Examples of Age Discrimination in the Workplace

Employers can be very skillful at hiding discriminatory practices; therefore, age discrimination may not be obvious. Some examples of discrimination in the workplace based on age are:

• The employer compensates younger employees with less skill and experience at a higher level than the older employees with more skill and experience.

• A company promotes a younger employee with less experience over an older employee, or hires a younger employee rather than promote an older employee to a position.

• A company is having difficult times economically, so it fires or lays off the oldest workers first, because they are making the highest salaries after having been with the company the longest.

• A supervisor gives an older employee undeserved poor performance evaluations and then uses these false records of poor performance to fire or demote the employee.

• An employer will not let an older worker take a training course or otherwise invest in the worker’s further growth.

• An employer forces an employee to take “early retirement”.

• A company refuses to hire anyone who looks older than a certain age, simply to maintain a youthful company image.

• An employer engages in harassment of an older employer based on age, such as age-related jokes, comments and gestures.

• A supervisor assigns undesirable or demeaning tasks only to older employees, or makes a job more difficult to encourage someone to quit.

• Before you were fired, forced to resign, or forced to retire, your employer made age-related remarks about you to you, or to others, or in your job evaluations, leading you to believe your age played some role in the employment decisions made against you.

• Your employer gave you feedback that you are too old, that you aren’t flexible in taking on new projects, that you lack the ability to learn new skills, that you are over-the-hill, that the company wants vigor, energy, a youthful and new approach that you lack.

• Your employer wanted to create a youthful image with new blood, so you were refused a job, you were passed over for a well-deserved promotion or raise, or you were fired because the employer wanted a younger person for the job.

• Even though terminated older workers performed effectively, received good evaluations, and have more experience, your company laid off mostly older workers while retaining younger workers.

• Your employer promotes and provides more promising positions to younger employees as compared to older employees, not based on competence or performance, but because the employer wants a more youthful image.

• Your employer is removing older employees and replacing them with younger employees.