The disability community represents more than a billion people worldwide, and more than a quarter of U.S. adults self-identify as disabled. So why does the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report the employment rate of persons with disabilities in the U.S. at 23.1% as opposed to the non-disabled employment rate of 65.4%?
The answer to that isn’t easy. It’s born from a long history of systemic bias, misinformation, and even call-backs to “ugly laws,” which were laws that prohibited the public participation to those who did not represent particular societal expectations. For hundreds of years, people with disabilities were falsely assumed to be unable to perform work and therefore were excluded from many career opportunities.
