Making STEM More Inclusive of People with Disabilities
Feature Story
By Sara Frueh
Last update July 25, 2023
As she grew up navigating life in a wheelchair, Anjali Forber-Pratt encountered obstacles both in the physical world and in other people’s mindsets.
“As a young child going through public schooling and so forth, I was constantly faced not only with physical inaccessibility, in terms of accessing spaces, but also attitudinal inaccessibility,” she said.
Forber-Pratt recalled people questioning her decision to take an honors English class because they assumed that she would not be going to college. When she was drawn to an applied technology class that included a wind tunnel, she wasn’t allowed to enroll, and was informed that she wasn’t interested in science.
“Unfortunately, my story of those assumptions that were made is far too common for many individuals,” said Forber-Pratt, who went on to get her doctorate and now directs the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. “My disability is such an important part of who I am and became the driver of the types of research questions that I wanted to study as a scientist.”
Forber-Pratt was among the speakers at a summit hosted by the National Academies — the first of a series of events in June that examined how ableism in STEM can keep people with disabilities from engaging and thriving in these fields, and explored how to advance STEM by creating more inclusive environments.
Currently, people with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM occupations in comparison with their share of the general U.S. population, according to data from the National Science Foundation. STEM workers with disabilities also earn less than those without.
“We have to take head-on the ideas that people with disabilities are lesser, that we can’t, that we shouldn’t — and to attack the notions that including people with disabilities is just too complicated, is inconvenient, or even too expensive,” said Bonnie Swenor — planning committee chair for the summit and founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center — during the summit’s opening session. “It’s really beyond time that we reimagine STEM so that people with disabilities are included from the start — included as trainees, included as leaders. And that’s really what these conversations are all about — doing that not just because it’s the right thing to do, but doing that because it is good for science.”
National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, who also spoke at the summit’s opening, agreed. “For decades now, we’ve realized that if we don’t pull in the full talents of everyone in this nation — that includes women, that includes underrepresented minorities, and it includes people with disabilities — we certainly aren’t going to remain a science powerhouse,” she said. “And we aren’t going to have the innovation for the future that is actually going to drive the economy, address sustainability, and create the kind of future that we all want to build.”
Changing the culture, engaging more faculty and students
Speakers at the summit pointed to multiple ways that colleges and universities, agencies, and philanthropic organizations can make STEM environments more inclusive.
Karen Marrongelle, chief operating officer for the National Science Foundation, emphasized the importance of appreciating and strengthening the varied routes by which people can enter STEM fields. “We know now that many individuals’ pathways into STEM take twists and turns, and it’s rare that any two people’s looks exactly alike,” she said. “We have to affirm that, and we have to strengthen what those pathways are — to ensure that if someone needs to take some time off [or] if someone is getting into STEM not at 18 years old … that there is a way in.”
Solutions are also needed to allow students and researchers with disabilities to fully engage in their degree programs, said Marrongelle. “This means that labs have to be fully accessible, and field training sites — we need to reimagine those.” She stressed importance of culture change in STEM to value the unique perspectives and contributions of those with disabilities.
Key to shifting the culture is the use of inclusive hiring practices to ensure that people with disabilities are present in business and academic workforces, said Angela Lean, senior business program lead for Accessible Employee Experience at Microsoft. “Bringing different perspectives obviously will help change culture and drive change,” she said. She also urged businesses and individuals to create content that is more accessible, for example by using accessibility checkers in software. “That’s a very easy, actionable thing for folks to do on a daily basis.”
“A lot of what I would like to see change is embedded in student support [and] faculty support,” said Cassandra McCall, assistant professor of engineering education at Utah State University. That includes reaching out to the community to get more students with disabilities involved in STEM, and also engaging more faculty in efforts to create more inclusive classrooms. “A lot of times, if faculty aren’t already interested in this space as a research area, they tend to not be in this space at all,” she said.
Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, urged a fundamental shift away from the long-standing idea in American science that doing increasing amounts of research is always the best possible thing — that the goal is to have a big lab, produce more papers, and get more grant money. This approach leads to underpaid graduate students and postdocs, burnout, and the undervaluing of people who may take longer to read or listen to a research paper, he said. “Almost every bad thing about STEM is a readout of the fact that we’re trying to do too much science instead of doing better science.”
Alison Cernich, deputy director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, stressed that as efforts to make science more inclusive move forward, the most essential thing is to involve the people affected.
“Anything that we do, we need to start with the community of people with disabilities,” she said. “We’re not going to be effective if those voices are not part of it … The only way to do that is to meaningfully engage with the organizations and people who are wanting to be part of the STEM community and finding barriers, and then asking them, ‘How do we work with you to overcome those?’”
Watch the summit and four subsequent webinars that further explored the topic:
