Age inequality: Geography’s overlooked dimension of difference

Abstract

Drawing on evidence from children and young people’s geographies, geographical gerontology and wider writing about inequality, this paper explores processes through which age operates as a system of stratification. Consideration is given to, how ageism as a lifecourse experience is distinctive from other forms of prejudice, the relationship of age to other axes of inequality and how age cohorts and intergenerational dynamics are fundamental to emerging patterns of wealth inequality. Given the consequences for people of all ages, I conclude that greater integration of age as a concept in Geography may reinvigorate the discipline’s focus on tackling worsening inequalities.

I Introduction

Age is one of the most ignored, and theoretically underdeveloped, concepts in Geography. On first reading this claim might seem contestable, given there is a significant body of work in the discipline about children and young people (summarised at various moments, for example in, Jeffery, 2010; Holloway et al., 2019) and a parallel focus on older people and ageing (see overviews: Harper and Laws, 1995; Andrews et al., 2007, 2009; Hardill, 2009; Skinner et al., 2015; Skinner et al., 2018). For all the strength and quality of this research both threads rarely engage with each other and have relatively low profiles within Geography more widely. Both receive more recognition through their interdisciplinary reach with notable contributions to debates about the ‘spatial turn’ in Sociology and Gerontology, respectively (Andrews et al., 2007, 2009; Schwanen et al., 2012). Indeed, age is most visible in Geography in relation to children and young people, and older adults, in much the same way that ‘“race” and “gender” are often mistakenly assumed to refer to those in marginalised positions within these social hierarchies’ (Barrett, 2022: 215). ¹ Of course, age is something we all have. One consequence of the polarity of research efforts directed variously to children and young people, versus older people and ageing, is that ‘mid-life’ has not been adequately addressed through this lens (Hopkins and Pain, 2007; Schwanen et al., 2012; Vanderbeck, 2007), let alone to think in more integrated fashion about how age shapes inequalities. This paper seeks to redress this problem.

Previous observers of this pattern of ‘age segregation’ have called for geographers to focus on age relations rather than specific age groups (e.g. Harper and Laws, 1995; Vanderbeck, 2007; Hopkins and Pain, 2007; Tarrant, 2010; Andrews et al., 2013, summarised by Skinner et al., 2015). Some progress has been achieved with emergent work on intergenerational relations, both extra-familial where the generations are commonly read as in competition or conflict (Vanderbeck and Worth, 2015) and intrafamilial with growing acknowledgment within Children & Young People’s Geographies that children’s lives need to be understood not in isolation, but in the context of their relationships with adults and families (Holloway et al., 2019). More broadly, the concept of ‘linked lives’ (Katz and Monk, 1993) has led to increased recognition of all those we live our lives in connection with (Horschelmann, 2011), and that age and ageing are consequently relationally produced (including through non-human interactions) in space and time (Andrews et al., 2013; Hopkins and Pain, 2007).

This paper argues however, that despite this progress, the characteristic of ‘age’ that remains overlooked is the way that it operates systematically as an axis of inequality akin to patriarchy or racism. My contention is that greater recognition and unpacking of this might be the key to the more visible integration of age as a concept in the discipline. While over recent decades geographers have paid extensive attention to patriarchy, racism, heteronormativity and ableism, seldom has age been scrutinised as a system of inequality. Glenda Laws first raised the potential for such a perspective three decades ago. She pointed out that ‘Ageism as a set of social practices, and its embodiment in the aged body, are central concepts for understanding the way we treat people of different ages. Together these concepts, which capture the active oppression of older people, let us explore the ways in which oppressive relations might be challenged and changed’ (Laws, 1995: 112). With Sarah Harper (Harper and Laws, 1995) she further advocated for a more theoretical approach to ageing, informed by feminist and postmodern thinking (most notably Iris Marion Young’s (1990) work on oppression), to provide insights into age segregation and inequalities. This call was echoed almost two decades later by Schwanen et al. (2012: 1294) when they argued that ‘challenging ageisms and forms of inequality rooted in age and other axes of social differentiation…could usefully inform contemporary research on the geographies of ageing’.

While these authors advocate for a focus on age as a system of inequality, there remains the risk of an implicit slippage into assuming only older people experience it. Laws (1995: 113), for example, notes that ‘as we age we may move from playing the role of oppressor to being oppressed… That is, the power relations implied in ageist practices are time limited’. Yet, vice versa, work within children and young people’s geographies provides plenty of evidence for the way young people can also be marginalised and excluded based on age (Matthews, 1995; Valentine, 2004; Vanderbeck and Dunkley, 2004). Unlike other forms of inequality (such as racism and sexism) ageism is something we are all likely to encounter.

