NEWS

WIRES

OTHER

Apprentice Age Discrimination?

Entertainment Talk with Wanda Toby

When people fall in love with those that are out of their age range or with those that most people would feel are inappropriately young or old, they always throw out the cliché, "Age is just a number." Somehow, in love, age doesn't matter. Some even want us to believe that, once in adulthood, age doesn't matter at all, in any aspect of life. The age issue (or whatever) is paraded about all the time, particularly in matters of the heart, particularly with celebrities, and particularly with older men and younger women. Recently, we have seen a small rash of celebrity women with younger men, i.e. Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake and Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.

Recently, though, with the lasting popularity of Donald Trump's Apprentice reality television show, viewers are getting a different aspect of the age issue. In the latest season finale of Apprentice 5, Donald Trump hired Sean Yazbeck over Lee Bienstock, a 22-year old Business Analyst. Sean is a 33-year old Recruitment Consultant that brokered deals and boasted of his 11 years of seniority over Lee as if it were a Boy Scout badge. Sean verbalized that his being older was a great asset because he brought a greater depth of experience.

Sean and Lee are definitely from opposing corners of the world, not only in age but also in personality, style, and approaches to business. In this case, age could have easily been removed as a factor, and Sean still would have been the better man for the job (Lee performed his task horribly). Relatively, age was also a factor, for many of the same reasons, in Apprentice 4 when Randal Pinkett was hired. Apprentice, with its two recent hires, brings forth a thought to ponder. Does age matter in the work place?

It certainly does. So much so that it has dual affects. On one end, seniority can serve as a positive factor in which a candidate is more experienced, more mature, and more capable. On the other end, age can be taken negatively albeit discriminatory. Older people, usually above 60 in the corporate arena, are viewed like an old pair of sneakers that have been worn out. An older person's capability is automatically met with speculation. Outside of the executive levels in the corporate arena this prejudice and eventually discriminatory thinking is even more ramped.

Age is nothing but a number, a number mixed with other numbers that in turn can cause a negative outcome. In the employment arena, a candidate has to be just the right age, not too young and definitely not too old. Now, that may not or may have everything to do with the number attached to an age.

Wanda Toby is an author and entertainment columnist