I would challenge Owen’s assertion that male middle managers are better treated in the public sector, especially when it comes to ‘not suffering from blatant ageism’. My union branch’s study of my department’s pay awards as part of last year’s pay negotiations exposed the fact that the best awards were given to those under 35, and your liklihood of geting a ‘good’ pay award decreased rapidly after that age.

Whenever a senior manager says “Staff are our most important asset” (and they still do this, much to my amusement), I always quote Dilbert back at them – “And like most assets, they lose value over time.” I’ve had management consultants think about this and then say, “Yes, that’s probably right.” And it happens in the public sector just as much. I’m currently defending a member who has been summarily dismissed on the most amazingly trumped-up charges I’ve ever heard (accused of ‘probably’ reading e-mails in a mailbox he was charged with administering to keep down junk mail, spam, firewall system notifications and the like). He is definitely in the ‘male, middle age, middle manager’ bracket, and I can’t help but think that he is being forced out in an exceptionally callous way partly because he doesn’t match someone’s image of a ‘professional’.