Inequality fundamentally stems from the organisation of society into hierarchies that result in the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities and rights, and the differential treatment of individuals and social groups in recurrent patterns (Harvey, 1973; Massey, 1984). Inequality is sustained ideologically through ideas and assumptions about dominant values and ways of living and being, that become apparent in negative attitudes and discrimination towards those who differ from these ‘norms’ (Smith, 1994). The sociologist Amy Barrett has suggested that ‘Age is a system of inequality that shares much with other such systems. Age inequality constrains opportunities, appears at individual and institutional levels, and operates overtly and covertly. It also manifests in numerous settings, such as the workplace and the health care system’ (Barrett, 2022: 217). In support of this observation, she argues that age defines who can hold certain roles, achieve particular rights, access certain services, and claim protections (e.g. drink alcohol, vote, marry, become an MP, have free bus travel, welfare benefits, etc.). Barrett also recognises that age positions are not necessarily always defined by chronological age but sometimes by ‘life stage’ (e.g. youth, adult, senior citizen) – an analogous concept widely used in demography to understand predominant phases of life (and hence the related term, ‘lifecourse transitions’). Subjectivities can also be characterised by criteria that are culturally associated with age, such as ‘the third age’ (when older age is characterised by relative health, activity, independence), or the ‘fourth age’ (associated with frailty and dependence). Whatever the form of age categorisation, all have one thing in common: they ‘sort people into positions in a hierarchy that advantages some groups over others and thus provides a relatively durable structure that generates age inequality’ (Barrett, 2022: 221). She therefore calls for theoretical and empirical research to understand how age inequalities ‘infuse social life’.

This paper takes up this challenge. Drawing on evidence from children and young people’s geographies, geographical gerontology and wider writing about inequality, it explores processes through which age operates as a system of stratification and makes the case for age as a meaningful dimension of difference. Consideration is given to some of the similarities and differences in forms of ageism across the life course (including how groups are aged in relation to one another), how ageism is distinctive from other forms of prejudice, the relationship of age inequality to other systems of stratification and the growing significance of age cohort inequalities and changing dynamics of intergenerational interdependence. The paper is structured into three sections: ageism as a lifecourse experience; age inequalities and intersections with other forms of stratification; and age cohort inequalities and the intergenerational transmission of privilege.

II Ageism as a lifecourse experience

Popular discourses of ageing draw on a crude understanding of the lifecourse as defining ‘natural’ age-based categories on a temporal trajectory from the early years of childhood development, through early adulthood and mid-life stability, to inevitable age-related decline. According to Aries (1962) it was not until the 15^th century in Europe that ‘children’ began to be recognised as having distinct needs and as separate from the adult world. This conceptualisation of youth as a life stage was institutionalised during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the development of formal education and a belief that children needed long periods of schooling before they could take on the mantle of adulthood (Jenks, 1996). Around the same time, ‘old age’ as a category was given meaning through the concept of retirement as well as the advent of geriatric services and institutionalised care. The process of ageing was characterised as the loss of capacities – in terms of both reproduction and production – essential in a modern industrial society (Hugman, 1999; Phillipson, 1982). In this sense the body has been central to hierarchical categories of age, with cultural expectations defining variable, context specific, and often gendered age-appropriate definitions of what bodies can do, where they can go and how they can live. Such insights have been evident in both children and young people’s geographies (e.g. Holloway and Valentine, 2000; James, 1993) and geographies of older people and ageing (Laws, 1995; McHugh, 2003; Mowls et al., 2000; Schwanen et al., 2012). Categorisations of the body have become emplaced through the creation of age segregated spaces (such as schools and nursing homes), and legal classifications and social expectations about the appropriate use of, and interactions in, space (widely discussed by geographers of both childhood and older adults – see as examples: Laws, 1995; Valentine, 1996; Vanderbeck, 2007).

In late modernity, feminist and post-structuralist work challenged the idea that ‘biology’ is a foundational bedrock that underlies ‘natural’ social categories. Scholars such as West and Zimmerman (1987) and Butler (1990) began to theorise (albeit in different ways) gender as performative, or an accomplishment – something we do. To paraphrase Holloway et al. (2019: 462), such thinking emphasises the contingent performative and relational nature of the subject that emerges through social practice within time/space-specific regimes of power. This approach is evident in the performance of age. Age ideologies define age norms which serve as a regulatory framework that orient individuals to align behaviours with expectations, such that in Butler’s (1990: 330) terms ‘they congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’.

Within geography this way of thinking about age as performance first materialised through the sub-discipline of children and young people’s geographies, where biological models of child development and notions of the institutional life course (e.g. education and retirement) were challenged by a recognition that age-based distinctions are produced and contested rather than natural or inevitable. Children were able to ‘grow’ or ‘shrink’ in age according to the negotiation, performance or contestation of their identities in everyday interactions (Punch, 2002; Robson, 2004; Valentine, 1997). Children were credited as competent actors, agents in shaping their own social lives and those around them (Ansell et al., 2012; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Prout and James, 1990). Youth studies emphasised that rather than following fixed and predictable life stages, individuals in advanced capitalist societies, increasingly freed from traditional social constraints, have opportunities to live more fluid, dynamic and highly varied individual lives in which agency is expressed in different ways (Giddens, 1991; Holloway et al., 2019; Hopkins and Pain, 2007; Vanderbeck, 2007). In contrast, in low-income countries maturity is often imagined in terms of familial and community interdependencies, rather than independence, with young people becoming more socially connected as they take on the mantle of adulthood (Jeffrey, 2010; Punch, 2002).

