Ageism Is Sexism Too

According to two economic studies, older unemployed women faced more hiring discrimination than older men and younger women. One of the studies, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, sent out 40,000 fake resumes, identical except for the applicant’s name and year of graduation. Callback rates were 12 percent for women aged 64 to 66, lower than the 19 percent callback rate for women aged 29 to 31. Older men, on the other hand, did not have lower callback rates than their younger counterparts. “There’s some evidence the age discrimination law doesn’t do as much for older women as older men,” said David Neumark, an economist at the University of California at Irvine and author of one of the studies.