Dive Brief:
- A U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit against Yale New Haven Hospital — which alleged the hospital forced older physicians to take certain tests in violation of both the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act — was cleared for trial, an opinion filed Friday showed.
- EEOC’s lawsuit centered on the hospital’s “Late Career Practitioner Policy,” which requires physicians and other practitioners aged 70 and up who want to obtain or renew clinical privileges to undergo “ophthalmic and neuropsychological testing.” While Yale maintained the policy is to ensure patient safety, EEOC alleged it was discriminatory.
- The court ruled that a trial is necessary to determine whether these age-specific tests were warranted. The case highlights a complicated area of determining age bias, with arguments for safety pitted against claims of discrimination.
Dive Insight:
Age discrimination is a constant issue in the world of work, taking a variety of forms.
Previous EEOC lawsuits have highlighted specific terminology, for example, including loaded questions such as “When are you going to retire?” or the use of the pejorative term “dinobabies.”
As of late, many of the most high-profile age discrimination claims have been related to hiring rather than on-the-job bias. Over the last couple of years, the class-action lawsuit Mobley, et al. v. Workday has been a watershed moment for recruiting. The allegations of algorithmic age, race and disability discrimination are at the intersection of hiring, inclusion, and artificial intelligence’s impact on both of those aspects of HR.
Whether Workday is ruled to have contributed to age-related discrimination remains to be seen; still, older workers’ belief that their age is a negative factor in their job search endures. In a 2021 survey by WerkLabs, workers over 40 years old confirmed they encounter ageism in the job search more often than in the workplace. More specifically, the majority of respondents 50 years old and up told CWI Labs that age feels like an obstacle in getting hired.
“Older workers play a pivotal role in the U.S. labor force,” Gary Officer, founder and CEO of CWI Labs, said in a statement at the time. “This survey highlights the age-related bias older workers and job seekers face that is costing our economy trillions of dollars each year.”
In 2025, company review site Glassdoor noted that “ageism” pinged in employer reviews more and more, year over year. Likewise, in the 2021 WerkLabs study, a whopping 60% of respondents said they had faced ageism in their professional life.
The EEOC’s lawsuit dealt with a more intractable issue, U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley indicated in her Friday decision. “Yale relies upon the undisputed fact that age is the single best indicator of a risk of cognitive decline, rendering age a legitimate proxy for safety related job qualifications,” she wrote. “As relevant to the ADEA, there are … questions of fact as to whether age is a legitimate proxy for the safety related job qualifications measured by the [policy].”
Recently, railroad company Norfolk Southern failed to prevail on its safety argument for removing an older worker from duty. The 65-year-old worker was also subjected to multiple evaluations, and though he had seemed to pass them, was removed from his role and deemed unsafe to perform his job. A jury awarded the worker $1.6 million — a decision a judge upheld on Oct. 15.
