Anchoring Bias: Ageism Funnier the More We Study It
The magic phase of life for aspiring software startup founders begins on their 26th birthday. And ends on their 27th.
After posting statistics earlier this week showing a more youth-lopsided workforce in San Francisco than Los Angeles, and studying ageism breakthroughs in other industries, like the Hollywood writers who achieved greater age diversity after a lawsuit was filed in 2003, very specific ages began to stand out: 26, 30, 35 and 40.
It's worth asking how much our brains cling to these magic age numbers because of some cognitive fallacy. "A 26-year-old is who we should hire." "He's 34? We'll only get one good year out of him before he expires at 35."
Anchor Bias is a term scientists use to describe that over-reliance on certain concrete traits to judge a person's potential, ScienceDaily.com says:
The magic start age of 26 appeared again last month, in a New York Times OpEd by someone named Shikha Dalmia, advocating the H4 work visas created in 2015 not be eliminated:
What happens to people under 26 - why are they seen as less productive than 26-year-olds? Why do people seem to expire at 36 when they were productive at 35? Speaking for myself, my coding skills really gelled around age 37, 38 after I took two years to work as a newspaper reporter. I thought better in terms of decisiveness, scale estimation and producing on the rhythm of a daily deadline, even if my work was due weekly.
As said at the bottom of this week's earlier post, Tom Brady played quarterback for the New England Patriots after his 40th birthday, and Wendy Whelan performed as principle dancer of New York Ballet until retiring at 47. She was a star of the form until stepping down.
Anchor bias as cause of "unicornism" leading to age discrimination is worth looking into. We'll post more about ways to diversify the ages of employee talent pools, in the coming week.
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Catch-up Reading:
I. Tech-Ageism Worse in S.F. Than L.A., 2016 Census Data and Anecdotes Suggest - offlinereport.net
II. U.C. Davis Students "Outraged" by Ageism in High Tech, U.C. Professor Says - offlinereport.net
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
After posting statistics earlier this week showing a more youth-lopsided workforce in San Francisco than Los Angeles, and studying ageism breakthroughs in other industries, like the Hollywood writers who achieved greater age diversity after a lawsuit was filed in 2003, very specific ages began to stand out: 26, 30, 35 and 40.
It's worth asking how much our brains cling to these magic age numbers because of some cognitive fallacy. "A 26-year-old is who we should hire." "He's 34? We'll only get one good year out of him before he expires at 35."
Anchor Bias is a term scientists use to describe that over-reliance on certain concrete traits to judge a person's potential, ScienceDaily.com says:
Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.As this site said earlier this week, in Tech-Ageism Worse in S.F. Than L.A., 2016 Census Data Suggests, featuring data our source R. Davis pulled from from IPUMS.org and graphed with python code, Silicon Valley appeared obsessed with 26-year-olds. As Ellen Pao told a San Francisco audience last year:
During normal decision making, individuals anchor, or overly rely, on specific information or a specific value and then adjust to that value to account for other elements of the circumstance.
Usually once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward that value.
I mean at Kleiner we had this anti-harassment training session, and during that whole time, the partners kept asking "well if we want to hire somebody who is 26 years old what do we do?"
And the guy was like, "you can't do that. That's discrimination."
And they said "well what if we asked for somebody who had the *mindset* of a 26-year-old?"
The lawyer was like "no! That's the same thing!"
And eventually like after a whole series of questions, they're like, "well what do we do to get a 26 year-old in?"
The magic start age of 26 appeared again last month, in a New York Times OpEd by someone named Shikha Dalmia, advocating the H4 work visas created in 2015 not be eliminated:
These women are qualified because educated people tend to marry other educated people. The majority of H-4 women have college degrees, according to a 2014 survey by the blogger Rashi Bhatnagar, herself an H-4 visa holder. They also happen to be between the ages of 26 and 35 — peak productive years.
What happens to people under 26 - why are they seen as less productive than 26-year-olds? Why do people seem to expire at 36 when they were productive at 35? Speaking for myself, my coding skills really gelled around age 37, 38 after I took two years to work as a newspaper reporter. I thought better in terms of decisiveness, scale estimation and producing on the rhythm of a daily deadline, even if my work was due weekly.
As said at the bottom of this week's earlier post, Tom Brady played quarterback for the New England Patriots after his 40th birthday, and Wendy Whelan performed as principle dancer of New York Ballet until retiring at 47. She was a star of the form until stepping down.
Anchor bias as cause of "unicornism" leading to age discrimination is worth looking into. We'll post more about ways to diversify the ages of employee talent pools, in the coming week.
---------------
Catch-up Reading:
I. Tech-Ageism Worse in S.F. Than L.A., 2016 Census Data and Anecdotes Suggest - offlinereport.net
II. U.C. Davis Students "Outraged" by Ageism in High Tech, U.C. Professor Says - offlinereport.net
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
