A developer for decades and a contractor since 2003, Amanda (not her real name) had a high-level security clearance and a successful career as a federal government contractor – until an overhaul of security clearances forced her to share her date of birth, and recruiters stopped calling.

Providing age-related information during job applications is not mandatory and Amanda – who began contracting at 53 and is now 76 – tells Information Age she was sensitive to the prejudices that her age might create, so she had gone out of her way to avoid the issue with recruiters.

It had worked, with a steady stream of business analyst and technical writing roles at government departments including Defence, DFAT and more as she tapped a well of expertise dating back to “the days when IBM was prominent and we were coding in COBOL.”

Yet, when the new security clearance system was introduced, she says her clearance was reset to Baseline until she could be evaluated by the Australian Government Security Vetting Agency (AGSVA), which uses date of birth to issue a unique Clearance Subject ID (CSID).

That CSID, in turn, is accessible for verification by recruiters who, Amanda said, regularly threw work her way in the past – but stopped doing so as soon as they had a way to find out her age.

“Recruitment agents used to ask for date of birth and I would decline,” she said, “but more recently they’re just asking for the CSID – and I noticed that suddenly I was never getting shortlisted for anything.”

Tech workforce not valuing older workers

Amanda’s experience reflects a broader problem in the ICT workforce, where older workers – the term, incredibly, often refers to those over 50 – are regularly driven out of roles even where their skills in legacy tech make them invaluable for keeping the lights on.

In 2024, Elon Musk was sued for arbitrarily firing nearly 150 Twitter workers over 50 – while in 2023, IBM faced a class action over claims it systematically discriminated against older workers that one manager called “dinobabies” who needed to be made “extinct”.

Despite widespread ageism and campaigns to improve the treatment of older employees, a 2020 study found Australia’s IT sector was among the most discriminatory industries – and five years later, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) found little had changed.

More recently, a pair of newly released University of Queensland studies –which included 199 Taiwanese workers and 177 Australian workers – found that older workers are seen as “less competent, trainable and adaptable” by younger colleagues.

In the studies, respondents were presented with a scenario in which a 55-year-old engineer was responding to an “urgent production issue” and respondents were asked to rate how capable the engineer appeared.

“Younger people expressed lower levels of trust in our engineer,” lead researcher associate professor Chad Chiu explained, adding that “they may have thought of them as a nice or supportive colleague, but they didn’t see them as useful.”

Managers were partly to blame because they often did little to showcase older employees’ expertise or give them a platform to showcase their capabilities, Chiu said.

“When younger workers receive very little information about their older colleagues’ capabilities,” he explained, “they will primarily rely on surface-level characteristics like age to make a judgement.”

Age-related bias is common in recruitment, with one UK study finding job applicants over 50 are up to three times less likely to be chosen for an interview than younger applicants with less experience – spawning advice about how to deemphasise age during job applications.

A Belgian study found that “implicit age cues”, like having an older-sounding name or “old-fashioned” hobbies, often impacts perceived hireability – and that concealing one’s birthdate “led to overall lower ratings… this effect was more pronounced for older raters”.

‘Respect your elders’? Not exactly

Fighting such perceptions remains an everyday battle for Amanda, who has approached recruiters, her local member, AGSVA agents, and the AHRC’s Age Discrimination Commissioner to address bias she says has limited her to two months’ work in the last 18 months.

“Occasionally you manage to get an interview, but once you’re on the job there are other issues,” she said, adding that “people can sabotage you on the job.”

At one contract to design a system for managing company tax registrations, she recalls fronting up to her new supervisor to witness her identity documents.

Once he saw her date of birth his demeanour changed immediately, she said.

“He went straight to one of his bosses and said ‘she can’t do this job’,” Amanda recalls, “and they made a decision to move me off that job.”

Instead, she was assigned to write four complex tax specifications to guide the system developers within four days – what she called an “impossible task” designed to set her up to fail – but worked overtime to complete it.

In another role, she recalls being directed to complete tasks using documents that were never sent, struggling to engage “obstructive” developers whom she was told she should not talk to, and being blamed when the tasks weren’t completed on time.

Then, she said, there was the contract where she was working for a manager “in his 30s, and he was too scared to fire me fast because he’d be accused of being anti-female.”

The manager trickle-fed her design details that she needed to complete her work, with many key documents missing – and then dismissed her when the work didn’t get done on time, Amanda claimed.

The day after she was dismissed, she tested her remote access login to see if it still worked – and saw that the missing documents had miraculously appeared for her remaining colleagues to use, she said.

“I don’t know for sure that it was deliberate,” she recalls, “but it’s a hell of a coincidence.

“And what I do know is that I have been repeatedly, over and over again, sabotaged on contracts.”