Hiring Discrimination Can Be a Particularly Gray Area

First of all, Ethel Mullin didn’t plan on being laid off. But when the insurance company she worked for merged with another, well, you know how it goes.

So, in April of this year, she found herself out of a job. No big deal, she thought. With 18 years of secretarial experience and 69 unused sick days in tow as proof of her reliability, she figured landing another job would be a cinch.

The story she tells now is somewhat different. She knows she can’t prove it, and I told her I wasn’t sure she convinced me, but she swears her job search was hampered by one irresolvable issue: She’s 63 years old.

“I do get called for interviews,” she says, “but when they see my white hair, that’s it. They never tell you, but it’s sayonara, baby.”

And so we were on to another of life’s vexations: How do you know if you’re being discriminated against? The longer I talked to her last week, the more muddled the issue became.

For example, although she’s convinced she faced frequent discrimination, Mullin did get a few offers--even if they were for what she considered lousy pay.

That’s what gnaws at a person. Except for the cases when someone is blatantly discriminatory (and most companies are smart enough not to do that anymore), how do you know if you’ve been unfairly rejected?

“They’re not going to tell you you’re too old, you just get that feeling,” Mullin says. “I even had one experience when I went to a job interview and the lady had the audacity to ask me how much longer I thought I’d be working.” At another interview, at a college, she was turned down, she says, because she didn’t have experience at an academic institution.

“A high school kid can do typing,” Mullin says. “A high school kid could be a receptionist. I thought they’d want someone who had a lot of experience and who was reliable.”

If she sounds miffed, she is. Or was.

By her own admission, she was driving her friends and family nuts with her job-hunting complaints. “It was eating me up,” she says, “and I thought, ‘this is dumb. They don’t want me, tough. Too bad. That’s their tough luck.’ ”

When we talked last week, she was happy that she eventually settled for a part-time job. Good people, good company. No benefits, no vacations, and less than half the pay she was making before, but the stress is gone.

In her 18-year professional life (she was a homemaker before that), Mullin only had two jobs. She thought her stability and reliability would be pluses. Now, she wonders whether they counted for anything.

“You know what, I do have good experience,” she says. “That just kills me. People said, ‘You won’t have trouble getting a job.’ I believed it. Everybody said, ‘If you need a resume, we’ll give you one.’ I never had to use them because no one ever asked to see them. They just see an old lady, and they don’t want to hire her.”

It’s not as though, at 63, Mullin is eagerly awaiting retirement. She and her husband are putting the last of seven children through college.

“I’m not ready to call it a day yet,” she says. “I really had planned to work for another 10 years. My husband’s not an engineer. He doesn’t have a college education. We’ve been struggling for all the years we’ve been married to make ends meet. We both have to work, and I told him I won’t let him retire. He’s 66. As long as I’m working, he has to keep working too.”

We talked about feeling discriminated against. We talked about the strangeness of suddenly having to look for a job when you’re 63. She never thought of herself as old, Mullin says.

“You know why?” she says. “I feel very young. My husband and I are not trying to be 20 again, but we can do a lot of things.”

I don’t know that Ethel and I resolved much in our conversation. Let’s just say she knows what she knows and, as for me, well, what do I know?

If nothing else, I know how genuinely angry she is in thinking that her age has been held against her. Discrimination is a pernicious little beast, because you can’t always see it or get your hands on it. I know how it must gall Mullin sometimes, convinced that she lost jobs because they wanted someone younger or prettier.

Any big lessons learned? I asked her. Now that you’ve made peace with your situation, I said, are you any wiser?

“I’m damn proud of my age. I’m damn proud of who I am,” she says. “How many people do you know who come to work every day and who don’t go home if they get a headache or who don’t have to go home because their children are sick? You’d think someone would jump at me.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.