Group Discussion Summary

Participants answered the following questions in small groups. Answers were recorded and are shared below. 

What barriers do women with disabilities face in academic STEM careers?

• Institutional Constraints
  • Some disability service centers are set up to help students but not faculty. Faculty often do not have access to or are unaware of a centralized office that addresses disability-related issues for faculty. They may be reluctant to ask their department chair or others who have roles in granting promotions and tenure.
  • Departments may be expected to pay for accommodations, instead of a centralized university office; if so, faculty with disabilities may refrain from requesting accommodations to ensure they are not considered a financial burden to their departments.
  • People who are approving accommodations for faculty may not be educated in disability rights and reasonable accommodations.
  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is/was unclear to faculty with autoimmune disabilities if they will be expected to come back to campus or otherwise put themselves at risk.
  • Academia is often inflexible with a rigid track for advancement.
  • Some units charged with providing accommodations to faculty focus on teaching and do not offer support for research, advising, service work, and other aspects of a faculty career.
  • Lab spaces can be hard to make accessible due to lack of space, high noise levels, availability of locations, or other factors.
  • Spaces for service animals to drink, eat, and relieve themselves are not always available.
  • Websites and technology often are not designed to be accessible.
  • Solutions for access are often reactive instead of proactive, which leaves people with disabilities perpetually needing to self-advocate to ensure equitable access.
  • Many policies are created from a minimum legal compliance perspective (How do we avoid getting in trouble?) rather than a justice perspective ("How do we ensure that we have an inclusive and accessible workplace?"). Compliance should be a floor rather than a ceiling.
• Biases
  • Some individuals assume that women with disabilities are incompetent or do not belong in academic positions. Merit and expectations are based on a biased system, where minorities aren’t always seen as part of a field or bringing valuable skills to the table.
  • People with invisible disabilities may feel a need to prove they actually have a disability or need accommodations.
  • People with disabilities are often asked to ensure a department is accessible, even if it isn’t in their job description and they don’t have the expertise.
  • Faculty are reluctant to use microphones because they assume they are loud enough or there aren’t hard of hearing individuals in the audience, thus requiring someone who is hard of hearing to request an accommodation.
  • Training on implicit and explicit biases, intersectional approaches, and other diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) areas is needed for everyone within academia.
• Individual Constraints
  • Women are often taught to avoid inconveniencing people, and people with disabilities are often made to feel like their needs create an inconvenience.
  • Women are often expected to do more work than others already, both in and out of the office (e.g., emotional labor, caretaking, family duties).
  • Imposter syndrome often causes women with disabilities to think they need to work harder than others or that they don’t deserve accommodations. 
  • Many academic researchers work long hours, while people with disabilities may not be able to do that either because of energy constraints or because of the time they need to spend on getting access to resources or on disability-related care.
  • People with disabilities often encounter the so-called disability tax where it takes them longer to complete tasks because of accessibility barriers. Institutions should find mechanisms to counter this as well as ensure equity for those who have a higher burden within academia.
  • Travel can create barriers for people with disabilities. In can be difficult to accommodate this. 
  • It is often difficult for faculty members with disabilities to get accommodations at conferences.

What are some strategies for addressing the barriers discussed earlier?

