I could see this happening. I work at a major company and it seems like everyone over 40 is some sort of director or senior staff engineer, so they are taken pretty seriously.
Here in Aus a great deal of it is managerial complacency and in some cases laziness ('management' aspirations sometimes comprising mainly a desire to play golf & watch rugby). There's a strong tendency to clutch at pattern-matching shortcuts: "You're over 30 so you must be a senior developer".
Or (another one I've suffered) "I see you have a book on X (new technology) on your desk, so you must be an expert in it". I honestly have more than once quickly shuffled a book into a drawer when seeing a project manager approach, just to avoid being given responsibility over a project using some new tech I've only just started to investigate.
