[nfbcs] Fake Cover Letters Expose Discrimination Against Disabled

[John G Heim]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/upshot/fake-cover-letters-expose-discrimination-against-disabled.html

I think I have talked on this list about wanting to commission a study 
similar to the one mentioned in this article except with a blind 
applicant  applying for IT jobs. The study has people with spinal 
injuries and Asperger's Syndrome applying for accounting jobs. They 
found disabled applicants were 26% less likely to get a call back. Of 
particular interest are some of the comments.

"Given two candidates of roughly equal qualifications the rational 
decision would be to hire the one without disabilities. It's going to be 
less expensive, on average . [...] So statistically, a disabled job 
applicant would need to be sufficiently better qualified for the job to 
overcome the disability to be the 'correct' choice."

Long time readers of this list will know I've speculated about this 
effect for years. My guess is that this factor is much greater for blind 
applicants than it is for the types of disabilities in the study. A 
blind person does, in fact, have greater challenges to over come. But I 
suspect that even worse is the lack of understanding about just how much 
a blind technologist can do. A perspective employer once flatly refused 
to interview me when she saw that I was blind. She essentially accused 
me of faking my resume and simply would not believe a blind person could 
use a computer.