Geographical research on older age has been slower than children’s geographies to move away from a biomedical obsession with the body and physiological experience. Nevertheless, the emergence of new theoretical approaches, such as nonrepresentational theory, have led to a growing body of work focusing on the importance of assemblages of human and non-human actants in the production of age (Andrews, 2014, 2015; Horton and Kraftl, 2008; Skinner et al., 2015). Examples of this include Hardill and Olphert’s (2012) work on mobile phones and Schwanen et al.’s (2011) research on other forms of mobile technologies such as cars and walking sticks.

Drawing on more-than-representational theories, Amy Barron (2021) focused attention on how social and cultural ideas and expectations about older life circulate, and mediate individuals’ lived experiences in diverse ways. She argues that ‘older age becomes a performance of “an” identity which both remakes and reproduces social and cultural worlds’, whereby an individual’s capacity can fluctuate on a momentary basis, having a bearing on the extent to which they consider themselves as older’ (Barron, 2021: 616). Likewise, Ho’s (2021) research on the post-retirement routines of older adults in Singapore has identified the complex ways in which identities are negotiated and time spaces experienced later in the life course; active ageing activities and caring duties can delay the emergence of infirmity later in the life course. In the context of Tanzania, physical capacity – the ability to perform strength, or not – defines who is old (De Klerk, 2016), whereas in the Democratic Republic of Congo being an ‘elder’ is not based on absolute age but rather social standing and the ability to exercise power over those who are younger (Kopytoff, 1971, both cited in McQuaid et al.’s, 2021 review of ageing in Africa).

Other studies (e.g. McHugh, 2003) have stressed that age is not only an embodied and relational process but emplaced. Place has the capacity either to facilitate ageing by offering meaningful activity spaces that support older people’s sense of identity, capability and wellbeing, or to make ageing more difficult because of age segregation, and barriers to mobility and encounters that undermine individuals’ sense of wellbeing, meaning they cannot age as well as they would like (Grove, 2021; Nyanzi, 2009). Indeed, Van Hoven and Douma (2012) have shown how the built environment can facilitate both spaces of inclusion (e.g. opportunities for encounters that foster social networks) and exclusion (e.g. access challenges) within the same location. (For related work on the lived experience of people with dementia, in place, see: Ward et al., 2021).

As these examples suggest, performances of age and competence/capacity do not take place in a vacuum. As Butler (1990) famously argued in relation to gender – performance is an effect of dominant discourses and matrices of power. In the context of advanced economies, age performances are shaped by institutions such as media, fashion, consumption, cosmetic surgery and health industries, all of which encourage individuals to align their bodily appearances, capabilities, behaviours and use of space with culturally desirable performances of ‘age’ and to interpret others’ identities in terms of the competence or otherwise of their ‘age’ performativity (Barrett, 2022). For children and young people, the pressure is to dress and act older than their age to access age-restricted spaces such as bars, clubs and on-line sites, often engaging in risky behaviours such as smoking, drinking, taking drugs or intimate on-line encounters. Meanwhile for older people, the neoliberal state has ramped up the emphasis on individual body management as essential to reduce the prospect of ill health, disability, dementia and so on (Pickard, 2019). Leading some commentators to suggest that anti-ageing management strategies including clothing (Twigg, 2015) and cosmetic technologies (Morton, 2014) can be empowering, particularly for older women, by enabling them to claim alternative embodied identities and spatialities (Sampaio, 2018).

While older age is valued for its wisdom and knowledge in many cultures, in advanced economies the consequence of the production, mobilisation and regulation of age ideologies is to create hierarchies of performance (Barrett, 2022). Although ageism refers to prejudice and discrimination against individuals or groups based on their age and can consequently affect anyone, it is more commonly directed at older people (Laws, 1995; Milligan and Tarrant, 2018) who are represented as losing characteristics valued by society: attractiveness, health, intelligence and promise. Gullette (2004: 130) describes this process as ‘identity stripping’. The emphasis on age-related bodily decline in both understandings of old age and everyday practices fails to acknowledge positive changes with age, and age-related adaptive responses – or indeed that reaching the ‘third age’ was once an identity to which people desperately aspired but rarely achieved. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that ageism directed at older people – particularly in the media – is more socially acceptable than many other forms of prejudice and discrimination (Barrett, 2022). Perhaps because bodily decline is assumed to be natural, ageism when directed at older people is read as ‘normal’ and is thus difficult to challenge (cf. with earlier understandings of both gender and sexuality).

