In the week that Parliament decided to give the vote to sixteen year olds, welcome back to Fearless Diversity, the podcast where age isn’t just a tick-box in the census, it’s the parent, the baby, and the teenage activist in the room. Join Simon, your resident digitally Bewildered Baby Boomer, living proof that you can survive a childhood without Wi-Fi or oat milk and Rachel stuck between Millennials’ optimism and Greta Thunberg’s existential despair.

Age is a minefield for managers and leaders. The young are idealised, patronised or indulged at work, while older people’s experience is either venerated or wasted and at worst consigned to the scrap heap. Some execs think their teenage children understand the world better than they do, young people reverse JFK’s exhortation and demand what the company can do for them and everybody disagrees about phone use, social media and how to communicate.

Rachel and Simon navigate the generational maze using their practical experience with clients and the latest scientific research. Neuroscience tells us that brains just aren’t fully cooked until at least 25. Executive function, the bit that helps you plot revolution or file taxes are still developing during your teens and early twenties. So, do children need parents, young people need older people and indignation need experience?

With age, discrimination goes both ways. In politics and workplaces, society is still wrestling with whose voice matters and whose is discounted. The generational divide is real, awkward, and much like our podcast, refuses to fit into a single, easy narrative.

So grab a cup of tea, an oat latte (God forbid), or just a tepid mug of nostalgia, and join us as we slice, dice, and deconstruct what age really means in a rapidly changing UK.

Equality Act – age discrimination and exceptions

https://shorturl.at/yolHi

Prof Sallie Baxendale - profile

https://shorturl.at/08fv7

Law Society of Scotland - Brain not fully developed until age 25, research reveals

https://shorturl.at/32aPn

Understanding the Teen Brain - University of Rochester

https://shorturl.at/uXvwK

The Power of Difference

Pp 201 – 204 and p208

https://shorturl.at/hvrfm

John Allen / CBI

https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/article/carolyn-fairbairn-on-cbis-really-good-culture-despite-sex-allegations-qhcmzc75s

Resolution Foundation report on young people’s mental health

https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/weve-only-just-begun/

Harmful stereotypes of young people fuelling record numbers to fall out of work

https://shorturl.at/y6saT

For more about Rachel: Who Is The Fearless Facilitator? - Fearless Facilitator

For more about Simon: Who We Are – Diversity by Design

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