Discrimination Against Older Women

The provisions of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act make it unlawful for employers to discriminate on the basis of age against any worker age forty and over. Data assembled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission show that women between the ages of forty and forty-nine are more likely than women in the other ages groups to file claims alleging both age and sex discrimination. Women over the age of fifty, on the other hand, are more apt to claim that their workplace adversities result solely from age discrimination.

The combination of age and sex discrimination in the claims of the group forty to forty-nine reflects the preferences of some employers for attractive female employees, and they equate attractiveness with youth.

The use of stereotypes is common throughout the workplace, especially in connection with the employment of older workers. In fact, age stereotypes underlie nearly all facts of age discrimination. Stereotypical preconceptions consign to older workers of a particular age the physical and mental characteristics of the average worker of that age. Such thinking fails to distinguish between an older worker’s physical and mental capabilities and those perceived to be common among members of that worker’s age group. Negative employer perceptions of aging are expressed in these commonly held stereotypes ;

• Older workers are stubborn, inflexible, resistant to change, and less likely to accept new technology.

• Older workers are less productive than younger workers.

• Older workers are less adaptable, and as they are slow learners they find it more difficult to learn new skills.

• If their skills become obsolete, older workers are more difficult to retrain.

• The cost of employee benefits for older workers are greater than those for younger workers.

• Older people are eager to retire at the earliest opportunity. They merely want to ride out what remains of their careers.

• Because their remaining tenure with the company will probably be short, it is economically unreasonable to invest in training older people in new technologies and processes.  

Sex Discrimination After The Enactment of Title VII

When Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it declined to enumerate or restrictively to define discriminatory employment practices. Concerning sex discrimination against women. Title VII makes it unlawful for an employer. These few words proscribe all sex discriminatory workplace policies, practices and behavior.

More than nine thousand discrimination complaints were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in its first year of existence when only two thousand had been anticipated. Not surprisingly, most of these claims charged employers with race discrimination.

The company thus classified or segregated workers on the basis of gender. Because both men and women were at risk, individual workers should have been permitted to decide whether to accept or reject that risk. An employer may not assume that women are less capable than men of making that choice. It is for each woman, not her employer, to decide whether her reproductive role or her economic role is more important to her and her family.

Thus, in the years immediately following the adoption of Title VII, the courts and the EEOC formulated broad legal principles applicable to issues relating to discrimination against women. To see how successful the courts have been in helping women eliminate sex discrimination from workplace, we now turn to a review of court cases that have applied these principles in sex discrimination claims over the last three and one-half decades.