Where do we see age discrimination towards older people? A preliminary study on age stereotypes in job offers.

The increase in life expectancy worldwide has brought new challenges for organisations and, in general, for the labour scenario. Precisely one of the most relevant issues in the face of this panorama is the increasingly frequent presence of older people who continue to be active in the organisational sphere, bringing with it discussions about development plans, retirement, or, in other cases, about prolonging working life. These issues have also had a point of convergence where barriers that an older worker may face in the labour market have been identified. In fact, some studies show that one of the main difficulties encountered by older people is access to job opportunities because of their age and the stereotypes surrounding their age.
This study seeks to describe age stereotypes in job offers. Information will be collected from different employment platforms, in which the time frame will be established as the job offers published during the last month without distinction of sector or area of the economy. Taking into account the literature on this field, some stereotypes that are usually labelled as negative and assigned to the older population and that have been related to skills/competences demanded by job offers will be chosen. Findings will also be described according to age (sometimes explicit in publications), gender, area of work, professions, among other socio-demographic characteristics. It is hoped that the results of this study will provide evidence to support what the literature has mentioned about the barriers that older people face when accessing job opportunities, especially those related to publications and offers where the competencies and skills required have been associated with age stereotypes.

Ageing, discrimination, ageism, ageism, stereotypes