THE radio DJ Liz Kershaw could not hide her fury when she was recently axed from her show. “I got sacked from @BBC6Music,” she tweeted, “because they don’t want women over 60.” The renowned broadcaster, who will be 64 next month, is second only to Annie Nightingale for the time she has spent behind the mic, a stint which has lasted 35 years.

That’s not a bad record for any employee these days, when the portfolio career has replaced the job for life. Would Kershaw have been taken off the air if she were in her forties? She certainly sees a pattern: “It just seems quite remarkable that whereas there are many men in their sixties, seventies and eighties on these pop stations there are hardly any women.”

And it’s not just on pop stations where women of a certain age are as hard to find as Conservative voters in Toryglen. The disparity in attitude to ageing men and women reveals shocking double standards. The UK’s best-loved broadcaster, David Attenborough, is 96. Jon Snow, the Channel 4 News presenter, stayed in post almost as long as if he’d been a high court judge, for whom 75 is the time to mothball the wig.

Where, though, are Attenborough and Snow’s female counterparts? Will Cathy Newman be a prominent face on our screens when she has reached three score years and ten? Will Rita Chakrabarti? For every Nancy Pelosi, still dominating the US House of Representatives at 82, there are numberless women who have been gently “let go” from their posts because, as they grow vintage, they are not wanted.

Given the invisibility of older women in high-profile roles you could say Kershaw was lucky to last so long before the rug was pulled from beneath her. The new series of Borgen, about the former Danish PM Birgitte Nyborg, is painfully accurate in its depiction of a woman in her early fifties being viewed, by some, as a dinosaur. Yet many at this age are entering what Muriel Spark would have called their prime: bursting with ideas and energy, with years of wisdom and experience to draw upon.

The former Financial Times journalist Lucy Kellerman co-founded a charity, called Now Teach, to support professionals, both male and female, who wanted a second career as a teacher. She retrained in her late fifties and has witnessed eye-watering prejudice. “Ageism,” she says, “is the new bias – the taboo – people are not yet talking about.”

Younger colleagues and friends think her generation “are all bigoted Terfs”, who can’t use technology and are alcoholics. When she asked a class of 12-year-olds what they thought of older teachers – who are regularly called Santa, dinosaur, granddad – they replied: “Not good at new ideas, gets tired easily, racist, homophobic, etc”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, others applying for teaching posts were finding it much harder to get an interview compared to younger applicants. They are not alone. In the ordinary workplace, consider your 55th birthday as the witching hour, the moment when your career prospects either freeze, or actively melt away. Forget climate change: you have entered the new ice age.

Who is always in the front line when redundancies are required? Step forward those in advanced middle age. Who cares if they still have 18 years to run on their mortgage, and children to put through uni; there is an engrained perception that a CV that stretches back decades is a hindrance rather than an asset.

Like it or not, a conceptual gulf lies between millennials and those who can remember the Poll Tax riots. It shows itself in lack of respect, sometimes couched as banter. Except the 69-year-old heating engineer who was dubbed “half-dead Dave” by his work mates didn’t find it funny. He felt “saddened and embarrassed”, and a tribunal upheld his complaint. In another landmark case, it was decreed that describing an employee as a grandparent was inherently ageist, even if it was true.

That memo, clearly, has not percolated down to the average office or shop floor. Nor to the classroom, where one teacher was told, “back off, granny”, when she tried to confiscate a mobile phone, and was asked if she was alive during the Second World War. Of all the ‘isms’ that blight the country, ageism is the least noticed and arguably the most pervasive.

Even though there was a fanfare about the number taking early retirement during the darkest days of Covid, do not be fooled. By far the majority of tail-end Baby Boomers can’t afford not to work. Their private pensions are too paltry to tide them over until state retirement age, and this won’t kick in until they are in their late 60s at best.

Never has the predicament of the over-50s been so stark. A financial desert stretches between their best-earning years and the state pension. Bridging that period without falling into hardship is tough if they are looking for a job in a marketplace that shamelessly favours those 20 and 30 years younger.

And while no institution or company would ever admit the reason for rejecting an applicant was age-related, as older job seekers miss out time and again it is disingenuous to deny it’s a major factor. Meanwhile, if those of this generation are fortunate enough to have been retained, they must accept their double-edged position as a veteran. That word, in fact, should probably be banned for its ageist overtones. Where once it indicated an impressive store of experience, now any hint of venerability carries overtones of decrepitude and obsolescence.

Yet when you consider what older workers can bring to the workplace, head hunters should be hammering at their door. They not only have a broad perspective and hinterland, but deep reserves of know-how. Some will still be brimful with ideas and as tech savvy as a 14-year old. Others will need training to keep abreast of new skills, but can be relied upon to listen to advice and follow instructions. Older staff are also valuable as mentors and leaders, and are perceived as less threatening than more youthful colleagues.

Until employers wake up to their complicity in this pernicious and endemic form of discrimination, growing older is a financial lottery. While age cannot wither us, society’s prejudices can. Now perhaps is the time to remind unenlightened HR departments of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that “The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.”