There is a well-known experiment demonstrating racial inequality: American researchers created fake résumés and sent them to different companies. Some of the résumés had a typically “white” name, while others had a typically “Black” name. In every other respect, the résumés were identical. The result showed that the “white” applicants received 50% more responses from recruiters than the “Black” applicants.
We decided to repeat this experiment, but compare job seekers of different ages. The government is carrying out a pension reform and assuring us that people over 50 can find work just as easily as 30-year-olds. So we decided to test whether that is really true.
We chose five common occupations: sales assistant, cook, driver, accountant, and secretary. For each occupation, we created two résumés with similar experience, but made one “applicant” 32 years old and the other 52. Our accountants and secretaries were women; the rest were men. Then we found 100 suitable vacancies for each occupation and sent the 32-year-olds’ résumés to half of them and the 52-year-olds’ résumés to the other half. We waited a week and then looked at the results.
The results are in our video:
Come to the rally against raising the retirement age on July 29 at 2:00 p.m. on Sakharov Avenue (named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov). The rally has been officially authorized.
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