On February 12, 2009,
Vice President Joe Biden announced the appointment of a special assistant to
the president for disability policy. By selecting the associate director of
White House Office of Public Engagement, Kareem Dale, to this post, Obama
became the first president in United States’ history to have a special policy
advisor overseeing disability issues.
One of the key components
of Obama’s policy on disability is the effort to increase access to employment
for the disabled population. The White House website states:
President
Obama is committed to expanding access to employment by having the federal
government lead by example in hiring people with disabilities; enforcing
existing laws; providing technical assistance and information on accommodations
for people with disabilities; removing barriers to work; and identifying and
removing barriers to employment that people with public benefits encounter
With this statement, the
Obama administration has identified some important employment issues associated
with disability, but it seems to be focused only on bringing people with
disabilities into the labor force. Once they are in, people with disabilities
face a number of additional hurdles. The barriers identified by the
administration fall short of addressing how to retain this population in the
work force and enable a self-propelled professional growth.
What does it take to
succeed in one’s career? Evidence shows that the social skills of individuals
and their ability to integrate themselves into the work environment are
incredibly important. Social skills - such as making friends at the workplace,
ability to lead a team, facilitating decision making in large teams, conveying
confidence, etc. – all play a vital role in sustained professional growth.
Unfortunately, people who are severely disabled, like those who are blind,
often find it difficult to assimilate into the social atmosphere of their work
place with the same ease of their functionally able counterparts.
“There is no professional
growth without social skills,” explains Terri Hedgpeth, director of ASU’s Disability Resource Center. Hedgpeth has been blind her whole
life and had to learn how to socially interact with her sighted colleagues. For
instance, she learned to turn her head toward her interaction partner to mimic
eye contact. She learned to hear people’s bodily movements to assess what they
were communicating non-verbally.
Hedgpeth doesn’t want to
be offered any social leeway because of her disability, but strongly believes
in training individuals who are blind and visually impaired to learn the same
social skills as their sighted peers.
She laments the fact that currently there are no federal programs,
either vocational or academic, that train people who are visually impaired
about important social skills in a professional setting. Social training is
generally reserved for children and young adults who have a severe case of
tics, like body rocking or eye poking.
The social disconnect is
not limited to visual impairment and blindness alone. Social implications of
disabilities can be seen across the spectrum from physical disabilities like
quadriplegia to cognitive disabilities like Autism. The disabled population
faces social barriers due to their sensory, motor or cognitive dysfunction.
Overcoming this social barrier cannot happen overnight through “enforcement of
laws” as reported on the White House’s disabilities web page. This has to
happen through strong dedicated programs that study the social barrier to
employment in the disabled population and offer effective solutions (social
assistive aid, social education programs and co-education of disabled and non-disabled
children to encourage mutual learning of social skills, to name a few) to
reduce the consequences of social
disability.
The Americans with
Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990 by President George H. W. Bush and,
from then on, pretty much the same verbiage has followed in each successive
president’s agenda on disability employment. As a nation, we have been
successful in moving this segment of the population into the work force, but
still there is a large gap in their professional success. On a wage comparison
scale (data extracted from the 2008 American Community Survey questionnaires), the visually impaired
population in the United States make on an average 32% less than the general
population of the same age. The physically challenged population in the United
States makes 42% less. When one includes education level in these statistics,
the results are even more disappointing. People with visual disability, with
post graduate education, make 47% less than the average population with post
graduate education; people with physical disability with post graduate degrees
make 72% less than the general population with similar degrees.
Hedgpeth emphasizes the
point that people skills are the most
important tool for professional success. Unfortunately, social disconnect
is a repercussion of disabilities. It is important to train the disabled
population to circumvent their social disconnect, while we train the rest of
the population to understand and acknowledge this social barrier.
About the Author: Sreekar
Krishna is an engineering doctoral candidate
at ASU and a participant in CSPO’s PhD Plus
program.
