Women in their 40s and 50s face age discrimination in hiring at far higher rates than men the same age, and a growing body of research points to assumptions about menopause as part of the reason why. Here is what the evidence shows, and what to do about it.
A woman in her 40s or 50s applies for a job. Her resume matches the posting. Her experience is strong. She does not get a callback, or she gets one for a role well below what she is qualified for. She will likely never know why. Age discrimination in hiring is almost impossible to prove from the outside, which is exactly what makes it so persistent. Researchers have spent two decades building a body of evidence that shows this bias is real, that it hits women far harder than men, and that for women specifically, some of it appears to be tangled up with assumptions about menopause.
One note on ages before getting into the research: this bias does not switch on at a fixed birthday, and it starts earlier than the phrase “after 45” suggests. The studies below use different comparison groups, but they overlap in the low-to-mid 40s. Sweden’s data shows callback rates beginning to fall in the early 40s. The largest US study’s “middle-aged” comparison group was women 49 to 51, not women over 50. And the Harvard Business Review research on assumed-menopause bias specifically describes women in their late forties being passed over, years before most women reach menopause. If you are in your early 40s, this is already relevant to you, not something to file for later.
What the Research Shows
A widely cited study on this comes from economist Joanna Lahey, published in the Journal of Human Resources in 2008. Lahey sent matched resumes, identical except for the implied age of the applicant, to nearly 4,000 entry-level job openings in Boston and St. Petersburg, Florida. Younger applicants (ages 35 and 45) and older applicants (ages 50, 55, and 62) had the same qualifications. In Massachusetts, older women needed to submit 27 applications on average to get one interview offer, compared with 19 for younger women, a 42 percent increase. In Florida, the gap was similar: 23 applications versus 16, a 46 percent increase. Résumé additions designed to counter age stereotypes, things like computer certifications or references to an active lifestyle, made no measurable difference.
A larger, more recent study reached the same conclusion with far more data behind it. Economists David Neumark, Ian Burn, and Patrick Button sent more than 40,000 fictitious job applications to US employers for administrative, sales, and janitorial roles, again using matched resumes with varying implied ages. Combining every occupation, callback rates were about 18 percent lower for middle-aged applicants (49 to 51) and about 35 percent lower for older applicants (64 to 66) than for the youngest group (29 to 31), a gap the researchers found statistically robust rather than random noise.
The gap was sharper for women specifically in administrative roles, the single largest job category in the study, which used only female applicants: callback rates there were 29 percent lower for women 49 to 51 and 47 percent lower for women 64 to 66, compared with far less discrimination against older men applying for the same kinds of jobs elsewhere in the study.
The researchers also translated that callback gap into something more concrete: a 35 percent lower callback rate implies roughly 54 percent longer average unemployment duration for older job seekers, a rough estimate that nonetheless lines up closely with real US government data from the same period, where 55-to-64-year-olds spent about 48 percent longer unemployed than 25-to-34-year-olds, and applicants over 65 spent about 59 percent longer. A lower callback rate is not just a statistic; it is time spent out of work.
This is not only a US pattern. Economists Magnus Carlsson and Stefan Eriksson ran a similar field experiment in Sweden, sending more than 6,000 fictitious resumes for applicants aged 35 to 70 to real job openings. Callback rates fell for both men and women starting in their early 40s, but the decline was steeper for women, and the researchers traced much of the effect to employer assumptions about older applicants’ flexibility, ambition, and ability to learn new tasks, the same coded stereotypes that show up in the North American studies.
A Canadian-specific resume-audit study testing the same question could not be found, which is itself worth naming: Canadian employers currently have less rigorous local evidence available to check their own hiring patterns against than employers in the US or Sweden do. What is available for Canada is self-reported survey data rather than a controlled experiment. A Women of Influence+ survey published in February 2024, of 1,258 respondents across 46 countries (the organization itself is Canadian, though the sample was global), found that 77.8 percent of women reported facing ageism at some point in their careers, rising to 55.9 percent specifically among women with 21 or more years of experience. In the US, AARP’s 2022 survey of adults 50-plus found 15 percent said their age had cost them a job they applied for within the past two years, and AARP’s 2025 survey found 74 percent of older workers think their age could be a barrier to getting a new job, with 64 percent of workers 50 and older reporting they had seen or experienced age discrimination at work, holding steady from 2024.
In Australia, data cited by the Australian Human Rights Commission found that 44 percent of managers aged 50 and older admit they factor a candidate’s age into hiring decisions, meaning even the managers who will eventually be judged by the same standard apply it to others. These are perception numbers, not controlled tests of callback rates, but they point in the same direction as the resume-audit studies.
