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The news about employment opportunities for people with disabilities has been almost uniformly good since the Covid-19 pandemic ended. Employment rates have consistently hit new highs as severe worker shortages compelled employers to aggressively recruit among marginalized groups of workers, including those with disabilities.
But a deeper dive into the employment data reveals that not all demographic groups of workers with disabilities have fared the same. Labor market gains for Black people with disabilities have been significantly smaller than those experienced by white people with disabilities, according to an analysis by the Kessler Foundation and the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability. The employment-to-population ratio for Black civilians with disabilities averaged only 23.2% from April 2021 to March 2022. That compares with 34.3% for non-Hispanic whites, a disparity of 11.1 percentage points. (The employment-to-population ratio measures the number of people employed plus those actively looking for work compared with the total population.)
That racial employment gap was even greater than it was for people without disabilities. Almost 75% of white individuals were employed by the end of March 2022, compared with 68.4% of Black individuals, a much narrower difference of 6.1 percentage points. “We know that there are racial disparities in terms of employment – period. It appears that if you add disability on top of that, you have the intersectional suppression of the employment rate,” says John O’Neill, PhD, Kessler’s Director of Disability Employment Research. “Many people would have predicted that to be the case but now we see it in the data.”
The deeper analysis of U.S. Census Bureau (USCB) numbers is funded by a grant from the (NIDILRR), part of the U.S. government’s Administration for Community Living. It is the same agency funding a $4.5-million grant to the Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research (CROR) at Shirley Ryan 吃瓜天堂91 to investigate ways to increase employment opportunities among people with disabilities. “It makes me wonder about our nation’s history of systemic racism and unconscious bias,” says CROR Director Allen Heinemann, PhD. “Being Black and having a disability appears to compound disadvantage.”
The finding has added significance given the fact that , according to the USCB, which added disability-related questions to its Survey of Income and Program Participation in the late 2000s. Among adults 40 and older, almost a third of Black adults reported having an activity-limiting health condition, compared to only 17.2% for Asian adults. The comparable figure for non-Hispanic whites was 27.4%. Disability-related hypertension was almost three times as common among Black adults (3.5%) as it was among non-Hispanic white adults (1.2%). Similarly, higher rates of Black adults reported that diabetes and arthritis limited their functioning.
The gap in employment among Blacks with disabilities is concerning to Namratha Kandula, MD, an internist and professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who is also an expert in health disparities among underserved populations. “The findings make me think differently about how social identities interact. To be both Black and have a disability may create additional risks in terms of potential discrimination or a lack of access to employment opportunities,” she says. “We need to do a lot more to understand people’s unique experiences and how our current systems exacerbate inequities for Black people with disability.”
People who belong to racial or ethnic-minoritized groups are often employed in lower-wage jobs or the gig economy, where they are less likely to have health insurance and other benefits, Kandula points out. That could contribute to a situation where people have less access to rehabilitation services and health-related leave, which are policies and benefits that could help them stay employed or return to work.
There are other structural and systemic reasons that Black Americans are employed at lower rates, which also affect those with disabilities, according to Claudia Gordon, Senior Accessibility Strategist at T-Mobile who spoke at a National Trends in Disability Employment (nTide) webinar in March 2023. Underperforming schools tend to be concentrated in poorer, minority neighborhoods, and fewer of their students go on to higher education, she noted. Gordon, the first Black deaf woman attorney in the U.S., told participants that she had to fight to go to college and then law school because people thought she wouldn’t succeed in those environments.
Compounding the disparities in educational opportunities, most jobs these days are posted on websites. Surveys by the Pew Research Center have found that U.S. adults with disabilities are less likely than those without disabilities to own a computer or a smartphone. Still, if the lower employment rates for Black people with disabilities was related only to under-resourced educational systems and less access to technology, one would expect Hispanic individuals with disabilities to have similar rates of unemployment. But that’s not what the data show. Employment of Hispanic Americans with disabilities strongly rebounded after the first 12-month period of the pandemic, and the gap with non-Hispanic white individuals narrowed. The employment-to-population ratio for Hispanic civilians with disabilities averaged 36% between April 2022 and March 2023, compared with 38% for whites and 27% for Blacks.
“When you dig a little deeper, the trends are disturbing,” says CROR’s Heinemann. “It reveals a huge untapped group of people with disabilities who want to work. We already knew that to some extent, but there’s been less progress for people from minoritized backgrounds. We need to redouble our efforts to document these disparities with accurate data so we can implement effective strategies to close these gaps.”