Older adults are more likely to cite bias in the workplace, survey finds
CHICAGO — Are older workers being discriminated against on the job? The answer appears to depend on the age of the person asked.
About half of Americans think there’s age discrimination in the workplace, according to a poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
But there’s a split by age. The poll finds that 60 percent of adults age 60 and over say older workers in the U.S. are always or often discriminated against, while 43 percent of adults younger than 45 say the same.
“I just think they’re not really aware of it,” said Wendy Sachs, 48, an author and speaker. She often has discussed her own experiences with age discrimination when applying for and working at New York City startup companies.
Federal law bars age discrimination in employment. Yet threequarters of adults 60 and older — and 65 percent of those between ages 45 and 59 — say they believe that their age puts them at a disadvantage when looking for work. One in 10 adults 60 and over and 2 in 10 of those ages 45 to 59 say they have been passed over for a raise, promotion or chance to get ahead specifically because of their age.
“They look at you kind of strange as you apply for a job. And I immediately know ‘Oh, well, I’m not going to get hired,’” said Kevin Kusinitz. The 63-year-old New Yorker spent years being rejected from jobs for which he felt overqualified after an August 2012 layoff.
Kusinitz now works a few days each week as a background actor in movies and television shows through Central Casting New York, and he said his wife “makes a good salary” to help support them. But after his initial layoff at 56, he said, he spent years unsuccessfully trying to land a job.
He believes that his age was a primary reason his job search failed to gain traction. As he filled out one particular online application, he was asked to select his birth year from a drop down menu. He discovered that the menu didn’t go back far enough for him to enter an accurate date.
“I think it only went back to the 1970s. I thought ‘Wow, I’m not even in the drop-down range. I really am old,’” he said.
By comparison, younger adults are more likely to think that their age puts them at an advantage.
Nearly half of those under 30 and about one-third of those 30 to 44 say they feel their age is a benefit.
Sachs applied for a handful of startup jobs in New York about five years ago. She said she was often competing against 20-somethings for positions and was at times made to feel like an outsider because of her age. She recounts one awkward exchange with a younger hiring manager who dismissed the physical resume she’d brought to her interview, instead insisting on a digital copy.
Sachs eventually landed a position but was let go shortly thereafter. She said she was led to believe her experience commanded too high a salary and that younger, less experienced workers would fill her role for less pay.
Meanwhile, the survey shows that 75 percent of women over 45 say their age puts them at a disadvantage when looking for work, compared with 65 percent of older men.
“For women, we see an early onset (cases of age discrimination), and the discrimination is much more severe,” said Patrick Button, an assistant economics professor at Tulane University. “I think there is a lot of sexism in aging.”
Button and his fellow researchers mocked up and distributed more than 40,000 fake job applications to online postings. They found that resumes designed to look like they belonged to an older applicant, particularly an older female applicant, were less likely to get a call back.
The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act bars discrimination in the workplace on the basis of age. A recent decision by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said that only current employees can be protected by certain elements of the statute, effectively loosening the restrictions on employers screening older individuals out of their applicant pool.