Gendron asserts that everything we know about getting older is wrong. But that’s not our fault, because everything we’ve been taught about ageing is wrong.

The solution begins by distinguishing between ageing and senescence, Gendron writes. Ageing is the universal lifelong process of growth and development, while senescence is the physical and mental decline at the end. But the two terms have become mistakenly conflated in many of our assumptions, casting our later years in a largely negative light, she says.

Spoiler alert: Ageism Unmasked is anything but a screed on political correctness. It’s a vivid and thoughtful account of human ageing for the general reader, encompassing the history of ageist biases and describing the undeniable damage they inflict – along with suggestions for uprooting them.

Gendron defines ageism as discrimination, oppression and marginalisation based on age. (It’s called adultism when aimed at younger people, as in “Oh, those impossible Gen Xers.”)

Lift weights – it protects your heart and slows the effects of ageing

For example, the subtle stresses of holding negative assumptions about ageing can apparently take a full seven-and-a-half years off your lifespan. The statistical chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease increase when we harbour self-directed ageism, she notes. Short of sickness, such ideas are insidious on the behavioural level: many people become the stereotypes that are thrust upon them, Gendron warns.

The costs of ageism are no surprise to older employees who, their ability and age conflated in their employers’ minds, are overlooked for training, promotions or special projects, Gendron notes.

The cosmetics industry’s promotion of “agelessness” is especially insidious, though natural enough: nobody likes wrinkles, and even Cleopatra bathed in donkey’s milk. But the quest for an ageless look subtly demeans and marginalises the very process of living itself, she warns.

Less overt ageism is found in well-meant laws and policies that subtly condemn and infantilise older people, and the medical notion that ageing is a downward pathological spiral, Gendron writes.

Yet it was the “rampant displays” of ageism unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic that drove Gendron, then 50 years old, to write Ageism Unmasked – hence her title. She was shocked by callous online postings suggesting the lives of older victims were more expendable than the young, some describing Covid-19 as a “Boomer Remover” – in reference to the Baby Boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964.

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Gendron’s eight chapters take us into many citadels of ageist bias that developed both before and after the Industrial Revolution began dismantling popular notions of older adults as wise, dependable and knowledgeable. Once terms of reverence, “elderly” and “senior citizen” now widely connote feebleness, she laments.

Although deeply embedded, our stereotypes can be overcome, Gendron argues. She suggests pausing before saying things like “someone of your age may not understand …” Instead of “age”, substitute the other person’s religion, race or gender, and see how it feels.

Uncomfortable, she hopes.

To put ageing into its proper perspective as a universal experience, we might try referring to preschools as part of the ageing services sector, she argues. “What a switch in perspective that would be!”

The author points admiringly to the respect directed towards older people in Japanese and Korean societies. She likes the word for old age in Botswanan – botsofe – which combines the ideas of wisdom, experience, knowledge and physical decline at the end of a long life.

Gendron writes in a readable journalistic style, dipping only lightly into her professional jargon as a gerontologist. Despite her credentials as a senior academic, she gives her sense of indignation a look-in, denouncing ageing myths as “blindingly unreasonable” and “ridiculously untrue”.

This is a valuable book that will bring clearer understanding to younger and older readers alike, jolting some, like this reviewer, into fresh insights and understanding.