Alibi or False Witness: The Body Before the Court of Age
Some erase their graduation year from their CV and the grey from their hair, others add volume, muscle and a younger face at fifty. It looks like two opposite paths. In fact, they are two defences before the same court, where the body is the exhibit.
Thousands of CVs went out to real job vacancies from the Labour Office database, and not one of them stated an age. The applicants were fictitious men aged between forty and fifty-five, and all of them met the requirements of the advert. Employers worked out their age anyway.
All it took was the year the applicant finished school. An experiment by researchers from the Faculty of Economics and Administration at Masaryk University and the Office of the Public Defender of Rights showed that every additional year lowered the chance of a positive reply by three tenths of a percentage point.
That experiment reminded me of a courtroom where no one has stood up to read out the charges. The proceedings run all the same, witnesses are questioned and the exhibit is the human body. The accused know perfectly well that the court is in session. They can defend themselves in two ways, as if choosing between an alibi and a false witness.
The Court Nobody Convened
⚖️ In a survey of forty-four Czech companies, two thirds admitted that an applicant’s age is often a barrier in hiring. Yet eight in ten of them are struggling to find staff. In fast-paced industries an unofficial cut-off of fifty-five appears, sometimes even forty-five.
None of them writes it into a job advert, because that would be illegal. But a norm doesn’t need a statute; the silent consent of everyone involved is enough. The accused respond sensibly.
A British survey of people over forty-five found that one in five would consider Botox or collagen fillers if it helped them get a job or a promotion. Four in ten would dye their hair for the same reason. Personally, I don’t see vanity in that. I see a precise reading of rules nobody ever announced out loud.
Alibi
🧹 Their first defence claims that time wasn’t there. It takes three usual forms. The graduation year and the first job vanish from the CV, and there is an apt English term for it, résumé Botox, a smoothed-out CV. The grey vanishes from the hair. And everything that might hint that the body is going through something unsuited to a meeting vanishes from speech. A Canadian survey showed that only a third of people over fifty-five would put the year they finished school on their CV.
An alibi is a quiet, economical defence. It adds nothing; it only removes the traces from which age could be calculated. But it has one weakness. An alibi has to be maintained. The grey grows back, colleagues ask when you finished school, and every silence demands another, even longer one.
False Witness
🎭 The second defence doesn’t erase the traces; it brings in a witness who testifies to the opposite. It adds muscle volume where it is waning. Hair longer and thicker than a person could ever grow. A body worked into a shape that belongs to an age two decades younger.
The same testimony includes Botox, which global plastic surgery statistics rank first in demand across all adult age groups, including people over sixty-five.
And now the important part. The same addition can testify in two ways. Hair extensions can say “look at who I am”, but just as well “treat me as if no one had sent me the bill yet”.
The first sentence speaks of how I want to present myself. The second, of how I want others to treat me. From the outside, you can’t tell them apart. I wouldn’t want to turn this into a rule. Many people treat themselves to a procedure or hair extensions without a single thought of a job interview, simply because they enjoy it.
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Not every change to the body is testimony in court. But when the same adjustments pile up precisely in the years when the job market starts counting birth years, it is hard not to see in them a collective wish of our time that time itself should not show.
Evidence That Can’t Be Retouched
🔍 But one question remains: what evidence are both defences actually aimed at? The firms in the Brno experiment saw no photo, no wrinkles, no grey hair. They read age from a date on paper. Defences waged with the body therefore partly miss the target, because the court first leafs through the file and only then looks into the human face.
The experiment included only men, so what applies to women is my own inference. For women there is one more layer. A questionnaire among five hundred and sixteen middle-aged Czech women showed that willingness to undergo an aesthetic procedure is shaped by fear of ageing, the weight they give to appearance, the influence of a partner’s demands and their position at work. For them, the file and the face meet in a single box.
The alibi and the false witness have more in common than it might seem. Both defences accept that the court has jurisdiction and that the body is the exhibit. Yet they differ not in tactics but in whom they answer to.
Perhaps that is why there is no point in looking for a better defence, only in learning to read your own traces differently. Try, just once, opening your CV and going through your morning routine at the mirror with a single question: what part of this is testimony about you, and what part is a defence before a court nobody convened.
You don’t have to cross anything out or add anything. It’s enough to recognise when you are the one speaking and when the fear of the verdict is speaking for you.
Sources
- Věková diskriminace na trhu práce se týká lidí i ve středním věku (Advokátní deník) — A summary of the correspondence experiment by the Public Defender of Rights and ECON MUNI with 4,280 fictitious CVs of men aged 40 to 55 (in Czech).
- V Praze raketově přibývá nezaměstnaných padesátníků. Firmy je potřebují, ale jejich životopisy hážou do koše (E15) — Data on job seekers over 50 and the Neviditelní project survey on age as a barrier in hiring (in Czech).
- Older workers would consider cosmetic procedures to get a job or promotion (Human Resources Director) — Results of the Centre for Ageing Better survey on the willingness of people over 45 to undergo cosmetic procedures for work.
- The rise of “resume botox” (Employment Hero) — A Canadian survey on how job seekers blur the length of their experience and their graduation year on CVs.
- ISAPS International Survey on Aesthetic/Cosmetic Procedures (ISAPS) — Global statistics on aesthetic procedures by gender and age group.
- The middle-aged women’s attitudes towards (anti-ageing) cosmetic services in the Czech Republic (Acta chirurgiae plasticae) — A questionnaire study among 516 middle-aged Czech women on attitudes towards aesthetic procedures and the factors that shape them.
- Vzhled jako nálepka, co zároveň skrývá i odkrývá (Wizard Michal) — An article on what appearance hides about a person and what it reveals at the same time (in Czech).
- Stárnutí není další disciplína, kterou je třeba vyhrát (PEI) — An article on how ageing turns into a contest with winners and losers (in Czech, with an English version).
- Vylepšená profilovka mění i toho, kdo ji nosí (Imagemaker) — An article on how an enhanced profile photo changes the behaviour of the person who uses it (in Czech, with an English version).
