AI recruitment tools are emerging as a systemic barrier for mid-life women seeking work, with legal battles, government taskforces, and the testimonies of dozens of experienced professionals all pointing in the same direction: the algorithms screening CVs may be quietly encoding the very biases employers claim to have abandoned.
Stacey Duguid, 52, spent 16 months sending what she describes as “gazillions” of CVs after a career spanning decades in senior fashion roles, receiving little beyond automated replies. She eventually posted on social media asking whether other women her age were having the same experience. Thousands said they were. Her response has been to “Botox” her CV, stripping out references that betray her age and the depth of her experience. “AI holds a mirror up to society,” she said. “It’s a reflection of our bias.”
The BBC spoke to more than 60 women aged 40 to 65 across a range of industries. Most have decades of experience in senior roles. Most have received automated rejections or silence.
Koeyli Jaluka, 49, has applied for 442 jobs since being made redundant nine months ago and has heard back in only a handful of cases. For the previous 10 to 12 years she had been headhunted. She has been told, on occasion, that she is “too senior,” a phrase she reads as code for something else entirely. Anna Cowie, 52, had a 30-year career in advertising and is now on jobseeker’s allowance after almost four years of unemployment, despite having never previously been without work.
The Workday Case Puts AI Recruitment Tools Under Legal Scrutiny
The most consequential legal challenge to AI recruitment tools is playing out in California. Workday, whose human resources software is used by thousands of employers, is facing a collective action lawsuit under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. On 16 May 2025, Judge Rita Lin of the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted conditional certification, allowing the case to proceed as a nationwide collective, with the central question being whether Holland & Knight summarised as “whether Workday’s AI recommendation system has a disparate impact on applicants over forty.”
The scale is arresting. Workday represented in court filings that 1.1 billion applications were rejected using its software tools during the relevant period, meaning the conditionally certified collective could potentially include hundreds of millions of members, according to Law and the Workplace. The lead plaintiff alleged he applied for over 100 positions at companies using Workday’s tools since 2017 and was rejected for every one, with many rejections arriving immediately or in the middle of the night, as HR Dive reported. In June 2026, Reuters reported that a judge dismissed a separate claim relating to discrimination against Asian American applicants on procedural grounds, but the broader suit over age, race, and sex discrimination remains live.
Workday says the claims are false and that its tools do not make hiring decisions. The company states its AI is “rigorously tested” through its Responsible AI programme and does not consider traits such as age or gender.
Why the Regulation of AI Recruitment Tools Is Failing Women
Laura Holden, an AI lawyer and founder of the Bonsai AI consultancy, argues that companies often do not understand how these tools work. She points to CV scoring systems that grade applications from A to D and flag career gaps as “things to note,” including gaps that frequently correspond to periods of childcare. Although marketed as decision-support tools, she says they function in practice as automated decision-making systems. The problem, she argues, is structural: “there is a lack of regulation globally that requires providers to show how their tools work.”
Dr Eleanor Drage, a senior researcher at the University of Cambridge, goes further. The logic underpinning AI recruitment tools is, she argues, “completely faulty,” because the systems cannot assess a person’s intrinsic value or personality in the way a human recruiter can. She is particularly concerned about their deployment against “vulnerable populations, like older women going back into the workforce, or people who’ve had a career break.”
The City of London Women Pivoting to Digital Taskforce, backed by partners including Accenture, Deloitte and IBM according to techUK, has placed the issue inside a wider structural concern: fewer than 25% of women work in AI and data science fields in the UK. Chair Caroline Haines warns that AI screening systems fail to recognise the skills experienced women bring, and that if these women drop out of the market there are “huge repercussions” for economic growth.
The taskforce’s displacement projections draw on the Department for Education‘s labour market projections covering 2020 to 2035, a dataset updated as recently as August 2024. Those projections form part of the Skills Imperative 2035 programme, led by NFER and funded by the Nuffield Foundation. The NFER‘s final report projects that up to three million UK jobs in declining occupations could disappear by 2035, largely driven by AI and automation. Without significant investment in retraining, the taskforce estimates firms could face more than £750m in severance costs. In the taskforce’s survey of over 1,000 women, 68% said their employer had not given them the opportunity to retrain or transition into digital roles.
The government says existing equality and data protection law already applies to AI systems and that it will act where additional protections are needed. That is a statement of principle, not a programme. With a case involving 1.1 billion rejected applications now proceeding through a California federal court, the question is whether UK regulators will move before the damage compounds further.