Where Menopause Enters the Picture
The resume-audit studies show that age bias in hiring hits women harder than men. They do not, on their own, explain why. A separate line of research gets closer to that question. Researchers Amy Diehl, Leanne Dzubinski, and Amber Stephenson surveyed 913 female leaders across higher education, faith-based nonprofits, law, and health care, and published their findings in Harvard Business Review in June 2023. Their conclusion was blunt: there was no right age to be a woman leader. Younger women were seen as not experienced enough. Older women were seen as past their prime. And in the years in between, one leader interviewed for the study described how some search committees passed over women in their late forties, citing “too much family responsibility and impending menopause,” while similarly aged men were hired without the same scrutiny.
This is the detail that matters for anyone thinking about hiring bias and menopause together. It is not simply that employers prefer younger candidates in the abstract. For women in midlife specifically, some of that preference appears to be built on assumptions about what menopause will supposedly do to a candidate’s reliability, focus, or energy, assumptions almost never tested against the actual person sitting across the table.
Why the Law Doesn’t Fully Catch This
Every Canadian jurisdiction’s human rights legislation prohibits employers from asking a candidate’s age on an application form or in an interview, with narrow exceptions for genuine occupational requirements, such as a minimum legal age for a role that involves serving alcohol. Age and pension-related information can only be requested after a job offer has been made. In principle, an illegal question asked during an interview can itself be used as evidence in a discrimination complaint.
In practice, the legal picture is harder for menopause specifically. Law professor Pnina Alon-Shenker, who researches age discrimination and menopause at work, has pointed out that menopause on its own does not automatically meet the legal definition of a disability under Canadian human rights law unless symptoms are severe and persistent. Without that classification, a complaint typically must be framed as intersectional age and sex discrimination to succeed, since an employer has no automatic legal obligation to accommodate a candidate or employee going through menopause otherwise. Her broader assessment, reported in a recent Globe and Mail feature on the cost of the menopause gap, was that government action to protect workers experiencing menopause remains minimal. A law that bans the question does not stop the assumption from shaping the decision.
The United States takes a notably different approach, and an older one. The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 protects workers 40 and older at companies with 20 or more employees, enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Unlike Canada’s framework, the ADEA does not prohibit an employer from asking a candidate’s age or date of birth on an application form or in an interview, only from using that information to discriminate, a distinction that is much harder to enforce after the fact.
A patchwork of state laws has started to close that gap instead of federal law: California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Colorado, and Connecticut already restrict employers from asking for age, birthdate, or graduation dates on job applications, and Oregon and New York City added similar restrictions in 2025. On the disability side, a 2019 US federal court decision, Mullen v. New Balance Athletics, found that endocrine function counts as a major bodily function under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and that an abrupt, medically induced menopause could meet the legal threshold for a disability. That case involved surgically induced menopause rather than the natural transition most women experience, so it is a narrow opening rather than a broad one, but it is a real precedent that Canadian law does not yet have an equivalent to.
The picture looks somewhat different again in the United Kingdom. The Equality Act 2010 does not name menopause on its own, but menopause-related discrimination claims can already be brought under three existing protected characteristics at once: age, sex, and disability, giving UK employees a broader statutory foothold than currently exists in Canada or the US. That legal framework has not solved the problem on its own.
The UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found in 2023 that two in three working women aged 40 to 60 who had experienced menopausal symptoms said it had a mostly negative impact on them at work, and more than one in ten said they felt discriminated against because of it, a figure describing the broader workplace experience rather than hiring specifically, since UK research on hiring-stage menopause bias is thinner than research on the experience of women already employed.
Has This Gone to Court? What the Case Law Shows
The clearest answer comes from the United Kingdom, where menopause discrimination has been recognized in tribunal decisions for more than a decade. The first case, Merchant v BT Plc (2012), found that a manager’s failure to consider whether an employee’s menopause symptoms were affecting her performance, the way the company routinely did for male employees’ health issues, amounted to sex discrimination and unfair dismissal; the tribunal awarded just over £20,000.
A more significant marker came with Davies v Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (2018), where a tribunal accepted that the claimant’s menopause symptoms met the legal definition of a disability under the Equality Act 2010, opening a second legal pathway beyond sex discrimination alone. That pathway was tested further in Lynskey v Direct Line Insurance Services (2023), where an employee moved into a role that worsened her menopause symptoms, without reasonable adjustments, won more than £55,000 in total damages. The volume of these claims has grown sharply since: UK employment tribunals saw 64 cases referencing menopause in 2022 and more than 204 in 2024, more than tripling in two years, with discrimination claims making up roughly 30 percent of that caseload.
