Women over the age of forty typically bring exactly the qualities employers claim to value most: sustained professional experience, established expertise, and, for many, a reduced burden of childcare relative to earlier in their careers. On that basis, this group should represent one of the strongest available pools of talent in the labour market. Yet a substantial and consistent body of research shows the opposite: women in this age group face measurably reduced access to employment, and the disadvantage begins earlier, and runs deeper, than the equivalent decline documented for men.
The clearest evidence comes from résumé correspondence studies, in which researchers submit fictitious but realistic job applications to real employers, varying only the applicant’s age, and measure how often each version is invited to interview. Joanna Lahey’s widely cited study found that a younger applicant was more than forty percent more likely to be invited to interview than an older woman applying for an identical role. A much larger study, involving more than forty thousand applications submitted across the United States by David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button, found the disparity in callback rates was consistently larger for older women than for older men, across every occupational category tested. Comparable results have been found using the same method in Sweden, and a cross-national study spanning Brazil, India, Italy, Singapore, Spain, the UK, and the US found a consistent pattern of bias against workers aged forty-five and older across all seven countries, despite considerable differences in labour market structure and culture.
The persistence of this pattern, despite no demonstrated decline in actual competence among women in this age group, points to unexamined stereotyping rather than to any real deficit. Research on hiring bias has found that older workers are consistently rated as warmer, but less competent, than younger workers, and that this competence-based stereotype predicts hiring discrimination even in roles where competence is not the primary requirement. A large meta-analysis of over four hundred studies found little empirical support for the underlying assumptions, including reduced adaptability or motivation, that this stereotype relies on. A further, women-specific dimension concerns appearance-based judgment: women are evaluated more critically than men on visible signs of ageing, which compounds with competence-based bias in a way that has no real equivalent for men, and which likely explains why the discrimination threshold identified in most studies begins roughly a decade earlier for women.
This disadvantage is not evenly distributed among women over forty. Migrant women face what the European Institute for Gender Equality describes as intersectional discrimination, in which gender, migration status, ethnicity, and age operate simultaneously rather than as separable disadvantages, and are more likely to be unemployed or economically inactive than any other group in the EU labour market. Women who have taken career breaks, most often for caregiving, face a separately documented penalty, with mothers receiving measurably lower callback rates than childless women with identical qualifications. The picture also shifts considerably by region: in the Middle East and North Africa, women have in many countries closed the gender gap in higher education, yet the region continues to record among the lowest rates of female labour force participation in the world, a divergence researchers have termed the “MENA paradox.” In Sub-Saharan Africa, the more common barrier is exclusion from the formal labour market altogether, with most working women remaining in agricultural, informal, or unpaid family labour. These are precisely the groups whose experience AFRIW’s work is most concerned with, and whose disadvantage is least often captured in general discussions of workplace ageism.
There is also a newer development worth flagging: recent research indicates that AI-driven hiring tools are not correcting this bias but reproducing it at scale, with a Stanford study finding that automated résumé-screening tools rate older men more favourably than older women or younger applicants of either gender.
Our report sets out this evidence in detail, including the underlying mechanisms behind the bias, the global comparative picture across regions where data is available, the compounding effect of career gaps and migration status, and what happens to women who remain in unsuitable employment rather than risk a job search they fear will fail. The full paper, with a complete reference list, is available to download here.