October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month or NDEAM. This article will answer the following questions:
What is National Disability Employment Awareness Month?
Why do we celebrate NDEAM in the US?
How can I participate?
Why do people with disabilities celebrate both NDEAM and Disability Pride Month (July)?
How can this year’s NDEAM theme (INCREASING ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY) actually be implemented in the workplace?
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was only founded in 1990, specifically says the following:
“No qualified individual with a disability shall, on the basis of disability, be subjected to discrimination in employment under any service, program, or activity conducted by a public entity”
Yet, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2019, “across all educational attainment groups, unemployment rates for persons with a disability were higher than those for persons without a disability.”
Additionally, only 19.3% of the disabled population was employed in 2019 compared with 66.3% of non-disabled people. – BLS
What does this mean for disability representation in the workplace?
It means that, regardless of whether or not companies are being actively discriminatory towards disabled job seekers, there is still a huge divide that needs to be addressed.