Ireland has produced at least one comparable case. In Rotunda Hospital v Siobhan McNally (2021), Ireland’s Labour Court found that retiring an employee early without considering any accommodation for her menopause-related symptoms amounted to discrimination based on an imputed disability, awarding €10,000. Legal commentators there describe the body of Irish case law as still limited compared with the UKs, but moving in the same direction.
The United States has no dedicated menopause discrimination law at the federal level, so cases must fit inside existing categories: Title VII sex discrimination, the ADA, or age discrimination law. A widely discussed case is Alisha Coleman v. Bobby Dodd Institute, a 911 dispatcher fired in 2016 after two incidents of sudden, heavy menstrual bleeding linked to perimenopause. A federal district court initially dismissed her claim, declining to treat the firing as sex discrimination; the ACLU took the case to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and it ultimately ended in a confidential settlement rather than a published ruling that other courts must follow. In April 2024, the EEOC formally recognized the problem for the first time in guidance, naming a supervisor mocking an employee’s “menopausal moment” as a textbook example of intersectional harassment based on both sex and age. That guidance did not last: the EEOC voted 2 to 1 to rescind the entire harassment guidance document in January 2026, over language about gender identity unrelated to menopause, but the menopause example was removed along with the rest of the document when it went.
Rather than moving through the courts, the more active US trend right now is legislative: Rhode Island became the first state to require workplace accommodations for menopause symptoms in June 2025, Philadelphia passed a similar city ordinance in December 2025 that takes effect in 2027, and at least 16 state bills addressing menopause at work were introduced in 2026, up from just 3 the year before.
Australia has not yet produced a widely reported tribunal case specifically about menopause, though employment lawyers there point to the UK’s track record and Australia’s 2022 Respect at Work reforms as reasons to expect one before long. Canada has not produced one either: a search across Canadian Human Rights Tribunal decisions, provincial tribunals, and labour arbitration rulings did not turn up a published case where menopause was the central issue. That gap matches what law professor Pnina Alon-Shenker has said about the state of Canadian protections more broadly.
It means a Canadian woman today has no home-grown legal precedent to point to, only the reasoning developing in the UK, Ireland, and now a handful of US states and cities.
| Merchant v BT Plc (2012, UK) | First UK menopause tribunal case. Failure to consider menopause symptoms the way male health issues were considered found to be sex discrimination and unfair dismissal. Roughly £20,000 awarded. |
| Davies v Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (2018, UK) | First case establishing menopause symptoms can meet the legal definition of disability under the Equality Act 2010, opening a second legal pathway. £19,000 awarded, reinstatement ordered. |
| Lynskey v Direct Line Insurance Services (2023, UK) | Failure to make reasonable adjustments for a menopausal employee moved into a worse-fit role. More than £55,000 awarded in total. |
| Rotunda Hospital v Siobhan McNally (2021, Ireland) | Early retirement without considering menopause-related accommodation found to be discrimination on an imputed disability. €10,000 awarded. |
| Alisha Coleman v. Bobby Dodd Institute (2016 firing, US) | 911 dispatcher fired after perimenopause-related bleeding. District court dismissed the sex-discrimination claim; ACLU appeal to the 11th Circuit ended in a confidential settlement, not a precedent-setting ruling. |
| EEOC Enforcement Guidance on Harassment (April 2024, rescinded January 2026, US) | First federal recognition of menopause-linked “intersectional harassment.” Guidance document rescinded entirely in 2026 for unrelated reasons, removing the example along with it. |
What This Looks Like in Practice
Coded language does much of the work here, and there is now real data behind that claim rather than just an impression of it. Economists Ian Burn, Patrick Button, Luis Felipe Munguia Corella, and David Neumark used computational linguistics to analyze the actual text of job ads alongside callback data from the resume-audit study described above, directly linking ageist language in job postings to age discrimination in who got called back.
The effect was strongest for men, where language touching on health, personality, or skill stereotypes all predicted lower callback rates for older applicants. For women, it was language coded around personality stereotypes specifically, the kind of phrase that implies a candidate needs to be a certain kind of person, energetic, adaptable, a culture fit, rather than simply skilled.
Employers appear to know, at some level, that an age cutoff exists. A 2024 Transamerica Institute survey of 1,873 US employers found that 35 percent believe there is a specific age at which a candidate becomes “too old” to hire, with a median answer of 58, well inside the age range this post is about and well below the traditional retirement age.
Job seekers have adapted in response. A 2026 survey by Employment Hero found that 28 percent of Canadian workers and job seekers admit to downplaying their experience on a resume, LinkedIn profile, or in an interview, specifically to avoid looking overqualified or dating themselves. Willingness to list a graduation date fell sharply with age in the same survey: 67 percent of workers 18 to 34 said they would include it, compared with 45 percent of those 35 to 54, and just 33 percent of workers 55 and older. Separately, AARP’s 2022 survey found that 15 percent of US adults 50-plus said their age had directly cost them a job they applied for within the past two years.