Unsurprisingly, many older people actively dissociate with being ‘old’ in terms of their everyday practices, use of space and social relations (Day and Hitchings, 2011; Leibing, 2005; Schwanen et al., 2012). There are a growing number of studies that demonstrate the agential strategies of older people, including undertaking transnational mobility in later life, providing caregiving, facilitating social connectivity, and doing paid work, that can enhance wellbeing, livelihoods, and redefine subjectivities. This is particularly evident in Latin American and African contexts where pensions and state welfare support in later life are tenuous or non-existent (Fox, 2005; Kodzi et al., 2011; McQuaid et al., 2021; Nare et al., 2017; Sampaio, 2024). Yet McHugh (2003: 180–181) argues that neoliberal discourses about active ageing are themselves ageist because they mobilise ‘a deep-seated fear of our decline and erasure, projected outward in the form of disdain and disgust for “old” people who do not “measure up” and who tumble down the spiral of “bad” old age’.

Less frequently acknowledged is the way children and young people can also experience ageism in terms of social attitudes, stereotypes, institutional policies and interpersonal interactions. Common examples include generational ageism where popular stereotypes based on perceived age cohort characteristics – such as being incompetent, snowflakes, lazy, woke, selfish and materialistic – are directed at young people (Carr et al., 2012; Jeffrey et al., 2008; Yu, 2014), in what Duffy (2021: 247) observes is ‘a timeless denigration of young people’ with negative stereotypes transferred from one generation to the next.

A similar pattern of ‘timeless denigration’ is evident in relation to attitudes towards young people hanging out in and occupying public spaces such as parks, shopping malls and street corners with repetitive moral panics over time about various youth cultures, graffiti and street art, drinking, drugs, gang violence and environmental activism (Cohen, 1972; Dillabough and Yoon, 2018; Lucas, 1999). Ageism can also limit opportunities for young people in the workplace and access to welfare support. For example, negative stereotypes of young men evident in state and media discourses have been shown to significantly impact male un/underemployment (Jeffrey et al., 2008; McDowell, 2003). Like many forms of prejudice, such experiences of age discrimination can also have pervasive impacts on individuals’ self-identities including their mental and physical health. In turn, young people’s experience of generational ageism can lead them to discriminate against other age cohorts on the basis of their perceived generational affiliations, as well as internalising negative attitudes towards and a fear of ageing. In such ways, because of its relational nature ageism has consequences for people of all ages.

Yet both older and young people are more commonly engaged in and reliant on their local neighbourhoods as an everyday activity space, site of key services (school, care, shops, transport) and source of social connections and friendship (Lovell, 2018). As such, both age groups commonly have limited opportunities to participate in local decision-making despite being very neighbourhood based (Aboderin et al., 2017; Horgan et al., 2017). This means both can encounter ageism and place-based exclusion because of macroeconomic factors such as deteriorating infrastructure and service provision (Katz, 2004), and a decline in social cohesion and participation, which can manifest as intergenerational tensions over the use of space with age groups stereotyping each other (Walsh, 2018).

Less commonly recognised is the way people in mid-life might be subject to age ideological expectations about how they should be living their lives, and experience various forms of discrimination, social stigma or exclusion for failing to perform their identities in age-appropriate ways. For example, new terms such as ‘kidadults’, ‘rejuvenile’, and ‘Peter Pans’ have emerged to describe those who do not make traditional transitions to adulthood and who are read as out of sync with their age (e.g. who live at home with their parents, choose not to have children) or enjoy ‘childish’ activities like skateboarding, gaming, and softplay night clubs (Smith and Mills, 2019). Further, as Barron (2025) points out, middle age is commonly defined in relation to the opposite ends and dominant markers of the life course: childhood/youth and older age, rather than a focus of geographical research itself. As a consequence, she argues, lived experiences of middle age, such as the menopause, workplace ageism or mid-life crises, are often overlooked. Drawing on life history interviews with 10 self-identified middle-aged people from Greater Manchester, UK, she shows how middle age is made sense of and differentially experienced as a process of change or a series of relational becomings: ‘a kind of prolonged transition between youth and older age which includes a range of both expected and unexpected events’ (Barron, 2025: 3). Her emphasis on thinking through middle age as always in relation to young and old, rather than identifying it as a discrete category, further reinforces the importance of measures to support participation and belonging for all age groups and to challenge all forms of ageism that create socio-spatial inequalities (Walsh, 2018).

By focusing on how age ideologies are produced, mobilised & regulated to create hierarchies of performance, this section has highlighted that ageism is not just about the systematic privileging of youth over older age. Rather age as a system of inequality manifests different outcomes across the lifecourse. In this sense, it is somewhat different from other systems of inequality. We are all likely to encounter ageism at some point in our lifetime as our experiences of age and ageing change, even if race, gender and sexuality tend to be more stable categories within and between cohorts (although of course, for individuals these too can be fluid) (cf. Laws, 1995). This matters because mobilising recognition of the relational nature of ageism is a potential key to challenging age prejudice across the lifecourse. Recognising ageing as relational provides an opportunity to break down the recurring pattern of age-based discrimination whereby people experience ageism because of their generational affiliation and in turn discriminate against other age groups because of their own experiences of ageism.

