Help Really Wanted? The Impact of Age Stereotypes in Job Ads on Applications from Older Workers

Burn, Ian; Firoozi, Daniel; Ladd, Daniel; Neumark, David

doi:10.2139/ssrn.4177539

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2023

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“…The job ads were collected as part of a large-scale correspondence study of age discrimination (Neumark et al, 2019a). The present research, in turn, was used to develop a field experiment on how actual job applicants respond to ageist language in job ads (Burn et al, 2022b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stereotypes of older workers and perceived ageism in job ads: evidence from an experiment

Burn

Firoozi²,

Ladd³

et al. 2023

Journal of Pension Economics and Finance

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We explore whether ageist stereotypes in job ads are detectable using machine-learning methods measuring the linguistic similarity of job-ad language to ageist stereotypes identified by industrial psychologists. We then conduct an experiment to evaluate whether this language is perceived as biased against older workers searching for jobs. We find that job-ad language classified by the machine-learning algorithm as closely related to ageist stereotypes is perceived by experimental subjects as biased against older job seekers. These methods could potentially help enforce anti-discrimination laws by using job ads to predict or identify employers more likely to be engaging in age discrimination.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%