Age Discrimination

Age discrimination in the workplace manifests in hiring, performance management, promotion decisions, and redundancy selection — with older workers most frequently affected in hiring and redundancy contexts, and younger workers sometimes facing assumptions about their commitment or capability in promotion decisions. The most legally significant form is adverse action disguised as neutral criteria: selecting employees for redundancy using criteria like seniority that disproportionately affect a protected age group without business justification is age discrimination regardless of whether age was the stated rationale. HR teams should conduct adverse impact analyses on any selection process — hiring, promotion, redundancy — before implementation, since disparate impact on an age group creates liability even in the absence of explicit discriminatory intent.