Accommodation data and rates
To assess how accommodations may help to reduce these employment and earnings gaps we turn to data from the 2012, 2019, and 2021 Current Population Survey Disability Supplements (CPS). In these supplements, employees were asked “Have you ever requested any change in your current workplace to help you do your job better? For example, changes in work policies, equipment, or schedules.” If yes, employees were asked what types of changes they had requested, and whether the request was fully or partially granted. Here we assess both any type of accommodation, and an accommodation based on “new or modified equipment.” Note that “new or modified equipment” is a broader category than assistive technology, since the equipment may not be specifically designed to address a disability; as we will see, however, employees with disabilities were more likely than employees without disabilities to request and be granted new or modified equipment, so it is very likely that much of this equipment is assistive technology. We do not know if the accommodation was made for a new or existing employee. The disability measure is based on the same six questions used in the ACS, identifying four impairment types and two activity limitations. The 2012, 2019, and 2021 supplements have sample sizes of 54,113, 43,167, and 40,498 respectively, including 2,092, 1,740, and 1,664 employees with disabilities respectively.
Table 2 shows that in 2012, 12.7% of employees with disabilities requested accommodations, and 10.2% had these requests fully or partially granted (column 1). These numbers each went up slightly in 2019 and 2021, so that 15.1% requested accommodations and 12.4% had them granted in 2021 (column 5). These increases between 2012 and 2021 are significant at the p<.10 level (column 7). Among employees without disabilities, the requested and granted accommodations in 2012 were just over half the rates among employees with disabilities (column 2), while these figures went down significantly by 2021 (columns 6 and 8).
Broken down by disability type, granted accommodations were highest among those with cognitive (12.1%) or mobility (13.0%) impairments in 2012 (column 1). This figure increased significantly by 2021 to 19.0% among employees with cognitive impairments, and increased non-significantly to 14.4% among employees with mobility impairments (column 5).
Turning to equipment-based accommodations, 4.2% of employees with disabilities requested such accommodations in 2012 and 3.3% had them granted in full or part (column 1). The numbers also increased slightly (but not significantly) to 4.8% and 4.1% in 2021 (column 5). As with accommodations in general, employees without disabilities saw a significant decline in equipment-based accommodation requests and grants from 2012 to 2021.
The rate of equipment-based accommodations does not vary substantially by disability type. Employees with mobility impairments were the most likely to receive such accommodations in both 2012 (4.0%) and 2021 (5.0%)(columns 1 and 5). The likelihood of such accommodations increased slightly across all disability types, especially among people with cognitive impairments (2.0% in 2012 to 4.4% in 2021). This suggests that technological advances may have particularly benefited people with cognitive impairments.
How do these accommodations vary by occupation? Table 3 presents an occupational breakdown of the percent who were granted accommodations, averaged across all three years. Among employees with disabilities, those doing personal care excluding childcare and home care were the most likely to receive any accommodations (27.3%), followed by those doing health support excluding diagnosis and technicians (23.2%)(column 1). Farming/ranching managers were the least likely to receive any accommodations (0.8%). The accommodation rate was higher among employees with disabilities than among those without disabilities (column 2) in every occupation except for construction managers, food prep excluding cooks, installation/repair, and farming/ranching managers.
Equipment-based accommodations were most likely for employees with disabilities in health support excluding diagnosis and technicians (13.1%), computer/math (12.1%), and administrative assistants (11.0%). Several occupations had no instances of equipment-based accommodations for employees with disabilities: childcare services, laborers/packagers/movers, maids, and farming/forestry/fishing.
Accommodations and employment outcomes
In contrast to prior literature which focuses on assessing accommodations at the individual level, here we use occupation-level measures that reflect the potential availability of accommodations in different occupations, and see how these measures relate to employment outcomes for people with disabilities over the past decade. We assess three outcomes:
- Disability employment growth: Percentage change in total number of people with disabilities employed in a given occupation, measured as ((year 2 disability employment)/(year 1 disability employment) - 1)*100
- Disability representation change: Change in percentage of people within an occupation who have a disability, measured as (((year 2 disability employment)/(year 2 total employment)) - ((year 1 disability employment)/(year 1 disability employment)))*100
- Disability pay gap change: Change in disability pay gap, measured as the difference between the disability coefficients predicting ln(hourly pay) in year 1 and year 2. For each year, ln(hourly pay) was regressed on the control variables listed in Table 1, plus disability interacted with occupational dummies in order to get an occupation-specific disability pay gap in each year.