This further underscores the need to bring together how children and young people’s geographers and geographical gerontologists, respectively, think about age. The lens of bodies, performativity and the lifecourse helps to develop a shared theoretical framework for understanding the production of age inequalities. In so doing, this perspective highlights the relationship between concepts such as ‘competence’ and ‘capability’ that are mobilised in these respective literatures to define ‘age’. Researchers need to unpack the relationship of particular ages to each other, as well as their role in generating or legitimating other inequalities in order to understand how ageism operates as a form of power.

III Age inequalities and intersections with other forms of stratification

The picture outlined in the previous section is rendered more complex when age is considered in terms of its intersection ² with other axes of stratification (Crenshaw, 1991). After all, the concept of lifecourse is used not only to take a holistic approach to age but also as a way of understanding the relationship between individuals’ past, present and future by recognising trajectories and the inter-relatedness of different aspects of lives, as a whole. Individuals have unique identities and experiences that shape different outcomes that are not necessarily recognised by broad generalisations evident in typical stereotypes of age cohorts, challenging assumptions that generation is necessarily a predictor of shared attitudes and behaviours.

Age and disability are axes of stratification that have been most obviously recognised as mutually constituted. Ageing – particularly beyond the age of 75 – is characterised by the increased likelihood of disability. While not all older people are disabled, and indeed less than one third of the population over 65 require support from professional services or other forms of care (Hugman, 1999; McCallum and Geiselhart, 1996), perceived disability can depend on perceived age and vice versa. Consequently, impairments in older age are commonly regarded as ‘normal’: a ‘natural’ outcome of the ageing process rather than disruptive, as they are viewed at younger ages (Priestley, 2006, 2014). This assumption in turn leads to older people being excluded from disability discourses, activism and policies because they are commonly read as ‘just old’ rather than as disabled. At the same time, many older people are not recognised as ‘abled’, either, because they are read through the lens of the fourth age as frail and in decline (Priestley, 2014). Even though the concept of ‘healthy ageing’ has challenged this deficit model of ageing, it has nonetheless had the unintended consequence of promoting ableism because it conceptualises disabilities through a medical lens, framing them as negative and undesirable, and ultimately defining success as the absence of disability (Gibbons, 2016; Larsson and Jönson, 2018). In this sense, the intersection of ageism and ableism showcases the power of cultural norms and ideals about bodily form and function that underpin the operation of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Moral evaluations of the relative ‘worth’ of groups of people, predicated on value distinctions about different forms of embodiment and individualised discourses about the importance of avoiding dependency through self-management, and a work ethic (Jones, 2012), fail to recognise the disabling and ageist nature of many workplaces. In turn, this can be used to justify reductions in welfare support for young, older and disabled people. Related to this are debates over the potential value of Crip Theory, which reclaims the denigrating slur ‘cripple’ as part of activist and scholarly attempts to recognise intersectional experiences of disability, and seeks to challenge what is normativity and whether so-called ‘perfect’ bodies are actually superior (Löfgren-Mårtenson, 2013; McRuer, 2006; Bone, 2017), exposing how other forms of power work beyond ableism.

Middle age is often perceived as a powerful category, the time when adults are at their optimum in terms of economic, social and political capital. Yet despite the fact that women in advanced capitalist economies are increasingly well qualified (for example, more women than men graduate from European universities) and are working increased hours, there is still a gender employment gap with women more likely to work in low-paid sectors, part-time, and to be paid less than men largely as a consequence of shouldering the bulk of private domestic and care work (Elson, 2017; ILO, 2024). This trend is exacerbated by population ageing. As ‘working age’ populations are shrinking relative to the population of pensionable age, the increased demand for care is being felt by the middle ‘pivot’ generation, particularly women, who are under pressure to care for children, grandchildren and elderly family members while also experiencing delayed, or indeed the loss of, inherited wealth due to the extended care needs of their parents (Milligan and Tarrant, 2018; Tarrant, 2010). In this sense, middle-aged women in advanced economies are experiencing a very gendered form of age inequality that can extend into retirement, as their care obligations, if not shared by men, can deny them positive opportunities for active ageing offered by freedom from paid work (Haberkern et al., 2015).

While the norm in low and some middle-income countries is for older people to be cared for by their adult children, the failure of young adults to establish independent households, plus migration, and ill health and death in the context of HIV/AIDS, mean it is increasingly common for women to continue to provide care in mid and later life – especially as surrogate mothers and grandmothers – instead of being cared for (McQuaid et al., 2021). Due to gendered employment patterns in earlier life, older women are also more likely to end up living alone in poverty when the traditional family care model breaks down (Desai and Tye, 2009; Varley and Blasco, 2000). Research in Uganda about widowhood provides further evidence of the way gender and age inequalities are mutually constituted (Nyanzi, 2009). While men who are widowed become sole owners of their property and children and are expected to marry again, women commonly lose their property, children and status and may be prevented from moving away or remarrying when their husbands die.

