Age and Gender Discrimination (Part III)

Overqualified or Overconfident (what does that mean?)

Sometime when they give you that comment, you wonder. What I see is they don’t want to pay you for what you are worth plus medical and insurance would cost more for older employee. There is also another view of this; the manager(s) is insecure with the idea of you being around. Someone like you might be more knowledgeable than he or she is. This more of saving face for him, if he is pretending to be expert on what he does, he would keep others that know more away. A confident manager would not be afraid of you and would enjoy having larger knowledge source, in the end he get more done and look better as a manager. An insecure manager would not want someone who knows more and make him look incompetence. You find a lot of the managers or employee lies about their background just to get the job and figure he can learn it later and these type of manager tends micro manage his subs and bully them. Even if you accuse them of age discrimination, would you really benefit from it? Mostly likely you would be target of future harassment. If a manager or corporate really want to get rid of you they would find ways.

One lady that I had met she told me she was lead out in the assembly area in a high tech company and the lady engineer won her legal case against the company for sex discrimination, so they can’t really touch her. Instead the company targeted all her supporter or friends to be laid off. Leaving her isolated. The person I had met was one of the casualties of being engineer associate.

The same goes for this executive; he was a Vice President of International Marketing. I had met his wife on one of my contracting position. The company he work for decided to not go International anymore, instead of moving him to a different division, the Human Resources transfer all those under him to another group. He was left alone with no responsibilities. He ended up quitting. The story goes on, thinking that he had resources and that he can find job in other companies. Small Asian company wanted to prove his worth by drumming up business for them. On a promise of a job he did a lot of international calls. When the company got needed contracts, he refuse to hire him plus would not reimburse him for his phone bills that ran up top $50,000. The time I met his wife, his house is going through foreclosure, his 3 kids are in universities had to dropout for awhile and his wife is earning $10/hr doing database for auditing.

(There are more stories to come. I’m just tired at the moment)