• Track how many faculty members have disabilities and address disability in campus climate surveys.. This step can lead to greater accountability for universities and departments. Keep in mind, however, that people may not disclose age-related disabilities and some may not even identify as having a disability. 
• Proactively work to promote disability inclusion. For example, at the University of Washington, within the Information Technology organization, multiple proactive practices are applied to ensure PDF documents are accessible, videos are captioned, and accessible technology is available to students, faculty and staff.
• Centralize services and funding for accessibility and accommodations. This saves time, cost, and risk by streamlining the process. This office could also be the unit tasked with encouraging the application of universal design to all campus offerings in order to make the entire campus more accessible and inclusive.
• Use universal design checklists to create institutional change that is equitable; include universal design when designing facilities, courses, IT, and facilities. 
• Adopt the social model of disability and consider disability-related issues when discussing department successes and conducting individual performance reviews.
• Create/update policies and procedures that support people with disabilities within departments that move beyond minimum compliance; it could include more funding and resources to support faculty requests.
• Promote more widespread knowledge and connections with the nationwide networks of disability service centers in order to share knowledge, resources, and best practices.
• Fund staff support to help ensure departmental websites, documents, videos, and course materials are accessible. 
• Provide training and education for human resources, faculty, support staff, and teaching assistants about their roles related to accessibility.
• Increase equity by providing more staff support, teaching release, and summer funding for people with disabilities.
• Offer opportunities for faculty members to learn ways to disclose their disabilities, negotiate accommodations, and build other self-advocacy skills.
• Consider removing the expectation of negotiation: Allow faculty and staff to be offered all the resources and accommodations available, and let them turn down what they don’t need.
• Provide a contingency fund to cover new challenges that arise unexpectedly.
• Encourage funding agencies to think about accessibility of the application process and provide the funding for disability accommodations into their published solicitation processes. 
• Increase awareness of NSF’s Facilitation Awards for Scientists and Engineers with Disabilities.
• Encourage universities to implement an institutional housework benefit for all faculty (see Housework Is an Academic Issue article).
• Promote a faster accommodation system; keep in mind that faculty often have to switch buildings, rooms, and labs quickly from quarter to quarter and don’t have the time to wait weeks for accommodations at each location.

How do we institutionalize flexibility gained during the pandemic and prepare for a post-pandemic world?

• Faculty and students should not be penalized if they must continue to work or learn remotely.
• Provide adequate training and support for faculty if they are expected to teach hybrid courses. Address how to make both versions of the class equivalent and accessible for students, while overburdening faculty.
• Post-pandemic, continue organizing hybrid conferences wherein both versions of the conference are equitable experiences.
• Consider ways to address issues surrounding working from home, including the case that women are often taxed with caregiving work at home.
• If there are any post-pandemic supplemental funds, advocate for their use for support staff and teaching assistants.
• Continue to have virtual or hybrid meetings, which are more inclusive of working parents, those with disabilities, and others. Record and caption meetings as appropriate so those who cannot attend or who take longer to process information can access them at a later time.
• Compensate faculty and staff have had to work more over the past year accordingly.
• Maintain increased ventilation and spacing in classrooms to prevent upticks in illness and allow for people to feel safer while on campus.

How can AccessADVANCE support you? What resources would be helpful?

• Consider developing an affinity group for women with disabilities in academia to support networking among women with disabilities in academia.
• Share suggestions for how to incorporate information about universal design, support and accommodations into onboarding processes for new faculty and staff. 
• Offer sessions and resources on job negotiations, disclosure, and self-advocacy to support women with disabilities pursuing and engaging in STEM faculty careers.
• Provide guidance on how to apply the concepts of universal design, accessibility, and inclusion to the specific context of faculty work, e.g. to faculty hiring/negotiation, resource allocation, space allocation, promotion/tenure review, work-life policies, and workload expectations.
• Develop and support the development of peer-reviewed articles with data and information on these topics to promote change in academia.
• Develop an information brief and/or training materials for administrators and department heads that addresses why more support—e.g, financial and other assistance—is needed for women faculty with disabilities. 
• Develop resources and strategies for encouraging departments and institutions to maximize the benefits of flexible and accessible remote work options—e.g., to reduce risk for those who cannot be vaccinated for COVID-19, to reduce transportation access barriers, to minimize exposure to environmental scents and chemicals, to improve communication when compared to situations where all/some participants are wearing masks, to increase opportunities to work asynchronously, to make it easier for some participants to adjust lighting within home environments as compared to offices, to allow viewing information on a computer screen rather than on a board across the room, to make it easier to adjust sound levels and connect hearing aids to computers, to make it possible to turn off the video and perform tasks that helps maintain focus, to engage in multi-modal ways (e.g., chat), to monitor how an individual is expressing/reacting, and to minimize crosstalk that interferes with productive discussions.