Age and masculinity present another intersection that has seldom featured in geographical analysis (Riley, 2021; Tarrant, 2014). Riley (2021)’s work on older masculinities shows how age changes what it means to be a man. Older men are often rendered less visible than young men because of their different bodily capacities and economic resources. Yet he also highlights evidence which suggests that older men are starting to be drawn into care for ill spouses and grandchildren (Bowlby, 2012; Tarrant, 2014) and that in the process their sense of self may be reworked, even if gendered divisions of labour persist.

Simplistic patterns of age inequality are also troubled by intersections with race inequality. There is a significant body of research theorising the way racial inequalities are produced and sustained through economic processes including land use and real estate practices, rental markets, and workplace practices, politics and environments (Bonds, 2013). This is evident in patterns of youth unemployment. In the United States, for example, the rate of unemployment among African American and Hispanic young people is significantly higher than it is among their white counterparts (Mayer et al., 2019). Similar patterns are evident in other advanced economies (e.g. Allahar, 2010; Lewchuk and Lafleche, 2014). Qualitative research with young men aged 18 to 27 in Toronto, Canada about experiences of trying to make the transition from high school to the labour market identified how race-based barriers, and racialised ideologies and practices frustrate attempts to obtain stable employment (Briggs, 2017). In a similar vein, feminist research has repeatedly demonstrated the barriers to employment young African American women and Latinas face compared with white women as a consequence of their differential access to housing and labour markets (Gilbert, 1998; Joassart-Marcelli, 2009), all framed by a context in which a racial wealth gap in the US and elsewhere is widening, creating further insecurity and vulnerability for young people in minority ethnic communities (Bonds, 2013).

Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to the later life experiences of those who are non-white and to the intersection of age and race in the context of ageing. This is despite Rowles (1986) call for geographers to recognise older people’s social and cultural diversity as well as heterogeneity in terms of bodily capabilities. Social gerontology in particular, has largely understood ageing in homogenised terms with research with older people from minority ethnic groups often limited to health and social care issues, where Zubhair and Norris (2015) point out ‘ethnicity’ or ‘culture’ is commonly conceptualised as problematic – a double burden. Instead, they argue that social gerontology needs to recognise age and ethnicity as relational, situational enactments and to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the intersection of age and race-based discrimination.

Within geographical gerontology there is now growing recognition of a complex intersection between age, class and race inequalities. Finlay and Finn (2021) observe how increasing affluence amongst ageing middle-class populations has resulted in private investment creating developments that support active ageing, targeted exclusively at privileged retirees that fail to reflect the diversity of older people (Lewis and Buffel, 2020; Neville et al., 2018). An ‘age-friendly cities and communities’ urban redevelopment model (Buffel and Phillipson, 2018, 2019) has the effect of facilitating the minimisation of state responsibility for and expenditure on healthcare and social infrastructure, exacerbating already highly unequal housing, support, and care options for vulnerable older people (Finlay et al., 2018; Finlay and Finn, 2021). Furthermore, while opportunities to live in private retirement communities enable privileged older people to socialise with like-minded people and to escape some of the ageism and marginalisation prevalent in everyday life (Vanderbeck, 2007), such ‘homophilic choices in retirement can create self-selected and socially segregated retirement environments that reproduce divisions of “race,” ethnicity and social class, which would undoubtedly be seen as problematic in other spheres of the life course’ (Oliver et al., 2018: 444). In such ways, both class and racial inequalities are reproduced through the privatisation of ageing.

In sum, when social scientists examine age they tend to focus on inequalities between age cohorts rather than how age intersects with other systems of oppression. Yet as this section has demonstrated, exploring such intersections is the key to understanding why age serves as a systematic form of oppression. Unlike other axes of stratification (patriarchy, racism, ableism, heteronormativity, etc.), age does not produce a hierarchy where one group is consistently privileged over another in the way that whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity are consistently powerful (i.e. there is not a normative group or category). Rather, intersectionality helps reveal how power works in diffuse and differentiated ways such that across the lifecourse – both in youth and older age – we can be the beneficiaries of, and/or the losers, in terms of age inequality. The next section focuses on the role of age cohort inequalities and the intergenerational transmission of privilege.

IV Age cohort inequalities and the intergenerational transmission of privilege

‘Cohort generation’ describes people of a similar age who were born at the same time in history. The sociologist Mannheim (1952) famously argued that, because of a shared historical position, birth cohorts develop particular characteristics as a consequence of being socialised in different conditions from other cohorts. This notion of ‘historical’ generation is often criticised as overstated because generations continually evolve regardless of whether they experience major social change and because it belies intersectionality (Attias-Donfut, 1988). Nonetheless ‘generation’ remains a powerful social imaginary because it provides a connection between individual lives and wider social, cultural, and economic, circumstances.

