The Fact
In a large resume-correspondence field experiment covering more than 40,000 applications, female applicants for administrative jobs ages 29–31 received callbacks on 14.41% of applications, compared with 10.30% for otherwise comparable applicants ages 49–51 and 7.58% for applicants ages 64–66.
What This Means
Hiring discrimination can begin before traditional retirement age. In this occupation and experiment, women around age 50 already received materially fewer callbacks than younger women with comparable resumes.
Sources
- David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button, “Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment,” Journal of Political Economy 127(2), 2019; NBER Working Paper 21669.