Aging and the Museum Workforce: Turning the Lens Inward

By Mike AlewitzMike , CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80735554 CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80735554

This week I received a copy of Museums and Creative Aging: A Healthful Partnership, 70 free, downloadable pages published by AAM. In a post-COVID world, you may have enough on your plate. After all, there's reopening your site, decolonizing your collection, and the undoing decades of subtle and not so subtle systemic racism, not to mention summer's frightening temperatures, drought and hurricanes, to remind us of climate change. Should you really have to worry about the over-55's starting to populate your galleries and heritage sites once again? Well, no, you don't have to, but you'll miss out. For one thing Museums and Creative Aging is written by Marjorie Schwarzer. If you haven't read her Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of the Museum in America, you should. She's the real deal, a writer who can construct a great sentence, while also telling you what you need to know.

Schwarzer focuses on four areas, so if 14 months of lockdown has eroded your attention span, go directly to the Executive Summary where you'll discover the report breaks down into four sections: Aging and Ageism in American Society; followed by chapters on Positive Aging, Case Studies, and Lessons Learned. It concludes with a call to action for the field. I read the first chapter on "Aging and Ageism" feeling a little aggrieved, convinced that Schwarzer wouldn't mention the museum workplace or issues of gender. I was wrong. She gently, yet emphatically, makes the point that problems in society also show up in our boards of trustees, volunteer groups and offices. The chapter is peppered with unnerving data like the fact that by 2035 there will be more adults over 65 in the United States than children, not to mention that even though overall life expectancy for today's children is still below 80, most, according to Brookings, will exceed that, many living into the next century. Schwarzer touches, however, briefly, on the fact that aging and gender are inextricably intwined--women generally live longer than men--that society's focus on youthfulness pressures women in the workplace in ways men don't experience, forcing women to conform to youthful stereotypes. And although she doesn't directly reference it, the ongoing gender pay gap keeps women in the workforce longer than necessary were salaries more equitable.

While I understand and applaud the importance of this report, both in terms of what museums do and who they serve, I would love to see Schwarzer turn her lens toward the museum workplace. Yes, the museum world's struggles represent many of the same struggles found in the American workplace writ large, but they are confounded by organizations and leadership who fail to put staff first, who fail to offer basic personnel policies, whose board members use their perceived personal power to take advantage of staff, and on and on. And, like other work sectors, many of our workplace problems--and leadership problems--aren't one thing. They are, in fact, intersectional. For example, Schwarzer makes the point that many of today's LGBTQ+ elders face additional struggles because they came of age when support systems were flimsy and role models non-existent. So if you're a person of color, over 60, LGBTQ+, and identify as female, how many different pathways for hatred, fear or simple dismissal can you experience? And how does that affect your ability to come to work each day and be your best most productive self, wherever you work in a museum or heritage organization? And as a leader, how do you make sure a person whose identity is varied and intersectional--an individual many say they want on their teams--is safe, seen and supported?

Maybe it's just me, but almost daily I experience a schism in the museum world. On the one hand there are angry, hurt, demeaned museum workers, whose stories appear on @changethemuseum and in commentary from Museum Workers Speak, the Equity Coalition, Museum Hue, and GEMM. Those support/special interest groups, and there are more, all formed in the last decade in an effort to address particular issues within the 135,000 museum workforce. (Just an FYI, that figure is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for May 2021. It represents an increase over January 2021, but still lags significantly behind December of 2019 when the number was 177,200.) Yet when many of those same folks come together tomorrow for AAM's annual meeting, will there be a focus on workplace issues? There are a million problems (not to mention successes) affecting museums and heritage organizations from the outside, all in need of understanding, but wouldn't it be helpful to turn the lens on staff once in a while? To draw on the expertise of all the people working to support museum workers wherever and whoever they are? Just a thought.

Suddenly it's summer. Stay well, stay cool, and be kind.

Joan Baldwin