Since the 1980s, there has been a growing recognition in most advanced capitalist economies that older generations – particularly the so-called ‘baby boomers’ (born between 1945 and 1964) – hold disproportionate levels of national wealth (manifest in property, but also income/savings, and pensions) predicated on living through particular socio-economic conditions and having access to opportunities that are no longer available to younger generations that is popularly framed as an issue of intergenerational injustice (Willets, 2010).

Globally, youth unemployment always exceeds overall unemployment (exacerbated at times of crisis such as the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic) (Duffy, 2021; Mayer et al., 2019). A report by the United Nations Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth in 2015 stated that global youth unemployment is consistently three times the rate of adult unemployment (see Mayer et al., 2019). In advanced capitalist economies, the context of post-industrialisation, stagnating wages, de-unionisation and expectations of a flexible and contingent labour force, mean contemporary young people are commonly required to accept precarious forms of employment such as 0 hours contracts, temporary and nonstandard work (Crisp and Powell, 2017). Such work experiences can in turn impact on young people’s employment trajectories as feelings of insecurity can deter them from applying for or changing jobs through a fear of unemployment (Worth, 2016). Unsurprisingly, overall earnings for younger generations are flat or falling (Duffy, 2021; Mayer et al., 2019).

At the same time, future state pensions for young people in advanced economies have been eroded. Faced with ageing populations, many countries have sought to reduce their future welfare obligations by increasing the official state retirement age and reducing age-related public spending commitments. Welfare reforms have forced people to rely instead on workplace pensions and private savings, the value of which are also being eaten away as employers, alarmed by the rising cost of an ageing workforce, seek to reduce their exposure (Clark, 2012). Such pensions will be less likely to provide the same level of state support for future generations, compared to that received by baby boomers in retirement. Likewise, the growing precarity of youth employment in low- and middle-income countries often results in poverty and affects young people’s health and their ability to progress in their lives, for example, through marriage and acquiring the status of adulthood. In the widespread absence of welfare and support this can lead to frustration, violence and social unrest (see Ansell et al., 2014; Gough and Langevang, 2016; Jeffrey, 2010; Jeffrey et al., 2008; Mayer et al., 2019).

Alongside the precarity of youth employment opportunities, and the insecurity of future welfare support, the intensive commodification of higher education in advanced capitalist economies means that young people are already carrying a significant burden of debt (Worth, 2018). In low- and middle-income countries at times of economic crisis young people are often forced to leave education to support their families (Jones and Chant, 2009; Lloyd, 2005). At the same time globally, young people face uncertainty about the impact of AI on the future of work and heightened anxieties about the impact of climate change on lives and livelihoods (Ansell et al., 2016; McQuaid et al., 2018). It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that there is growing recognition of a relationship globally between youth and mental ill health (Smith and Mills, 2019).

More fundamentally, in the context of advanced economies Adkins et al. (2019: 548) argue that the widespread growth of home and consequently asset ownership is producing ‘new, complex dynamics of stratification’. They highlight how in affluent economies a combination of policies from the sale of public housing and relaxation of consumer credit to the securitisation of mortgages have boosted property markets and contributed to rapid house price inflation, at a time of wage stagnation. Such conditions are ‘driving both [a] dramatic increase in net wealth among high-income households and stagnant levels of net wealth among the poorest’ (Adkins et al., 2019: 555). According to Adkins et al. (2019), asset ownership is now more important than work and employment in understanding socio-economic stratification. This process has profound implications for understandings of inequalities between age cohorts and the intergenerational transmission of privilege.

While older ‘baby boomer’ generations in advanced economies were in a potential position to buy property through their wages alone, this option has become less accessible to subsequent generations who have fewer chances to become homeowners and to access low-cost social housing than previous post-war generations (Clapham et al., 2014; Coulter, 2017). Instead, young people are commonly forced to privately rent accommodation often in multiple occupation or remain living at home with families (Hoolachan et al., 2017; Mackie, 2016). Whereas middle-class parents frequently subsidise their young adult children in the early stages of their employment careers by allowing them to live free at the family home and build up savings (Worth, 2018, 2021), less affluent parents often lack the requisite space, are deterred by the impact on benefit eligibility, or require co-resident offspring to contribute to the family finances (Coulter et al., 2020; Hill and Hirsch, 2019). In the Netherlands, research has identified a stark decline in homeownership by young adults excluded by house prices, with those on a low income showing the most notable decrease in owner-occupancy (Hochstenbach and Arundel, 2021). Similar patterns are evident elsewhere, such as Australia (Adkins et al., 2019).

