5 August 2009

Bring it on! Disabled people don't need positive discrimination

I found it rather depressing to read comments from some disability charities, criticising Scope for not reserving the post of chief executive for a disabled candidate. One, Mary Colley, the voluntary coordinator of learning difficulties charity Danda, went so far as to suggest that: "It would be difficult for a non-disabled chief executive to understand the needs of disabled people"

Surely, we have moved beyond the apartheid model, where it is held that the needs of disabled people can only be understood by other disabled people? Because taken to its logical conclusion, we would be saying that only a wheelchair user can understand other wheelchair users, only a blind person can relate to other blind people, etc ad infinitum. Society would then be broken up into lots of little, introspective groups of individuals who only want to communicate with other people just like them.

Now that the DDA makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate against a job candidate on the basis of an impairment, isn't it right that all the many talented applicants who happen also to be disabled, compete in a fair way with those who happen not to be?

Amarjit Raju, chief executive of Disability Direct, accuses Scope of traditionally having "a tokenistic approach to employing disabled people", but I suspect that anybody appointed to a position that they knew to have been specially reserved for a disabled person would feel very much "token". I applaud Alice Maynard, Scope's chair, for saying that their "priority is to find the right person for the job, and that person may or may not be disabled." The organisation wants to create an alliance between disabled and non-disabled people, and I suspect that most of us would endorse that as the sort of society we would like to live in, where our experiences as carers, friends, parents and colleagues are just as valid in enhancing quality of life and opportunity.

The truth is that every single one of us has faced some form of discrimination in our lives; each time we are rejected for a friendship, a sports team, a flatshare or a job, we experience the negative emotions associated with not being the chosen one. It is simply a part of life which we have to learn to deal with. Hopefully, it teaches us the valuable human quality of empathy, because that is what enables one person to understand the difficulties faced by another - not happening to share the same impairment.
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6 comments:

  1. Society in general is being weakened by positive discrimination. It prevents employers selecting simply on the basis of "best for the job".
    Employers select tools, machines, services, software, bank, premises etc on the basis of what will perform best for the company. Staff should be selected on the same basis. Whether disabled people are or are not the best for a job should be based on their capabilities, not their disabilities.
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  2. Caroline ChristieAug 6, 2009 04:11 AM
    I so agree with you Frances. I hate this whole modern culture of positive discrimination for whatever purpose - female mps etc, etc It is one of the ills of the modern world and breeds the worst sort of discrimination and negativity rather than encouraging inclusivity.

    All posts should go to the best possible candidate in every case. I personally would not ever want to be selected for any job on the basis that I was a woman rather than a man.
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  3. You are pre-supposing that all disabled people have the same access to education and the same opportunities in the employment market as anyone else and that this means a disabled person is able to compete on an equal footing when applying for a job like this.

    Did you or the other contributers here go through education as a disabled person? Have you or the other contributers here tried to compete in the job market as a disabled person with that education? Do you feel that at every stage you had precisely the same opportunities as anyone else and faced no prejudice that prevented you from advancing your career as you wished? If the answer to these questions is "yes" then I can assure you that you are in a very small minority.

    The needs of say a hearing impaired person may differ wholesale from those of a wheelchair user, but I suspect they will both share the same experience of prejudice and alienation that is experienced by disabled people on a daily basis, something which a non-disabled person can never truly understand.

    I would venture that SCOPE has a responsibility to show the world that, guess what, a disabled person is capable of running a large organisation and making it a success.

    I would invite yourself and your contributers to enlighten me as to how many of the top 100 FTSE companies currently have a disabled CEO. In your world where everyone has exactly the same opportunities as everyone else and faces no prejudice, I'm assuming there must be a fair few, particularly given that current wisdom is that 1 in 6 people have a disability.

    It's very easy to talk about judging people on capabilities, but you will find that (in general) those that do are not the people who have had to deal with the reality of being disabled and seeing these capabilities knocked back at every stage in their development. Herein lies the very reason why a large disability organisation like SCOPE must be run by a disabled person. You can never truly understand everything and weigh up all of the contributing factors unless you have lived through it yourself.

    I would be very interested to hear of Paul and Caroline's experiences of being disabled and how they feel this effected their career development.
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  4. Independent Living EditorAug 10, 2009 04:51 AM
    Hello Philip

    Interesting points, effectively made. But equally, your comments highlight many of the reasons why saying that you need to be disabled in order to understand the issues faced by a disabled person is way too simplistic.

    For example, I would suggest that the parent of a disabled child probably has a much better understanding of access to education than an individual who has become disabled in their 30s or 40s. Is that experience not a valid contribution that could be brought to a post such as this? I understand the point you are making that many disabled children may not have had the educational opportunities to make the most of their talents - but you don't have to be disabled to get a poor deal out of the education system, and I'm sure that you also know, or know of, many disabled individuals who have come through it successfully, and achieved a great deal.

    You may also like to consider how many CEOs of FTSE 100 companies are women? They make up 50% of the workforce, yet are conspicuously thin on the ground in top positions, despite more than 30 years of equal opportunities legislation. Black people? Similar situation.

    I would argue that the affluence of your family probably has more influence on how well you do in life - just look at the statistics on social mobility over the past decade or so.

    We ALL have to overcome obstacles in our lives, and all the time that any group says they need to be protected from competition in order to achieve anything, they are making themselves appear to be less able than others in society. I know too many intelligent, high-achieving people who happen to have a disability, to want "disabled people" to be perceived as victims in this way.
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  5. Philip B- you're in trouble! Whatever your disabilities, the prejudice you have encountered is almost certainly down to your hang-up that people with disabilities are the only ones that can understand prejudice.

    Your cryptic comment asking for Paul's and Caroline's experience of being disabled seems to come from bitterness - if I was to apply for the job at Scope, I would like to think I got it on ability rather than my disabilities!
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  6. It was interesting to read your observations and thoughts following Scope’s recent appointment of a new Chief Executive. You raise some valid points, but also we feel, fall into some of the traps set by the traditional critics of ‘political correctness.’

    Whilst we agree with you whole heartedly that people not capable of doing a job should not get such a post just because they are disabled, that debate is primarily a red herring, as I don’t believe anybody would really suggest such a thing. You make this point yourself.

    Positive discrimination is not about restricting the field to people with disabilities (your point about how this could break down into ever smaller and smaller categories is well made). It is about enabling access to people who clearly have the skills, but may lack the evidence through formal access to many educational advantages or career experiences that able bodied people have traditionally accessed better.

    In that respect it is in fact based on a post apartheid model, the opposite of what you claim, to redress decades of unequal social and educational access.

    The DDA may be bringing all this up to date, but it is only now beginning to overturn generations of inequality and will take decades for its real affects on access and equality to have real meaning and social impact.

    The reality is that societies often blame minorities for excluding themselves and seeking ‘special treatment’ when they complain, rather than take responsibility for failing to include them or attempt redress. This unfortunately feels like the tone of much of your content.

    We do completely agree with you that disability is so varied that insight is not confined to a defined concept of it that only a few people share. We agree especially with the conclusion in your blog that “Hopefully, it teaches us the valuable human quality of empathy, because that is what enables one person to understand the difficulties faced by another - not happening to share the same impairment.”

    The power of this hugely insightful observation though feels overshadowed by a misplaced anger in to the processes undertaken by SCOPE in their deliberations, the actual content of which we can only speculate on, as many have seemed too happy to do.
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