For all three outcomes, we combined CPS data for all 12 months in the calendar year of the relevant disability supplement (2012, 2019, and 2021). We tested two different occupational coding systems with different levels of detail: one that included 137 occupations which each had at least five employees with disabilities responding to the accommodations question in 2012, and a broader code that included 42 occupations which each had at least 14 employees with disabilities responding to the accommodations question in 2012. The second occupational coding system is used in results presented in Tables 3 and 4, but results were similar between the two coding systems.
As seen in Table 4, occupations in which employees with disabilities had more accommodations in 2012 also had significantly greater disability employment growth in 2012-2019 and 2012-2021 (column 2). There is also a positive correlation between equipment-based accommodations in 2012 and disability employment growth in 2012-2021 (column 3). Both results are consistent with the idea that a higher accommodations rate favored employment growth among people with disabilities.
The above results may simply reflect greater employment growth in general in more accommodating occupations, but we also find a significant positive correlation between the disability accommodations rate in 2012 and the change in disability representation in an occupation. A positive correlation also exists between this outcome and equipment-based correlations, but this is not statistically significant.
A different story emerges with respect to changes in pay gaps. While the accommodations rate in 2012 is positively linked to improvements (i.e., reductions) in the disability pay gap in 2012-2019, the correlation is significantly negative when looking at the 2012-2021 period. It is possible that accommodations help draw in lower-skill workers who contribute to greater disability pay gaps. The pattern indicates that accommodations were linked to greater pay disparities in the 2019-2021 pandemic period, reflecting greater difficulties for workers with disabilities who managed to hang onto their jobs in the pandemic.
Do the potential effects of accommodation availability vary by type of disability? Table 4 reports similar correlations for 2012-2021 changes in employment growth and disability percent in occupation for people with hearing, vision, cognitive, and mobility impairments. As can be seen, the only significant correlation is a positive one, indicating that people with cognitive impairments had greater employment growth in occupations where they received more accommodations in 2012. All of the correlations with equipment-based accommodations, however, do not reach statistical significance.
These data are generally consistent with the idea that disability accommodations help increase employment growth for people with disabilities, and for people with cognitive impairments in particular. To probe the results, we tested whether there were differential effects associated with changes in accommodation rates over the 2012-2021 period, or differences between the accommodation rates of people with and without disabilities, but we did not find significant correlations (not reported here).
We recognize there are limitations to using occupation-level data on AT accommodations as a measure of accommodations availability, especially when looking at changes in accommodation rates over time. In particular, technological change varies among occupations, and many new technologies may make jobs more accessible for people with disabilities without the need for special accommodations. For example, many new computer software programs now have accessibility built in so that extra programs or peripherals are not necessary. Requesting accommodations may be stressful and even risky (41), so people with disabilities may gravitate to occupations where no extra equipment or other accommodations are necessary. In addition, employers may be more reluctant to hire people with disabilities in occupations where extra equipment is needed to accommodate their disabilities. Both these employee-driven and employer-driven effects would dampen the correlation between accommodation rates and employment growth.
We are also mindful that our data include the first 16 months of the pandemic (from March 2020 to the survey done in July 2021), and it is possible that the adoption and effects of assistive technologies may be affected by the pandemic recession. In fact we find that the results on disability employment growth are strongest when looking across the entire 2012-2021 period instead of just the 2012-2019 period. This suggests that for the more accommodating occupations in 2012, employers were more prepared and/or willing to retain or rehire people with disabilities in the early stages of the recession in 2020-2021. The use of assistive technologies in the pandemic may be related to the large increase in telework, due both to the development of new technologies to enable telework and to employer willingness to experiment with and accept new methods of completing the work.