In contrast, for the offspring of the ‘baby boomer generation’ that had benefitted from what Adkins et al. (2019: 565) term the ‘brief period of wealth democratization’, intergenerational transfers (e.g. inheritances, the provision of deposits, and mortgage guarantees, or the outright purchase of property) are now facilitating homeownership (Christophers, 2018; Sparks, 2016; Worth, 2018, 2021). This group are also generally the beneficiaries of privileged consumption and enrichment activities in childhood and early adulthood (Holloway and Pilmott-Wilson, 2014). In turn, these opportunities contribute to the accrual of future social and cultural capital and consequently to later positive outcomes for their beneficiaries in terms of their education, employment and future family formation (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2011; Pimlott-Wilson, 2011; Van Ham et al., 2024), in ways not readily available to those from low income, asset poor families (Adkins et al., 2019). Worth (2021: 33) describes such privilege as ‘an unearned advantage – a special kind of power’.

However, generations are internally differentiated. Not all baby boomer retirees have profited from the opportunities afforded by the socio-economic conditions of their adulthood, and as a consequence do not own their own homes and have not accumulated other assets (e.g. significant pension balances, savings, etc.). For these, and those who missed out on enrichment activities over their lifecourse, suggestions that they are members of a ‘lucky’ age cohort and are the beneficiaries of injustices between generations ring rather hollow.

As the evidence presented here demonstrates, generational dynamics are critical to understanding patterns of inequality and the transmission of privilege in contemporary advanced economies. Yet contrary to popular accounts (e.g. Willets, 2010) this is not a simple pattern of injustice between age cohorts or extra-familial generations in which all young people experience age inequalities compared with older generations. Rather, the opportunities afforded to cohorts such as the ‘baby boomer’ generation are a consequence of the socio-economic conditions into which they were born. Structural conditions have thus produced intragenerational socio-economic inequalities as a consequence of this cohort’s internally differentiated abilities to access them. Subsequent processes of the intrafamilial transmission of wealth from some of the baby boomer generation to successive generations are further concentrating resources and privilege into fewer and fewer hands (Adkins et al., 2019; Worth, 2021). Experiences of age cohorts as either advantaged or disadvantaged by virtue of their generation are rendered more complex. Yet as a context is created where common-sense traditional markers of life stages such as ‘adulthood’ and ‘retirement’ become less achievable for those without access to intrafamilial generational wealth transfers, there is a risk that because intergenerational dynamics of wealth inequalities are poorly understood it may amplify existing extra-familial tensions between generations around questions of fairness and justice. This in turn may fuel ageism targeted at the ‘baby boomer’ generation. There is therefore an urgent need for geographers to develop a better understanding of changing intergenerational dynamics and their implications for age relations and the future of the generational social contract.

V Conclusion: Why understanding age inequality matters

While geographers have regularly engaged with dominant constructions of class, race, and gender, the discipline has continued to fragment its study of age between children and young people’s geographies and geographical gerontology. In consequence, the discipline falls short in critically examining how age shapes social and spatial patterns. This matters because recognising that children and older people are not ontologically different but rather at different points along the lifecourse has the potential to integrate shared concepts and theoretical and methodological approaches, informed by thinking from both bodies of work. This is turn might raise the visibility of age and ageism within the discipline. This paper argues that age has not been explicitly recognised in the discipline as a system of inequality, yet clearly age is a stratifying category that: a. Sorts people into hierarchies through the framework of the lifecourse; b. Produces unequal access to resources, opportunities, rights and the differential treatment of individuals and groups over space and time; and c. Intersects with other modes of stratification.

Drawing predominantly on evidence from research with children, young people and older adults, this paper has demonstrated the similarities in and differential forms of ageism that are experienced across the lifecourse. Inequalities are sustained ideologically through ideas and expectations about natural age-based distinctions and bodily norms that define value based on concepts such as competence/capabilities, independence, and productivity at all ages and stages. In so doing, this paper has shown how ageism directed at older people often goes unquestioned because it is assumed to be a product of bodily decline and so ‘natural’ or inevitable, which at the same time means ageism directed at people of other ages and stages, and intergroup heterogeneity are rendered invisible. Moreover, ageism is distinctive from other forms of prejudice because as we age, we are all likely to experience it at some point in our lives. This means unique possibilities for interventions emerge at different life stages, to mobilise shared experience and break or disrupt recurrent patterns. Such opportunities occur where different age groups internalise negative attitudes to other age groups they have been or will become, and where they perpetuate prejudices, which they themselves have experienced or will be the recipients of in the future.

By recognising the intersection of ageism with other systems of oppression, this paper has demonstrated the significance of shared conceptualisations of ideal body/minds expected at all ages and stages in materially and ideologically facilitating socio-economic inequality by blaming individuals for various predicaments (unemployment, ill health, retirement) and legitimising the withdrawal of state support under neoliberal capitalism. More importantly, this paper has further shown that age cohorts and intergenerational dynamics are fundamental to understanding emerging patterns of wealth inequality and the transmission of privilege in contemporary advanced economies. Given the consequences of this for people of all ages, it is hoped that recognition of age as relational, intersectional, and structural, will inspire wider engagement across the discipline with the way age intersects with other systems of stratification, reinvigorating our focus on tackling worsening inequalities.