Emmy Award-winning actress, Doris Roberts, a star of the hit television series “Everybody Loves Raymond,” discussed the prejudices and biases plaguing older women in the entertainment industry at a hearing by the Senate Special Committee on Aging. The committee held the September 4 hearing to examine the image of aging in media and marketing.
Despite the fact that, in her seventies, she is at the height of her career, “society considers me discardable: my opinions irrelevant, my needs comical, and my tastes not worth attention in the marketplace,” she said. “Many of my friends,” actresses between the ages of 40 and 60, are unemployed and on welfare “because of the scarcity of roles for women in that age bracket,” she continued. According to an employment survey by the Screen Actor’s Guild, there are three times as many roles for women under forty as there are for women 40 and older, “even though 42 percent of Americans are over 40.”
Ms. Roberts told the committee that younger and younger women are visiting plastic surgeons to stop the aging process. “Women are starting to get tummy tucks and facelifts in their thirties to forestall the day when the phone stops ringing,” she said.
“The roles for women my age frequently show seniors in insulting and degrading ways, cartoons of the elderly,” she continued. “There is a coalition to protect the way every other group is depicted in the media from Italians to Arabs to racial groups, but no one protects the image of the elderly,” she added.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) agreed. “I do believe that this is an issue for older women in terms of what the media is doing,” she said. “When the Older Women’s League did a study on Medicare, they talked about the fact that when they looked at Social Security and Medicare, particularly for those over 85, it’s all women,” she continued. “I think we are particularly talking about stereotypes of women here, and I believe that it’s an issue that women of all ages need to be concerned about,” she added.
“The issues of age are very much the issues of women,” concurred Dr. Robert Butler of the International Longevity Center. Dr. Butler also testified at the hearing. “Women may live now 5.4 years longer, but they pay a price with more chronic illness, more poverty, more elder abuse, and 80 percent of individuals living in nursing homes are women,” he continued. “So many of the negative attitudes toward age are clearly focused very intensely on women,” he said, and added, “It’s very important to emphasize that.”
