Jon Allison’s Monday BlogI blogged about age discrimination a couple of times last month. Last week, the Washington Post reported that a new study shows age discrimination in hiring has a greater impact on women than men. The study is probably the largest field experiment ever testing age discrimination in the hiring process. According to the study, resumes of older women get far fewer callbacks than those of older men as well as all younger applicants. The researchers sent out over 40,000 resumes. The researchers studied different job categories, including administrative, sales, janitorial and security. Overall, the study showed a strong bias against hiring older workers. But the researchers observed that when they focused in on older female applicants, there was greater disparity. For example, for administrative jobs, female applicants 49 to 51 years of age got 29 percent fewer callbacks than those age 29 to 31. Applicants age 64 to 66 got 47 percent fewer callbacks. Similar results were found for sales jobs. The researchers note that women tend to live longer on average than men and therefore may benefit from staying in the workforce longer than men. This won’t help.
