Prime age recruitment: the challenges for age discrimination legislation.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Bennington, Lynne
• Date: 01 January 2004

There are many environmental factors contributing to the need for people to remain in, or rejoin, the workforce at older ages. Making this difficult are the stereotypes about the limitations of older workers. Research, both in Australia and overseas, highlights considerable discrimination against older workers. This paper reports on the findings of two small empirical studies that found job advertisements, although not likely to include overt age limits--due to age discrimination legislation, still appear to target particular age groups, and that the wording of such advertisements can be constructed quite purposefully. Although only one job category was used for these studies, together with the summary of the literature, the challenge for age discrimination is shown to be considerable. Although federal age discrimination legislation has recently been passed, it is predicted that, without significant education and training of employers over a period of time, age discrimination in employment will continue, just as it has under state-based anti-discrimination legislation.

I INTRODUCTION

Over the last 30 years there has been a steady decline in the labour force participation of older workers. This has been due to at least two factors: early retirement incentives, often complemented or facilitated by government policies; and, to active discrimination or ageism. (2) This active discrimination may be based on a "taste for discrimination" (3) and bias against older workers. Alternatively, it may occur when raters do not have the cognitive resources to inhibit their use of stereotypes. (4) Such stereotypes provide a misleading framework for thinking about older workers so offer a very poor proxy for predicting the contribution they can make to the workplace. (5)

British researchers (6) have found that negative attitudes towards older workers often lack an evidential basis, especially given that there are generally greater within-age group differences than there are between-age group differences. (7) However, there are some areas in which older people have been found to perform less well. These have mostly tended to be in laboratory settings on tasks that bear little relationship to tasks performed in the workplace. Older workers are known to be less effective in high paced repetitive work and in work requiring physical labour but, overall, when the strengths of older workers are taken into account (reliability, conscientiousness, working well in teams, thinking before they act, lower turnover, flexibility in terms of hours, innovative in applying their experience to new situations, fewer absences etc), there can be no rational argument that older workers are less qualified for employment in respect to most jobs.

1 Consequences Of Reduced Participation By Older Workers

The consequences of reduced participation in the workforce of older workers, whether this be due to discrimination or other factors, are many and varied. At the societal level, given that people are living longer, having fewer children and retiring sooner, the future will find fewer workers per retired person, and probably prohibitive pension and healthcare costs. (8) At the business level, due to demographic changes, there will be a decline in the actual number of available entry-level workers, (9 10 11) so employers are likely to have difficulty in recruiting sufficient skilled employees. Therefore, ageist practices by employers--in which merit is not the key criterion--are likely to be counter-productive.

At the individual level, this is an important human rights issue that goes not only to the right to quality of life (which includes employment in our society) but, with increasing inflation and increasing health care costs, older adults are often feel compelled to try to remain in the workforce or to re-enter the workforce at older ages. (12) With increases in the age of pension eligibility, (13 14) many may no longer have a choice about working. Yet, in general, older people still experience longer periods of unemployment, have the lowest reemployment probabilities, suffer from high probabilities of part-time employment, experience the largest wage losses, (15 16 17 18 19) and suffer disproportionately in redundancy programs. (20) Thus age discrimination in employment has become a serious issue for everyone, not just for older persons.

2 The Salience Of Age

Dealing with this issue is far from simple. Although irrational from a business perspective, age discrimination is deeply ingrained in both western and eastern societies. (21 22 23) In 1988, Lawrence, in her article New wrinkles in the theory of age, (24) pointed out that evaluating and comparing employee ages is an everyday pastime in organizations. She later wrote: "Age acts as a coat rack on which people hang norms, values and expectations", (25) even though many age expectations are thought to occur at the subconscious level. (26) Age has high salience so it is difficult to avoid. Age is easily 'identified' by the use of physical cues such as facial characteristics (facial and cranial hair and skin texture) and by vocal characteristics, both of which generally covary with age. (27) Age is a matching device both in employment and in social life. (28 29)

3 Age Discrimination In Employment

Although some have argued that that age discrimination is difficult to detect, (30) there is considerable evidence of its existence. While employers argue that age plays no part in their decision-making, studies show that they do use age to evaluate candidates. (31) In the United Kingdom, the application of age, particularly in recruitment and selection, has been found to be a frequently used informal decision mechanism. (32) Other British studies have found that up to 25 per cent of people say that they have suffered from some form of discrimination and that age discrimination is the most common form. (33)

(a) Australian Age Discrimination Research

Australian researchers have reported on a series of studies that attempted to examine the roles of the various players in the system of age discrimination in the recruitment and selection process. (34 35) More recently they have examined the role of the applicant in potentially aiding and abetting discrimination in the recruitment process. (36 37) The resulting picture is one of discrimination in the recruitment and selection process in which employers typically age stereotype jobs. They advertise these jobs either independently or through the use of recruitment agencies, and while these advertisements no longer contain explicit indications of age limits for recruits, they still provide numerous clear messages about the preferred age range through the use of "age specific descriptors" (e.g. young environment etc). Potential recruits may screen themselves out upon reading discriminatory advertisements; some apply for jobs but either include their age or provide sufficient information for this assessment to be made easily; some are screened out by recruitment agents during telephone inquires or once resumes are submitted--these agents are acting upon either their own stereotypes or on the stated or implicit directions of their clients (employers), and so the process continues. (38)

(b) Prime Age Recruiting

Age discrimination operates at both the younger end of the continuum and at the "older" end (39) but the focus here is on discrimination in respect to older workers. The term "older" begins to operate in employment at different points for men and women. (40 41) Some jobs in which women predominate are notoriously allied to 'youth'--hairdressing, secretarial work, modelling, sex work, etc whilst jobs where men predominate have less emphasis on 'looks' insofar as this concept is applied to women. Even 'male' jobs that require physicality seem to have a far broader age-spread--for example, road workers vary in age, although it may be thought that 'young' men only need apply, similarly with factory work, executives, heads and upper echelons of government departments, academics (upper echelons in particular are mostly old or older males). Age limits for jobs also vary, depending upon the country of origin and the sample used, but in Europe, age discrimination seems to start at 45 years or earlier in terms of employers being prepared to hire workers. (42)

The age range of interest to employers appears to quite narrow. For example, Loretto, Duncan and White (43) refer to as "prime age labour" or the 25-35 age group as the age group employers prefer to hire. The support for this notion is growing. For example, in the United Kingdom, McGoldrick and Arrowsmith's (44) summary of the research found that the upper age limit for positions varied between 40 and 50 years, but their own study found a mean upper age limit of 37.1 years. In Australia, a Queensland-based team (45) found that employers preferred 26 to 35-year-olds for almost all categories of employment. Victorian-based research also indicated that recruitment agents, when recruiting for secretarial positions, were most interested in those of 25 years of age, followed jointly by those 23 and 30 years of age. (46) Only two out of 180 recruitment consultants in this study thought that those above 37 years would be suitable to employers, even though the average age for a female secretary in the state in which the study was carried out was 36.38 years. (47) (At this time there was state-based age discrimination legislation and the federal Age Discrimination Act 2004 did not exist.)

An analysis of the advertisements used in this Victorian study revealed clear age targeting. A separate study had secretaries rate the individual words used in the advertisements indicating that words such as "buzzy", "fast-paced", "go-getter", "high-flyer", "can-do", "switched-on" and "on-the-ball", "recent graduate", "at least 2 years experience", "flexibility", "dynamic approach"...