Before You Talk Of Inclusion at Work, Fix Your Bias Against Persons With Disabilities

Written by: Ammara Qaisar

Today, about 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability. Yet, we continue to live in a world that looks at disability as an anomaly, something rare or atypical that is best operating at the margins of our imagination. This can also be seen in abundance in the widespread problem of bias against persons with disabilities in workplaces.

Unsurprisingly, and despite the law (The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016) mandating employers not to discriminate against people with disabilities in any employment practice, work remains a key area of discrimination for the community.

The article looks at some of the challenges people with disabilities face in employment in terms of interpersonal and organizational barriers. It also suggests ways in which employers can address these challenges to make workplaces more inclusive and accommodating.

Attitudinal Barriers And Ignorance Causing Hindrances to Inclusion at Work 

As a marginalised group, people with disabilities continue to have a lower employment rate and are also more likely to be underemployed. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to non-disabled folks, people with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed. Once employed, people with disabilities continue to face many challenges due to how those without disability understand and perceive disability in society.

When it comes to hiring people with disabilities, the most frequent concerns of employers are about job performance or qualifications.

According to a 2011 study of enterprises known to be resistant to complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act’s employment provisions, workers and job seekers with disability often cited employer attitudes and workplace discrimination as barriers to acquiring or keeping a job.

Many respondents felt that employers believed that a worker with a disability ‘‘doesn’t pull his own weight,’’ ‘‘can’t do the job 100%,’’ or ‘‘might not have the same capacity’’ as other workers, which, actually, wasn’t true. But ignorance in the matter perpetuated the belief that it was true.

Thus, bias against persons with disabilities and stereotypes due to ignorance become a barrier to the hiring and retention of workers with disabilities. Usually, employers haven’t successfully exposed themselves to employed and accommodated workers with disabilities performing their jobs as well as anyone else or to success stories from other employers.

This lack of knowledge on the employers’ part results in reliance on stereotypes of people with disabilities as poor job performers, an erroneous belief that people with disabilities are often absent from work, and general social discomfort around workers and job applicants with disabilities, translates to discrimination and unfair treatment.

In terms of the words or phrases we habitually use to communicate, ignorance also makes language a site of disability discrimination.

When we use words such as “lame,” “dumb,” “moron”, “retarded,” “crippled”, “blind,” “deaf,” “idiot,” “imbecile,” “maniac,” “nuts,” and “psycho,” we not only stigmatize the already marginalized but also cause internalization of harmful biases about disability.

When we verbally describe things, experiences, and people around us, we are also attaching value to them, and that value affects how we interact with each other. Even though the intention may not be to belittle or insult, these words imply that having a disability makes a person ‘less than’.

Implicit Biases while Implementing Inclusion at Work 

Another significant factor keeping talented people with disability from the workplace is implicit or unconscious bias – the process of associating stereotypes or attitudes toward categories of people without conscious awareness.

Unconscious bias against persons with disabilities appears to be higher than any other social group. In fact, according to Employers Network For Equality & Inclusion, U.K., over one in three people show an unconscious bias against those with a disability, higher than levels of bias based on gender or race.

In a 2019 research study by the Centre for Research on Work Disability Policy, Canada, 76% of respondents showed an implicit preference for people without disabilities, compared to nine per cent for people with disabilities.

In these cases, employers often make workplace decisions without being conscious of how they are doing it. They automatically come to depend on rules of thumb informed by stereotypical assumptions about people with disabilities.

Implicit biases don’t just come out of thin air – they’re shaped by our life experiences, people’s attitudes around us, culture, and the media. The society we live in has operated by invisibilizing people with disabilities.

Workplace culture, just like the society, has been created in the image of people without disability, it is hardly a surprise that the policies, infrastructure and language used doesn’t take the needs of people with disabilities into account.

The subsequent lack of provisions such as convenient scheduling, assistive technology, accessible equipment, access to convenient transportation, etc., has commonly caused employers, colleagues and supervisors to look at reasonable accommodations. These accommodations are a necessity for people with disability to be on par with those without disability (as is their right), as ‘special treatment’.

Inclusion at Work and Interpersonal Barriers

Research shows that policies, procedures, language, and larger systems in the workplace work in tandem with interpersonal mechanisms to create patterns of discrimination. These discriminatory and recurring patterns give rise to inequalities like job segregation, unequal promotion opportunities, and resistance in providing reasonable accommodation.

Interpersonal mechanisms operate by transforming coworkers’ and supervisors’ beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions of disability into differential behaviour observed in routine interactions between workers with disabilities and their coworkers and supervisors. Among these, marginalization, fictionalization, and harassment have the most common and widespread occurrence.

Marginalization operates through exclusion, avoidance, stilted interaction, and staring that render workers with disabilities invisible and make them feel like objects of curiosity and rob them of their dignity. When workers routinely experience marginalization in the workplace, they remain “outsiders in the workplace”, causing workers with disabilities to feel rejected and devalued.

In a 2006 research study conducted in the United States on mechanisms of disability discrimination in large organizations, nearly all the interviewees experienced or were aware that other workers with disabilities had experienced marginalization in the workplace.

Workers with disabilities, particularly those with visible or work-related injuries, reported being routinely avoided by peers and sometimes even by their supervisors. Extreme discomfort displayed by coworkers and supervisors served to exacerbate the already present sense of stigma often accompanying disability status in the workplace. In extreme situations, discomfort turned to “distrust, dislike, and even a sense of being “hated”.

For example, one man with a disability described his relationship with his coworkers as “pretty nonexistent. I don’t interact. I walk past them without talking and vice versa. I have a solitary workspace and a very solitary job.”

