Another example of unexpected consequences, this time from Frances Woolley at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, who says we need to beware of middle-aged men waving feminist flags:
On December 12, 2006, Ontario ended “mandatory retirement.” As of that date, employers could no longer base termination decisions on an employee’s age. Ontario was following the lead of Quebec and Manitoba, which stopped having a standard retirement age in the early 1980s. Within a couple of years, mandatory retirement had effectively ended right across the country.
Fast forward to 2014. The first Ontario professors to elude retirement are now collecting their pensions. Yup, Canada Revenue Agency requires people to begin drawing their pensions at age 71, regardless of employment status. The average salary of a full professor in Ontario is around $150,000 per year […], and university pension plans are generally fairly generous. So a typical professor working full-time into his 70s will have a combined pension plus salary income of at least $200,000 a year, often more. No wonder professors 65 and older outnumber the under 35s […]. Who would willingly give up a nice office, the freedoms of academia, and a quarter million dollars or so a year?
Now if the professors fighting to eliminate the standard retirement age had said, “we have a very pleasant lifestyle and we’d like to hang onto it, thank you very much,” I could have respected their honesty, if nothing else. But instead, they draped themselves in the feminist flag. A standard retirement age of 65 was wrong because it hurt women. Thomas Klassen and David Macgregor, writing in the CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers) Bulletin, challenged ageism in academy on the grounds that “Mandatory retirement at an arbitrary age is devastating for female faculty who often began their careers later than males and may have had interruptions to raise children.”
[…]
Two thirds of university teachers between 65 and 69 are men […], as are three quarters of those over the age of 70. This is not simply a reflection of an academy that, 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, when these folks were hired, favoured men over women. Let’s rewind five years, to when the people who are now 65 to 69 were 60 to 64. This is more or less the same group of people, just at two different points in time.
In 2005-6, just before the standard retirement age ended, 65 percent of academics aged 60 to 64 were male […].
In 2010-11, when that same cohort of people were 65-69, 68 percent of those working as university teachers were male. There is hardly any hiring of individuals into university teaching in that age group. The only plausible explanation of the three percentage point increase in the proportion of men in the academia is that more women than men retired in that cohort.
[…]
The PhD students in the pipeline are 47 percent female […], as are 46 percent of Canadian assistant professors […]. Just 23 percent of full professors, however, are women. Replacing over 65 full professors with PhD students would result in a more gender-balanced academy.
I’m not trying to argue that we should reintroduce mandatory retirement in order to achieve greater gender balance. I am merely pointing out that who thought the end of mandatory retirement would disproportionately benefit women and promote gender equity were mistaken.
