2007-12-18 - 3:23 p.m.
Last month I went to a recruiting session at the Chicago branch of Goldman Sachs. I had gotten a random email about it through some UIC listserv and decided to check it out. There were people there from Goldman of course and also Merrill Lynch and Pepsico. It was oddly similar to recruiting events I remember from my back in Harvard days in the mid-90s (well, except Pepsi probably wouldn�t have been there � there was an odd absence of companies that made actual products; it was mostly investment banks and management consultants).
I think I was a little old for the event. I know the routine � companies want to take you on as a summer associate to dazzle you with a high salary and great perks in the hopes that you�ll stay down the line as a full-time employee. That�s great, it really is. But it�s really a bit late in my own game to switch from an academic to a corporate track. And it�s been a while since I last worked in a field similar to the investment banks at the event. I was at Lehman Brothers for a bit, but it was in retail sales and when I was 19 � 14 years ago.
However, there were many eager and hungry younger people there, still in college or new graduates. And here�s the thing: they all had disabilities. Some were visible (wheelchair-users, little people, blind folks), some were not (I can only imagine � deafness, schizophrenia, Crohn�s?). The event was specifically targeted to recruit people with disabilities. Several of the recruiters themselves had disabilities (some quite serious) to show that there were already people with disabilities who were successful at these companies.
Skeptics might say that the companies recruiting were just trying to increase their �workforce diversity� by hiring people with disabilities. Well, maybe they were. But the entire understanding that disability is in fact a part of diversity is a relatively recent revelation. I remember when a student group I was in at Brown for people with disabilities was asked to speak to another group examining diversity. We were initially quite surprised. Was disability really a part of �diversity�? Then we realized that our life experiences were indeed different and this is the true meaning of diversity.
While I don�t have any direct experience (not having a disability at the time), I don�t imagine there were recruiting sessions targeting people with disabilities in the mid-90s. There may indeed have been disability �job fairs� featuring the likes of McDonald�s and telemarketing places,, but certainly not recruiting for prestigious firms. In fact you generally didn�t see any students with visible disabilities in the pre- or early-ADA days before social inclusiveness also started to be expanded to people with disabilities. I think education for people with disabilities was limited to learning practical life skills and such limited things as how to flip burgers.
There also seems to have been a limited concept in the past that people with disabilities even could participate in the workforce. I still see some of this thinking now. When a random telephone survey called me, he took my demographic information by asking if I were a homemaker, employed full-time, employed part-time, were a student, or were disabled. I replied that I was disabled and also employed part-time and also a student. This caused him some difficulty. Apparently if you checked �disabled�, it turned off the other boxes.
I�ll leave you with this image from the recruiting session, one that I found quite touching. A young blond guy using a wheelchair, probably a recent college graduate, asked a question about what sort of responsibilities he could expect on the job. A simple query really. But in his voice was all the hope and dreams and fear and nervousness of being 22 and looking for your first job. It occurred to me that this is the same feeling many young people beginning their independent lives have. But for a long time, this sort of start was out of the question for young people with disabilities.
The same things everyone else gets. Isn�t that the goal? Props to Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch and Pepsi for understanding that disability is indeed diversity and offering this.
� 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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