A resume correspondence study on the basis of more than 40,000 job applications for four occupations (administrative jobs, sales, security jobs, janitor jobs) found "robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men".
For the four occupations combined, callback rates were significantly lower when the applicants were perceived as older, i.e., by 18% for middle-aged workers and about 35% for older workers.
For administrative jobs, the callback rate was 14,4% for applicants aged 29 to 31, 10,3% for those aged 49 to 51 and 7,6% for applicants aged 64 to 66.
For sales jobs, there was not really a difference between young and middle-aged applicantsn in terms of callback rate. However, the callback rate for older applicants was 30% lower. In addition, there was evidence of stronger age discrimination of female applicants.
For security jobs too, there were more or less equal callback rates for middle-aged and older applicants. Again, both were lower than the callback rate for younger applicants.
And, finally, for janitor jobs, the callback rate for older applicants was significantly lower than the rate for middle-aged or younger applicants (Neumark, Burn & Button, 2018).
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- Neumark, D., Burn, I. & Button, P. (2018). Is It Harder For Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment. Journal of Political Economy, 127(2), link
- photograph by Flip Schulke via
