Sonya Lennon

In designing social change and social reform.

So I suppose when I look at what has happened through Work Equal and I look at the evolution of those women that we've served and my own evolution, right?

So I'm going to be 58 at the end of this year.

I now see that the biggest challenge to workplace equity is the sort of invisible and taboo subject of ageism in the workplace.

Right.

Tell me about it.

What do you see?

I see that there is a cloak of invisibility that falls over people once they hit kind of 50, maybe mid-50.

There are plenty of firms that are pretty blatant about the fact that, you know...

You end at 50, your career ends at 50 or 55 in this particular sector.

That's just the way it rolls.

But actually, we are an ageing population.

And actually, just to add to that, the research will show you that there is a cliff in terms of investment in training and development, learning and development for people over 50 in the workplace.

So there are these kind of floating assumptions that maybe they can't learn more or maybe they're not worth investing in.

So there's a really kind of insidious... It makes no sense.

Well, we are biased, right?

And that's, I call that earned experience.

and discerned wisdom.

So we know it because we've lived it.

But what I've done now is create a framework and a transformational change programme for organisations to unlock the value of the experienced worker.