“Working at fifty in a fashion magazine, where the industry uses 20-year-old models to sell products to 60-year-old women, is discouraging,” describes María Pérez de Arenaza. A journalist by profession, she has worked throughout her life in the publishing sector, writing about trends, design and tourism. “In the end I didn't feel represented and my future prospects grew older as the newsroom opened its doors exclusively to younger women. I thought about changing jobs, but who was going to hire me, if I'm already old?” It was then that she saw entrepreneurship as a way to retrain herself professionally and decided to found Singular Spain, a travel agency oriented to the rural world. “I kind of censored myself before companies censored me,” she admits.
She is one of the 318,000 women over 55 years of age who are self-employed in Spain, who are a minority compared to the 661,000 men. As shown by the data reflected in the first Senior Talent Map carried out by the Mapfre Foundation, there is a strong increase in self-employment among senior workers, especially when comparing the figures with younger workers.
One of the main conclusions of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: 2020/2021 Report, carried out by the Entrepreneurship Observatory in Spain, is that with maturity, entrepreneurship is seen more as a necessity than as an opportunity. The trend begins to be seen in the older age group, which ranges from 45 to 54 years of age, when the population's employment rate decreases.
In this career, senior women may face more barriers to finding work because they face a double bias, explains Irene Gil, head of the Vulnerability and Employment Observatory at the Adecco Foundation. “On the one hand, there are gender stereotypes. It is assumed that women are the first to withdraw from the labor market, to care for a family member, for example, or that they have less strength. On the other hand, age is usually a difficulty that materializes from the selection process. Many companies see how old the applicant is and discard the resume without even wanting to read her qualifications.”
The time they spend unemployed is a factor that aggravates the situation. According to the latest active population survey for the third quarter of this year, 1.1 million people in Spain have been looking for work for more than 12 months. Of them, 479,800 are over 50 years old, which means that 42% of the long-term unemployed in Spain are senior professionals. And the situation affects women more than men. “They suffer from chronic unemployment and with each month they spend unemployed they move further away from the reality of the world of work, so reinstatement becomes more complicated,” explains Irene Gil.
Ana Cabezas, creator of the Soy Calidad program, a comprehensive software that digitizes the management of ISO quality, safety and efficiency standards, experienced age discrimination when faced with the job search. “She didn't care about previous experience and training. I felt that I was in the best moment due to my knowledge, experience and common sense... but it seems that only I saw that.” After a period of job uncertainty, without receiving a response from the companies, a project arose at the Technological University of Arequipa, in Peru, where years before he had launched educational actions and the stay in the country opened the doors to the National Quality Institute. This year, her project made her the winner of the IV Edition of the 50 Emprende Awards.
Current data reflects discrimination against senior talent, which is more noticeable in the case of women. However, the inversion of the demographic pyramid is also having an impact on the composition of the labor market.
Rafael Puyol, president of the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and professor of Human Geography, perceives that senior talent is being revalued over time. “The weight of senior workers in the Spanish labor market is growing and the female force is doing so at a greater rate than that of men. “They start from lower numbers, so growth is actually reducing the gap.” However, Puyol continues, “our country has a great career ahead of it, as we have one of the lowest employability rates for seniors in Europe.”