Canadian focus-group research conducted for the federal government in Nova Scotia adds a qualitative layer to these numbers: participants described being asked their age directly in interviews, which is not legal, and some described changing their appearance, such as dyeing gray hair, specifically to avoid being screened out before they ever got in the room.
What Job Seekers Can Do
None of this is a candidate’s fault, and no amount of resume editing fixes a biased hiring process. That said, a few things are worth knowing. Being asked your age, your retirement plans, or your family responsibilities in an interview is not legal in Canada, and you are allowed to redirect the conversation back to your qualifications rather than answering.
If you are job hunting in the US, a growing number of states, including California, Colorado, and as of 2025 Oregon, now restrict what employers can ask about your age up front, though there is still no federal ban on the question itself. If you choose to shorten your resume’s work history or omit graduation dates, that is a legitimate strategy more than a quarter of Canadian job seekers already use, not an admission that your experience is a liability. And if a pattern of unexplained rejections despite strong qualifications continues, documenting dates, postings, and any comments made in interviews creates a record, should it ever be needed.
What Employers Should Do
The fix sits mostly on the employer side, since candidates cannot see or challenge a bias they never witness directly. Structured interviews, where every candidate is asked the same questions in the same order and scored against the same rubric, reduce the room for assumptions to creep in. Blind resume screening for the first round, with names, graduation dates, and other age-signaling details removed, has been shown in related hiring-bias research to improve outcomes for other underrepresented candidates and is worth testing here too.
Job ad language is worth auditing directly, not just interview conduct: the research above found the ageist coding in job postings is often unconscious, an ad written to sound energetic and dynamic rather than deliberately exclusionary, which means a second reader looking specifically for age-coded language will catch what the original writer did not. Age is rarely named explicitly in workplace DEI conversations. Menopause-friendly policies matter for the women already on staff, but the hiring process is where many women in midlife are screened out before those policies ever apply to them.
Why This Matters
Every qualified woman a company fails to interview because of an assumption about her age or her hormones is a company narrowing its own talent pool for no defensible reason, and the cost is not abstract: the research above translates a lower callback rate directly into months of extra unemployment.
Women in their 40s and 50s are often at the peak of their professional experience, with decades of judgment and expertise that a 25-year-old candidate simply has not had time to build yet. Hiring bias tied to assumed menopause status is not a footnote to the broader conversation about menopause at work. It is the point at which some women never get the chance to have that conversation with an employer at all.
The Research at a Glance
| Lahey (2008, US) | Matched-resume study, nearly 4,000 US entry-level job openings. Older women needed 42 to 46 percent more applications than younger women to get one interview offer. |
| Neumark, Burn & Button (2019, US) | 40,000+ US job applications, matched resumes by age. Callbacks 18 to 35 percent lower for middle-aged/older applicants overall; 29 to 47 percent lower for women specifically in administrative roles, versus far less discrimination against older men. |
| Burn, Button, Munguia Corella & Neumark (2019/2020, US) | Computational-linguistics analysis of the same study’s job ads. Ageist coded language in postings directly predicted lower callback rates: health/personality/skill stereotypes for men, personality stereotypes for women. |
| Carlsson & Eriksson (2019, Sweden) | 6,000+ fictitious resumes sent to Swedish employers, applicants aged 35 to 70. Callback rates fell for both sexes from the early 40s on, with a steeper decline for women. |
| Diehl, Dzubinski & Stephenson (Harvard Business Review, 2023, US) | Survey of 913 female leaders across four US industries. One leader described search committees citing assumed “impending menopause” and family responsibility as reasons to pass over women in their late 40s. |
| CIPD (2023, UK) | Survey of UK working women 40 to 60. Two in three with menopausal symptoms reported a mostly negative impact at work; over 1 in 10 reported feeling discriminated against because of it. |
| Women of Influence+ (Feb. 2024, global sample) | 1,258 respondents, 46 countries. 77.8 percent of women reported facing ageism in their careers; 55.9 percent among those with 21+ years of experience. Self-reported, not a controlled hiring experiment. |
I am not a lawyer. If you believe you have experienced discrimination in a hiring process, a human rights lawyer or your provincial human rights commission can advise on your specific situation.
I am also not a doctor. Always talk to your own doctor about any symptoms you are experiencing.
—
Aimee Debow is the Founder of Menovate and a certified Menopause Coach. She appeared as a witness before the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women in June 2026. Menovate helps Canadian organizations build menopause-supportive workplaces through corporate talks, e-learning, and HR advisory services. Learn more at menovate.ca.