Justin Fox, Columnist

Corporate Boards Shouldn't Be Retirement Homes

The average director age at big U.S. companies has passed 63. Is that really a good thing for those companies?

January 26, 2015 at 7:48 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Where's the youth movement?
Photograph: BSIP/UIG via Getty Images

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These are tough times in the U.S. for workers older than 50. Buffeted by the Great Recession and big technological changes, many have been thrown out of the workforce and are finding it hard to get back in. They are the “new unemployables,” Boston College researchers declared a couple of years ago.

There’s at least one group of over-50 workers that’s doing awesome, though. Corporate board members! They just keep getting older. The average age of independent directors at Standard & Poor's 500 companies has risen from 60 in 1998 to 63.1 today, according to the executive search firm Spencer Stuart: