Disability Exclusion

Abstract

Disabled people face severe economic disadvantages, yet disability receives relatively little attention in public discussion and in the economics of discrimination compared with other minority identities, including gender and race. We use incentivized experiments to examine preferences for disability representation and the beliefs behind them. In the first experiment, participants decide whether to pay a small cost to replace workers in a pool of 100 non-disabled, male, and white workers to instead match U.S. population shares for each group. Relative to women and Black workers, disabled workers are 25 percentage points more likely to be excluded from the worker pool. Although beliefs that disabled workers have relatively low performance contribute to their exclusion from the worker pool, it does not fully explain their higher rates of exclusion. Disability exclusion is not specific to our experimental task: participants are also less likely to state that Fortune 500 companies should recruit disabled workers relative to women and to Black workers. Our results are consistent with participants expecting greater social tolerance of disability discrimination. We observe this both when participants make incentivized predictions about companies and when participants make predictions about other participants in our study. A complementary experiment shows that disability representation is also less salient than gender and race representation, suggesting that in some settings disabled people may be excluded simply because they are not top of mind.