A group of researchers from Rutgers and Syracuse Universities sent résumés and cover letters from well-qualified fictional applicants in response to more than 6,000 advertised accounting positions. One-third disclosed that the applicant had a spinal cord injury; another third disclosed the presence of Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism; while the final third did not mention a disability at all. Those specific disabilities were chosen because they would not impact a person's ability to effectively perform the duties of an accountant, thus ruling out any productivity-based explanations for differences in employer responses.
The fictional applicants with disabilities received 26-percent fewer expressions of employer interest than those without disabilities, with little difference between the two types of disability, according to the resulting paper, The Disability Employment Puzzle: A Field Experiment on Employer Hiring Behavior, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass.
The researchers expected to find some evidence of discrimination, but didn't anticipate "the magnitude of the effect," says Mason Ameri, a Ph.D. candidate with the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J., and one of the authors of the paper. Half of the resumes portrayed a novice accountant, and half portrayed an experienced one. Ameri was particularly alarmed to discover the more-experienced disabled applicants were 34-percent less likely to receive a call-back from potential employers than their non-disabled counterparts.
"We created trail blazers with outstanding, robust profiles," says Ameri. "That raises the question of how much experience is enough to supersede disability -- and I would argue there may never be enough."