Christy Nittrouer published a paper that suggests anti-discrimination legislation could reduce bias faced by job applicants with mental impairments, like her brother.

Before a job interview, antsy applicants may find it beneficial to take deep breaths, chew a piece of gum or listen to calming music. 

However, the most recommended trick to alleviate stress is not a quick fix. It requires homework to feel as prepared as possible through research and practiced answers to anticipated questions. 

But for some individuals with disabilities (IWDs), no amount of time can help them overcome the challenges they face with the traditional job application process. Christy Nittrouer has witnessed these struggles firsthand with her brother Michael, who has profound autism and an intellectual disability. 

“My family has run into a lot of questions with his employment,” she said. “For example, how do people who are profoundly different obtain gainful employment when the interview is so influenced by self-presentation, fitting in and saying all the right things? These are the types of individuals who are most at risk of unemployment.”

Nittrouer, an assistant professor of management at Texas Tech University’s Jerry S. Rawls College of Business, has predicated her career on conducting research concerning the workplace experience of people with disabilities, including those like her brother. Her experience growing up alongside Michael, who is three years younger, inspired her to earn her doctoral degree in industrial/organizational psychology from Rice University. Self-described as a stigma scholar, her research draws upon stigma theory to explore the impact of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination in the workplace. 

Her first-author paper, titled “Reducing Discrimination against Individuals with Mental Impairments: Influence of Section 503” was accepted in May of this year by the Journal of Business and Psychology – a preferred publishing destination not just for the Rawls College but widely across both disciplines of management and psychology. It was published June 13 after more than a decade of research into how Section 503 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act (reauthorized as of March 2014) would impact discrimination expressed toward hiring IWDs. 

Section 503 not only prohibits discrimination based on disability status, but also puts forth affirmative action mandates for federal contractors (such as requiring that IWDs comprise at least 7% of contractors’ workforce).

“I was really hopeful we could examine if this legislation had a positive influence on those people with disabilities who find it most difficult to obtain employment,” Nittrouer said. “I knew people in the disability community were going to care about this. Legislation like this influences the hiring rate and hiring incentives for people with disabilities who have been the least successful obtaining employment. This will be important for anyone who serves this community.’”

A Decade of Commitment 

For the next 10 years, in what she describes as a long haul, Nittrouer and several collaborators studied the potential role Section 503 plays in mitigating hiring bias against IWDs. The author team conducted experiments to see how hiring managers reacted to applicants who disclosed a physical impairment, mental impairment, no impairment or no disability at all. The team engaged in many methodological best practices to ensure participants were not just telling them what they wanted to hear.

Nittrouer was excited to discover experimental evidence that hiring managers consistently reacted much more positively toward applicants who disclosed they have a mental impairment after seeing Section 503. The authors also examined if these ratings were influenced by the presence of norms prohibiting expressions of bias toward individuals with mental impairments and found quantitative evidence that Section 503 motivated hiring managers to suppress their automatic stereotypes. 

In other words, she believes this legislation conveys that IWDs are valuable, even those individuals who are historically most discounted, creating a boomerang effect against natural inclinations so that hiring managers view these applicants with preference instead of prejudice. 

 “You have to have groundswell support,” Nittrouer explained. “When an individual realizes how many people are subject to this legislation and subscribe to this new social norm, that is the tipping point which moves their own social norms.”

This open-mindedness is vital for job applicants like Michael, who have a mental rather than physical impairment and do not always benefit from politically correct culture, which creates a norm to be kind to those with differences. Nittrouer has found, complementary to previous research, that these “invisible disabilities” are many times perceived as more controllable and consequently, elicit more negative biases.

“People with invisible disabilities had no incentive to talk about these identities in the workplace (despite the Americans with Disability Act (ADA)) because previously there was no affirmative action outlined in legislation specifically for them,” Nittrouer said. 

Michael and others like him need a job coach or support staff to obtain employment and perform their job duties, which is still so atypical in the traditional interview process that in the best-case scenario it may lead to reorganization and additional questioning, but most commonly results in getting cut from the hiring process. Although many organizations have recently begun implementing techniques such as asynchronous video interviews or visual resumes to assist IWDs (as well as other individuals across a range of identities), Nittrouer argues those options are still impossible for applicants who have profound disabilities. 

Consequently, despite how hard they try, some IWDs cannot find work.

“We know job experience begets job experience, and it’s a lot easier to get a job once you have one,” Nittrouer said. “And if you can’t even get your foot in the door, then it becomes exceedingly difficult over time to get that first entry-level experience.”

In Michael’s case, he works at a rock-climbing gym, the most recent of his part-time jobs worked over the years. Nittrouer wants her brother and the growing population of others like him to have access to full-time employment so they can escape the risk of living below the poverty line. 

Nittrouer and her family feel encouraged by her research, along with many of her colleagues in the disability community who have provided positive feedback after her presentations at universities and conferences.

“They have come up to me and said, ‘Can you please send me the paper when it’s out? We need evidence that these laws work because otherwise people are going to rescind them,’” she remarked. 

Nittrouer has since shared her paper on LinkedIn, which quickly garnered more than 4,500 impressions. She is hopeful it will make its way to influencing lawmakers and how they write future laws affecting IWDs – understanding that being considerate to IWDs is one thing – but eliminating barriers they face in an already difficult hiring process sets a much higher bar. 

“It’s something that’s not going to happen unless we’re intentional about it,” she said. “And it’s no surprise to me that the people I run into in this field who are the most passionate and are doing the most research on this topic often have personal connections; because we have seen the future for people with mental impairments if the status quo holds – and it is not good. The only way people with mental impairments are going to experience the dignified employment they deserve is if the community of IWDs and their supporters, employers and researchers work together to achieve it.”