The Disability Inclusion Delusion

WE ARE HEARING a lot about disability inclusion these days. It seems like a great idea. Yet many who are disabled, or ‘differently abled,’ or whatever one wishes to call it, have no reason to believe it exists. The reason is because they have to get hired in order for it to apply.  

‘Disabled’ is an umbrella term that covers probably a billion people worldwide. Some are permanently disabled. Some temporarily. Some are considered an asset. Others a liability. 

Say a company is hiring for a remote position. One of the applicants is in a wheelchair, but otherwise incredibly level-headed and well-qualified. There does not seem to be any cost or risk in hiring this person. Quite the opposite. 

But what if a company hires a person with undisclosed mental health problems? This seems too big a risk for any employer to bother themselves with, especially in today’s highly competitive job market. Why hire somebody with these problems when you could hire somebody without them? 

It is unlikely many good paying jobs would. Such challenges can leave many gaps in one’s resume. Perhaps they did not last long at past employers because their health caught up with them. Maybe they were unable to relocate to take on an opportunity, so they had to stay in the middle of nowhere and work a much less rewarding job. Worse yet, maybe they had to take a year or two off to deal with their health. They also could have been discriminated against in so many hiring processes that they never got their career off the ground. In her 1991 book In the Way of Women: Men’s Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations, Cynthia Cockburn writes: “Though poor educational facilities and inadequate benefits hold disabled people back, employers are a significant source of handicap.” She continues,

They erect, or fail to remove, many of the social barriers’ to disabled people’s careers. When disabled people apply for jobs, they seldom get shortlisted or interviewed. When they do, they often encounter recruiting managers who underestimate their potential, who set up ways that limit their ability to demonstrate their full capacities and are ignorant about both disability and the resources available to employers to ease the employment of disabled people. Often employers are too mean to make the adaptations they could to the environment or too narrow-minded to restructure jobs to enable people with abilities and disabilities that differ from the norm.

In the digital age, many disabled people feel invisible. Why would a business hire somebody with a ton of gaps in the resume when they could find somebody who has been consistently employed for the past ten years? Why would they even grant an interview to said person? 

French businessman Franck Riboud wrote in the 1994 book Overcoming Indifference, edited by Klaus Schwab:

Another, more serious, reason is that exclusion leads to more exclusion. A young person who moves back and forth from a low-paying job to unemployment becomes more and more difficult to integrate. Exclusion is like cancer: the longer one waits to treat it, the more it becomes incurable.

In most of the US, a car is a necessity. Yet many disabled people cannot drive. Why would an employer hire somebody who cannot drive when they could hire a thousand other people who could, assuming this is even an option?  That person would have to be masochistic to admit the reason their resume is botched because they are disabled. This is even worse for people who cannot hide it. 

Look at an organization like the Valuable 500, which is composed of 500 of the largest employers in the world. Their goal is to take “synchronized collective action” to end disability exclusion. They do great work. 

Yet what good is it knowing that 500 large companies’ resources for employees with disabilities if a person cannot get hired or even get an interview from any of these corporations? It is like telling somebody in Gaza about all of the wonderful resources in Israel. What difference does it make if they will never get to use them? 

Plus, all of these companies operate in an ever-quickening, changing, multitasking, and complex environment. The fast fish eat the slow fish, and many with disabilities may struggle to keep up. The World Economic Forum predicts two-fifths of workers’ skill sets will be transformed or become outdated in the next five years.

Most modern employers are quick to note that they are looking for candidates that can operate under such conditions. They might as well say many disabled folks need not apply.

Many people with disabilities feel their positive qualities are overlooked. Cockburn interviewed one man who had lost a limb in a car crash, and he said:

For me personally, it’s made me a different person, it’s made me a person who can think now. I’ve got the ability to sit and listen to other people, as opposed to saying people are just wrong. It’s made me a better person from a lot of angles, really.

Since people with disabilities are more reliant on their peers than other community members, a recent report from the Valuable 500 finds that 79 percent of respondents value empathy as the most important trait of “disability-inclusive” leaders. This is bad news, because many studies show that we are seeing a freefall in cognitive empathy, or the ability to understand the internal state of another person. Social media promotes inflated self-views, so this is making the problem worse, too.

It is even more difficult to empathize with an employee if they are working remotely.

So, it increasingly feels like nobody cares. As an Old Testament psalmist remarked:

Their idols are silver and gold,
The work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, but they speak not;
Eyes have they, but they see not;
They have ears, but they hear not;
Noses have they, but they smell not;
They have hands, but they handle not;
Feet have they, but they walk not;
Neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them;
So is every one that trusteth in them.

In many ways, then, inclusion is getting worse after the pandemic. This is the opposite of what Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret predicted in their 2020 book, COVID-19: The Great Reset. 

To be sure, we have come a long way since the establishment in the late 18th century of the Institute for Deaf Mutes, the founding in 1817 of the first school for the deaf in America, the establishment of Perkins Institute for the Blind around 1833, since the 1960s when the US had a disabled president, and since 1990 when George HW Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Yet, while high-flying executives of massive multinationals celebrate their successes, people who could be helped are quite literally dying. Instead of gloating or using disabled people as a tool for public relations, we should instead admit that this is a crisis. Given that anybody can become disabled at any point and understanding that DEI programs are currently under fire, including people with disabilities should be the one thing that, despite our political preferences, we all agree on. It is just the right thing to do.