Disability is a common part of the human experience: the United Nations estimates that 16% of the world’s population is disabled, and a 2019 survey in the United States found that more than half of American adults aged 18-34 have at least one chronic illness.
Unfortunately, being disabled often means poverty. A recent report from the United States found that the poverty rate for people with disabilities is just over 25 percent, compared to less than 12 percent for people without disabilities. These rates are very similar in Canada, but the recently passed Canada Disability Benefit may help alleviate this situation.
One reason is that people with disabilities often lack access to good, well-paying jobs. Many countries have tried to address this issue by passing laws that protect people with disabilities from employment discrimination and ensure reasonable accommodations in the workplace. However, despite these laws, employment rates for people with disabilities around the world remain much lower than those for people without disabilities.
Researchers are trying to understand why these laws have not eliminated the employment gap for people with disabilities and what governments, organizations, and individuals can do to address this gap.
PROUD Project
We are part of a research team based at the University of Toronto called the PROUD Project, which is focused on understanding how people with disabilities overcome obstacles to find work.
To achieve this, we interviewed employees with disabilities, entrepreneurs with disabilities and managers of employees with disabilities. For this project, we only included workers with visible physical or sensory disabilities, who face different challenges than people with invisible disabilities.
We interviewed people in five developed countries: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Belgium. We wanted to find out whether different laws, cultures and physical environments affect disability and employment. Our more than 80 semi-structured interviews revealed several factors that enable people with disabilities to find work.
The United Nations estimates that approximately 16% of the world’s population has a disability. (Shutterstock)
What we discovered
Law is an important mechanism for supporting workers with disabilities: in the United States, many have made use of vocational rehabilitation programs (created by a 1973 law) to establish careers, while France has implemented quotas that require companies with 20 or more employees to identify 6% of their workforce as disabled or pay an annual penalty.
However, many companies do not meet their hiring quotas. Only 29% of companies met their obligations in 2021. Several interviewees pointed out that some companies have even explicitly decided to pay a fine instead of hiring disabled people. However, the existence of hiring quota laws forces companies to think about disabled workers. While many employers pay fines for not meeting hiring quotas, many also admitted that their annual audits made them think about the issue.
Perseverance and persistence were common themes in the interviews, with many participants describing themselves as “warriors,” some of whom had gone through dozens of interviews before ultimately securing the job.
Additionally, having formal and informal support networks was important to the interviewees. In the United States, vocational rehabilitation programs can facilitate this through counselors. Often parents, teachers, and other mentors encouraged persistence. Several participants mentioned that their parents had always treated them as “normal” and expected them to have a “normal” life, including their careers.
Access to transportation is also crucial to career success: Many of the participants we spoke to lived within walking or driving distance of their workplace, some took public transportation, and others had changed their mode of transportation to get to work.
An important step that governments can take to ensure people with disabilities can get to their destinations is to design and implement accessible public transport. Without the ability to travel, people with disabilities cannot get to work. For example, the UK’s Access to Work programme pays for disabled workers to travel by taxi to work, which means that people with disabilities can financially support themselves and their families.
Read more: How Canada can become more disability inclusive
Government Program Reform
In some countries, disability pensions prevent people with disabilities from working, and many participants spoke of the stress they feel when they decide to take the risk of working and potentially losing their pension.
Others still received some benefits but had to be very careful about the hours they worked. On the other hand, some participants had independent financial resources that were not subject to the government’s restrictive policies. The government needs to move away from viewing people with disabilities as a burden and providing them with minimal support, and move towards encouraging their contribution and participation in the community.
People with disabilities also need access to a quality education. In general, people with disabilities tend to have lower levels of education than the general population. However, the participants we interviewed had higher than average levels of education in all five countries.
In fact, many workers with disabilities were overqualified for their current jobs, suggesting that people with disabilities would need to have a higher level of education than people without disabilities to get the same jobs.
People with disabilities also have to contend with other barriers and preconceived notions about their capabilities. Fears, misconceptions and prejudices against people with disabilities act as barriers to professional participation.
Fear, misconceptions and prejudices against people with disabilities create barriers to professional inclusion. (Shutterstock)
A supportive workplace is key
Our project found that it is much easier for people with disabilities to find work in sectors, industries and companies with employers that are aware, supportive and proactive about hiring people with disabilities. For example, in all five countries, employees with disabilities were more likely to work in the not-for-profit or government sectors, where attitudes towards people with disabilities are likely to be more positive than in the private sector.
Again, France was an exception: the private sector employers we spoke to were enthusiastic about hiring people with disabilities: they recognised the contribution of employees with disabilities and expressed a desire to employ more workers with disabilities.
Read more: Why hiring people with disabilities is good business
Some French managers wanted to educate non-disabled employees and superiors about the benefits of employing disabled colleagues, and some argued that social prejudice could lead some qualified employees to avoid formal disability certification.
However, it is important to recognise that even for those with disabilities who were able to find work, significant challenges remained: some remained in the same role for which they were initially employed, with little or no career development, and others were only able to find work in disability-related occupations, even if their education, training and skills were tailored for other industries.
People with disabilities are capable, flexible, adaptable and creative. Governments and private companies must do more to include them in the workforce, or communities will miss out on the talented people they can contribute.