The research also showed decision makers’ at work encouraging and tolerating the use of physical or spatial segregation for “hiding” or “making invisible” employees with disability, inevitably leading to job segregation. Usually, a few token people with disabilities were hired to say, “We hire the disabled”, and then these employees were physically segregated “in the backroom”. This physical ‘dumping’ of employees with disabilities worked to keep them at the margins of the workplace.

The limited social networks due to this marginalization greatly hamper the career advancement potential of those with disabilities. In fact, fewer social connections across organizational networks imply a suboptimal career progression for those with a disability.

Harassment of people with disability in the workplace also operates as an interpersonal mechanism of discrimination. The barrage of jokes, comments, insensitive questions, innuendo, and insensitive remarks, by coworkers and supervisors who are ‘just kidding’ often leave workers with disabilities feeling they must continually navigate a hostile work environment while contributing to the larger problem of bias against persons with disabilities.

As a woman with systemic lupus erythematosus, who reported being routinely teased at work, explained, “I came in one day and my face was all broken out and the one guy (who was always teasing me) said: ‘Oh God, she looks like the Lone Ranger.’”

As mentioned above, participants in the research also routinely encountered one or more false characterizations, or “fictional identities,”‘ which were dissonant with their view of themselves. For instance, workers with disabilities were automatically considered “slow, incapable of keeping up,” “slow learners,” “stupid,” “of low or limited intelligence,” or “not mentally capable.”

A worker with a back condition reported being, “…treated like an imbecile. People are very strange about disabilities. They immediately assume that you have a severe brain problem along with whatever else is wrong with you.”

When the negative, stigmatizing impact of having a disability is coupled with fictionalization, a cycle of discrimination appears to develops.

Indeed, people with disabilities fictionalized as incompetent or helpless came to be routinely denied a chance to prove they can do a job effectively, along with the opportunities afforded their peers without disability. Most promotions that do occur are usually inconsequential and lack substantial gains in salary, status, autonomy, and responsibility.

In fact, nearly one-half of the individuals in the mechanisms-of-disability-discrimination research believed that they were overqualified for their current jobs and aspired to be promoted beyond their current grade level. Regardless of their actual abilities, talents, and skills, people with disabilities were socially constructed as “liability workers” who couldn’t compete with their peers without disabilities.

According to the interviewees, the rules of the merit system were routinely circumvented to promote candidates considered “abled,” while candidates considered “disabled,” regardless of actual abilities, were routinely bypassed or discouraged from taking promotions. As one worker explained, “They play games when they want to reach someone [else on the eligible list]. They tell you the job is very difficult, [that] it’s terrible, and [that] you have to work a lot of overtime.”

Another focus group study from 2008 published in the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal found that people with disabilities were primarily employed in entry-level and semi-skilled positions. The same people could not or did not move on from their roles because their employers expressed productivity concerns or because they thought people with disabilities would be ‘comfortable enough’ in their current positions.

Similarly, employers and decision-makers can legitimize the differential treatment of workers with disabilities and the resulting disparate outcomes. The embedded pattern of inequality creates a loop of discriminatory practices – since biases and ignorance lead employees to not hire people with disabilities, they prevent themselves from being exposed to people with disabilities, which can challenge their flawed beliefs about them.

The Way Forward to Fix the Bias Against Persons with Disabilities 

“Companies that champion disability inclusion significantly outperform their peers across key financial indices including revenue, net income, profit margins and shareholder returns,” Ted Kennedy, Jr. Disability rights attorney and Board Chair, the American Association of People with Disabilities.

There are plenty of ways to try and change policies and practices and make workplaces more accessible. From making facilities infrastructurally more accessible, creating flexible HR policies, restructuring jobs to suit the person with a disability (not the other way around), and providing written job instructions, transportation accommodations and modified equipment.

Besides, companies can also work towards having flexible work schedules, telecommuting, and redesign workstations ergonomically.

Coming to unconscious bias, even though it is developed and maintained by the brain’s automatic sorting process, there are ways to mitigate against its effects and take action to change attitudes and reduce inequalities for people with disabilities.

An important way of challenging attitudinal barriers while also addressing bias against persons with disabilities, requires hiring managers to be educated about the myths and realities of employing people with disabilities. Managers must be educated and sensitized to the realities of working with persons with disabilities to reduce bias. 

In a survey of Fortune 500 companies (1991), it was found that greater exposure to people with disabilities is associated with more positive attitudes towards them. For example, respondents from high exposure organizations believed that disability wasn’t associated with higher absenteeism or lower career advancement. Respondents from these organizations were also more likely to mention working from home and buddy systems to help people with disabilities.

A person-centered approach that considers each and every person in the group as an individual, looking at what each person can benefit from, regardless of disability, to perform their best, can also help in creating an inclusive workforce that taps the hidden talents of people with disabilities.

Conclusion

Only by acknowledging and removing barriers can organizations ensure that they hire inclusively and not conveniently. Having a fully inclusive and accessible hiring strategy as well as an in-work environment leads to a better candidate experience and richer talent in the pipeline while removing bias against persons with disabilities.

As H.R. professionals, Vassilis Chouliaras and Anna-Maria Economou have said, “It’s not about hiring for the sake of it. We need to think about what happens after hiring, too. To retain our employees, we should make sure that we provide them what they need to be successful at work.”

About the author: Ammara is a second year student at the Lady Shri Ram College for Women, majoring in Sociology and minoring in Journalism. 

All images have been used for representative purposes only. 

Ungender Insights is the product of our learning from advisory work at Ungender. Our team specializes in advising workplaces on workplace diversity and inclusion. Write to us at contact@ungender.in to understand how we can partner with your organization to build a more inclusive workplace.