A Symposium Explores Aging on Screen and on the Page

A symposium organized at Annenberg in September 2023 brought together scholars and media makers to think about how portrayals of aging on screen can have real-life consequences.

Titled “The Stories We Tell: Gender and Getting Older in the Media,” the two-day event was organized by the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication (C3) and directed by Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School.

During the opening keynote, University of Michigan’s Susan Douglas shared that even though people are living longer — there are more women over the age of 65 in the United States than ever before — the media, public policy, and health care are still deficient at handling aging, especially women aging.

She addressed that women are expected to be young forever, faced with advertisements for “anti-aging” beauty products, and that there are few characters in movies or television to whom they can relate.

“Being sidelined or marginalized in the media interlocks with being sidelined or marginalized in work, government policies, and everyday life,” she said.

Speakers at the symposium addressed how aging is seen as a source of dismay, discrimination, and even shame when societies see older people as “past their prime.”

Dean Banet-Weiser noted that age is typically left out of workplace diversity initiatives, and the decades-long attacks in the U.S. on Medicaid and Medicare also mean that cuts disproportionately hits women.

In many ways, the symposium was inspired by Wallis Annenberg, chairperson of the board, president and CEO of the Annenberg Foundation, and daughter of the founder of both Annenberg Schools, Walter Annenberg.

“Her investment in changing the story around aging was the initial motivation for organizing this symposium in the first place,” said Banet-Weiser.

One of those investments is the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, an innovative community center in Los Angeles for older adults, a demographic that includes one in five Americans.

GenSpace Director Jennifer Wong spoke at the symposium, explaining the lack of resources for Americans who are living nearly a decade longer than they were in the mid-20th century. GenSpace offers something that is curiously rare in America: an anti-ageist, inclusive community for people who are too often isolated and left out.

“We need to push back against this understanding of age as a diagnosis,” Banet-Weiser said. "The conversation should be about community and care. We need to think deeply about what it means to be interdependent in this world, caring for multiple generations and forming a community around these issues."

“Being sidelined or marginalized in the media interlocks with being sidelined or marginalized in work, government policies, and everyday life.” – Susan Douglas, University of Michigan