National Disability Employment Awareness Month
Yvette E. Pearson
October was National Disability Employment Awareness Month, which celebrates the contributions of workers with disabilities and highlights inclusive employment policies and practices.
Yvette E. Pearson is a globally recognized engineering education leader. She is vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Texas at Dallas; founder and principal consultant for the Pearson Evaluation and Education Research (PEER) Group; and host of the podcast Engineering Change. Pearson was born with cerebral palsy. Her mission is “to inspire, impel, and institutionalize change towards ubiquitous inclusion (UI) so that justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion become universal standards in engineering education and practice.”
This Q+A has been edited for length.
What does this month mean to you?
I like that this month brings attention to the importance of employment of people with disabilities. It’s not on a lot of people’s radar. But I want to get to the point where we’re thinking about this every month.
What would you most like your engineering colleagues to think about as part of their awareness?
Stop thinking about disability as abnormal, looking at disabilities with a deficit lens. There are still a lot of folks who think—especially when a person has an invisible disability—“If I provide you an accommodation, it’s creating inequity for everybody else.” No, it’s creating equity for the person with a disability. Some people still look at it as, “They’re trying to game the system, get an unfair advantage,” and that’s not true.
There also needs to be more awareness around different types of disabilities. When we have students with neuro-differences, for example, it’s harder for people to understand because they can’t “see” the challenges those students encounter.
With all the talk about diversity in engineering, how well do you think the field has done with diversity related to disability?
It’s still lagging. The unemployment rate of scientists and engineers with disabilities is more than twice that of those without disabilities. When we look at affirmative action plans for federal contractors, including many universities, we don’t often see disabled people represented in technical or faculty job groups; they are usually included in nontechnical, lower paying job groups. Data on graduates with disabilities is practically non-existent. When things aren’t measured, often [they] aren’t done in a meaningful, impactful way.
What are some of the top steps you recommend?
Recognize that “compliant” does not always mean accessible. For optimal accessibility, we need more emphasis on user-centered universal design, both in the practice of engineering and in engineering education. We must include the voices of stakeholders—designers, professors, students, researchers, end users, and research participants—with a range of disabilities, and we need to teach future engineers to consider constraints related to accessibility (physical, sensory, or otherwise) in their designs just as they do with cost [and] safety. Doing so can actually improve safety and life cycle costs.
Disability must be front and center—along with race, ethnicity, gender, and other identities (including intersectional identities)—in DEI conversations and in strategies for improving DEI in education and employment.
What are some of the biggest barriers to success in employment of engineers with disabilities?
Focusing on the perception of what disabled people can’t do instead of what we can do. If we could change that, we’d be taking a giant step.
What does ubiquitous inclusion look like to you?
Inclusion is ubiquitous when it becomes the norm to have a culture and climate in which differences are valued and respected. It’s not focusing just on inclusion, but also on having foundations of justice and equity that help create [that] culture.
Why is it important to ensure that disability is part of the DEI conversation?
Disability can happen to anybody at any time. The question that I like to ask is, “If it was somebody you cared about, how limited would you want their opportunities to be?” If people recognize that it truly could happen to anyone, then it opens their eyes to the possibilities as opposed to the limitations.
We always say engineers are problem solvers. The part we omit is that engineers solve problems for and—if we’re doing it well—with people. We cannot effectively solve problems for—and with—our heterogeneous society with homogeneous problem solvers. Roughly 25 percent of adults in the US identify as having disabilities. Excluding [them] means that you’re excluding a large population from [developing] solutions.
I’m a wheelchair user, I can’t open one of my hands, and I’ve lost significant mobility in one of my arms. I solve problems just to navigate life day to day; most disabled people do. Why wouldn’t we want that kind of problem-solving capability in our classrooms, engineering firms, and research labs?
Photo courtesy of Sarah Wall
National Hispanic Heritage Month
Yvonne Santiago
National Hispanic Heritage Month was September 15–October 15. It recognizes the history, culture, and contributions of Hispanic Americans.
Ivonne Santiago is an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), with experience in community engagement, water quality, and water and wastewater treatment. She helps to find innovative engineering solutions and improve people’s well-being through an understanding of the balance between sustainability, social equity, entrepreneurship, community engagement, and leadership. Santiago is currently co-PI of UTEP’s NSF-funded Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program, fostering Hispanic doctoral students for academic careers; the Department of Education (DOE) grant-funded STEMGrow program to encourage Latinx students and students with disabilities to pursue STEM careers; and the DOE grant-funded Yes She Can! program, which provides support and mentoring to female Hispanic pre-college students. She is also Co-PI in the NSF Engineering Research Center for Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification (ASPIRE).
This Q+A has been edited for length.
Can you summarize your research?
My main area [is] equity—in access to safe drinking water, transportation, and education. Even though [these areas] seem very different, they’re important for social mobility. So without safe drinking water, you don’t have health; without health, you can’t work or thrive. Without access to transportation, you don’t have access to education, health, or jobs. And education is a key component in social mobility.
My main focus is to train underrepresented minorities. So the students involved in those research projects are Hispanic students.
What makes you passionate about this work?
Number one, my own experience [as a] Hispanic female engineer. I always wanted opportunities to grow. I didn’t need 10,000 opportunities; I needed one.
And the biases. There’s a psychiatrist who says the body keeps a score of everything that happens to us. And my way of dealing with those scores is to become an advocate for those who are still shy.
Then, to see the potential in our student population. At UTEP, we are 85% Hispanic. I see the skills that the students have. They don’t realize how valuable they are. Whenever I go out of El Paso, I see how our students could fit and provide a point of view that is so important in engineering and STEM.
What are some of the most memorable aspects of your work?
[My] biggest satisfaction is after I have worked with a high school student and then I’m walking the [university] hallways and I see the student.
I’ve worked a lot with study abroad programs [to] provide experiential opportunities. [It] helps our Hispanic students to see how what they learn in the classroom can be taken to their communities and other communities around the world. I have [worked in] Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. In Colombia, we’re designing a water treatment system for an indigenous community. I have worked in these programs with about 130 students, and I can tell you that it’s 100% retention. I have not met a student that participated in these opportunities that dropped [out], because they have become aware that what they’re learning in the classroom has practical applications and can change people’s lives.
In other engineering fields, you don’t see the person you serve, but [in civil engineering] we do. We see the people who are drinking the water. For faculty it’s the same. To see the success of the students is the biggest reward.
What are the biggest challenges for recruiting and retaining Hispanic engineering students?
It has to be a concurrent approach. The institutions need to make it part of their mission and vision and take the tangible steps required. But those initiatives are only as successful as the individuals within the institution make them.
We’re recognizing as well that our underserved populations have financial needs. We can’t expect them to come to the lab as a volunteer and then go work at Taco Bell because they need income. That will always be a challenge that we need to address as researchers. We must support our students not just in their careers but also financially.
What else needs to happen to address those challenges?
Rock the boat. I know it’ll be difficult, but you have to speak up. You cannot stay silent. You cannot be on the sidelines. Every faculty, researcher, member of academia needs to speak up.
When another person that doesn’t look like me is advocating for people like me, it’s more powerful. [Non-marginalized voices] need to be heard. You can help greatly to increase the sense of belonging that we all must have at the university.
Photo courtesy of UTEP