NCDJ Director Kristin Gilger quoted in HuffPost article on disability discrimination in the workplace

How employers weed disabled people from their hiring pools
NCDJ Director Kristin Gilger discusses job description language in a recently published HuffPost article by Wendy Lu. The image shown above is a screenshot of Wendy Lu’s HuffPost piece with the headline “This Is How Employers Weed Out Disabled People From Their Hiring Pools.”

Job listings that discourage people with disabilities from applying are prevalent across professional industries, from journalism and news media to finance and higher education. Not only do these job descriptions discourage candidates with disabilities from applying to jobs for which they are qualified, but they also exacerbate the larger problem of people with disabilities being underemployed in full-time work.

Kristin Gilger, a senior associate dean at the Cronkite School and our director here at the NCDJ, is quoted in a recent HuffPost article discussing why these job descriptions are problematic and how they can be changed to attract a more diverse pool of candidates. The article was written by Wendy Lu, a journalist and disability rights advocate.

Click here to read Lu’s article on disability discrimination in the workplace.

ASU student explores how disability is talked about on Twitter

The Twitter hashtag #AblesAreWeird highlights the strange things that people do and say to people with disabilities. Image: text that says "AbledsAreWeird" appears against a solid blue background.
The Twitter hashtag #AbledsAreWeird highlights the strange things that people do and say to people with disabilities. Image: text that says “AbledsAreWeird” appears against a solid blue background.

Adam Schmuki, a linguistics graduate student at Arizona State University, studies the language and narratives people use on Twitter to refer to disability. A wheelchair user himself, Schmuki became interested in the subject earlier this year when he came across the hashtag #AbledsAreWeird. The hashtag gained popularity among Twitter’s disability community in late March as a way to normalize people with disabilities, who are often regarded by outsiders as “other.”

Click here to read more about Adam Schmuki’s research on language used to discuss disability on Twitter.

Curious to learn more about disability and language? Check out our disability language style guide, which is available in both English and Spanish.

Amy Silverman on the Challenges of Updating Our Disability Language Style Guide

Journalist and NCDJ board member Amy Silverman discusses the complexities of disability terminology and opens up about her experience updating our Disability Language Style Guide, a task she calls “one of the toughest assignments of my career.”

Read Amy Silverman’s blog post “Beyond the R-Word.”

Click here to download the 2018 NCDJ Disability Language Style Guide as a PDF.

disability language