Looking Older After 50: What the Research Says Men Get Wrong
A team of researchers ran an experiment that should change how every man over 50 thinks about his face. They built job candidates. For each one they varied two things separately: the age printed on the résumé, and what the man’s face looked like in the photograph, using digital aging. Then they handed these candidates to 383 adults, and afterward to 264 professional recruiters, and measured who got hired. I’m 57, and I’ve spent three decades around men’s health and performance. This is the most useful study I’ve read on the subject, and almost nobody in my field talks about it. The résumé said 50. Nobody cared. That’s the first result, and it’s startling. Telling raters the candidate was 50 rather than 30 produced no effect on hireability whatsoever . The statistic came back at p=0.965 — the researcher’s equivalent of a flat line. Your actual age, declared in writing, was not the problem. The face was. Candidates whose photographs had been aged were less likely to be hired. But...