No foot in the door: an experimental study of employment discrimination against older workers.

Pairs of testers, one aged 57 and one aged 32, applied for 102 entry-level sales or management jobs in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Although their credentials described them as equally qualified, the older applicants received less favorable responses from employers 41.2% of the time. Three quarters of these differences occurred before older applicants could fully present their qualifications. The negative employer assumptions about older workers implied by these differences in outcome were seldom explicitly stated.