Age bias in the evaluation of achievement: what determines?

This study hypothesized that there would be no sex or age biases in judged quality of a newspaper article previously rated sex- and age-neutral as to likelihood of authorship and readership. Undergraduates (53 males, 73 females) read a biographical resume varying author age and sex and either a well-written or poorly-written version of an article on gardening. A 2 (stimulus age) x 2 (stimulus sex) x 2 (article quality) factorial multivariate analysis of variance found only a significant main effect of article quality and, as predicted, no effects of stimulus age or sex upon article evaluation or authorship expectancy.