Seven Australians in their 50s, 60s and 70s challenge the notion that older women become invisible
Women have always had an acute awareness of growing old. In her acclaimed May 2015 essay The Insults of Age, Helen Garner explores the ways in which getting older means being erased from a culture that equates youth and beauty and beauty with value – a cruel and thankless algebra. “Your face is lined, and your hair is grey, so they think you are weak, deaf, helpless, ignorant and stupid,” she writes. “It is assumed that you have no opinions and no standards of behaviour, that nothing that happens in your vicinity is any of your business.”
When women lose cultural currency, they also pay for it in literal currency. According to a 2016 report from Monash University researchers, commissioned by the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, 34% of women aged over 60 live in permanent income poverty. In the same year a report from the Australian Human Rights Commission found that nearly one-third of workers 50 and over were discriminated against in the workforce, with older women being more adversely impacted than older men. And March 2018 figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics found a 31% increase in older women experiencing homelessness since 2011, while men experiencing homelessness increased by 26%.
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