It's election; do you know how old your candidate is?

That adage about never asking a woman her age is older than, well, how old is it?

"That's been a standing joke for as long as I've been alive and before that," says trailblazing Illinois politician Dawn Clark Netsch.

And how long has Netsch been alive?

"I'm 82-and-a-half," she says with the dry wit that has marked her illustrious career. Netsch is professor emeritus at Northwestern School of Law, where she graduated at the top of her class in 1952. She helped rewrite the state's Constitution, served in the Illinois Senate for two decades, was the first woman elected to a statewide constitutional office as comptroller in 1990 and lost a race for governor in 1994. She's never let gender or age define her.

So how does she react when I tell her that some female candidates running for public office in the suburbs refuse to supply their dates of birth for this newspaper's candidate biographies?

"I'm surprised because I didn't think people paid that much attention any more," Netsch says."It was never an issue for me. I thought it had ceased to be an issue. I thought maybe women would want to emphasize their mature years."

I suspect the reluctance of some female candidates to provide their ages might have something to do with the mind-set expressed by Rush Limbaugh during Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

"Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?" bellowed Limbaugh, who has not kept any of his three marriages alive long enough to have much firsthand knowledge of that aging process.

"Ageism exists for both men and women, but it's worse for women," suggests Bonnie Grabenhofer of Aurora, president of the Illinois National Organization for Women. "Men get older and they are viewed as experienced. Women get older and they are sometimes dismissed."

While Grabenhofer and others can find examples of successful, older women, society has plenty of examples of double standards.

"We see the same patriarchal double standard in Hollywood, where male actors continue to land leading roles well into their 60s and beyond," says Jennifer Keys, chair of political science/sociology and anthropology at North Central College in Naperville.

Audiences were supposed to buy a sexual spark between 68-year-old Sean Connery and 29-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones in "Entrapment," but I suspect no movie producers would push a movie featuring a romantic scene between 68-year-old Faye Dunaway and 29-year-old Jason Segel unless the age difference was an integral part of the plot.

"As the political realm becomes increasingly dominated by media images, it is simply another stage upon which women must manage impressions," Keys notes. "Rush Limbaugh's comment may have heightened awareness of this societal imperative, but female political candidates' reluctance to report their ages is more symptomatic of the much deeper and more systemic problems of ageism and sexism."

As septuagenarian John McCain discovered, age can be an issue for men, too.

"But the perceived 'good ages' for a man are much broader than the perceived 'good ages' for a woman," Grabenhofer says. "We have this horrible, long history of women being judged by their looks, and looks are very tied into age."

While women such as Netsch helped voters realize female candidates are more than gender and age, she did so by tackling some of the issues on a very personal level. One opposing campaign poster during her 1994 race for governor said, "The truth is as ugly as she is."

Netsch responded with ad campaign promising she was "More than just another pretty face."

As for the few female candidates who wouldn't reveal their age, maybe I'm reading too much into that. Perhaps those women are afraid that once their date of birth goes into a computer, it won't be long before some hacker steals their identities and charges Viagra to their credit cards.