Older female workers to miss out on training opportunities
16-01-2007
Many older female workers will miss out on training opportunities as employers see them as a poor return on investment, new research from the University of Surrey claims.
The study, led by the university's Dr Almuth McDowall, offered human resources managers in 48 companies a notional training budget of £6,000 and asked them to distribute this among four fictional employees.
Despite the managers having an average of ten years experience in making development decisions and there being a "careful mix" of gender and ethnicity worked into the study, the characters who were female and over 50 received far less of the available budget than young males.
HR managers justified their decision in terms of older employees and women offering a lower return on investment than younger males, the study claimed.
Dr McDowall said: "With legislation now having a bearing on age discrimination in the work place HR managers have to be aware that even though they say they don't want to be ageist, as many in our study did, there may be subliminal factors which mean they place the training and development interests of older workers and female workers last."
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