What is the Cause of Deaf Underrepresentation?

A recent post by Steven Thomas Copsey (EDI at the BBC ), along with my training session tomorrow with Lorraine Mensah at The Barrister Group , got me thinking about the lack of D/deaf people in most workplaces and professions and where it stems from.

What is the root cause of this chronic underrepresentation in almost every sector in the UK?

I worked in the legal profession for years and only became interested in the Deaf Community when I was thoroughly humiliated by my own ignorance.

I met a woman who was infectiously proud of her culture and language and felt no need to 'water-down' either just to make me more comfortable (and quite right too) and this inspired me to learn sign language

Little did I know that only a few years later I would be recovering from a cardiac arrest, coma, audiological processing issues, memory loss, deafness, Vestibular neuronitis ......

Of all of these conditions - society at large had the most difficulty with me being deaf.

I went from being viewed as an intelligent professional - to being an utter dim-witted idiot overnight... because me being unable to hear people allowed them to think that I was stupid.

It is this pervasive ugliness, that stems from a lack of training around deafness, that creeps into recruitment processes in all sectors across the board. And in my opinion, the root cause of the lack of representation that we have from members of the Deaf-Community in professional workplaces in the UK

HR teams carry this unconscious bias whether they know it or not, and when deaf people present themselves - their lack of volume control, or inability to lipread immediately (and ask for repeats) automatically results in a judgment of 'incapable' being placed upon them by the 'hearing-centric' team of interviewers.

Ultimately D/deaf people aren't allowed to be Deaf.

Society demands that we just keep tying harder to be 'hearing' because it makes them less uncomfortable, and we are judged by our ability to hear throughout our educational career rather than our ability to think - or how intelligent we are.

Hearing people forget that when they started to read, it was a sound-based skill. We learn that when letters 'look' like this - they 'sound' like this.... Of course, deaf children don't have this luxury and consequently learning to read is an excruciatingly painful process. 

Despite this being common sense - the hearing world just look at the inability of Deaf people to read/write as stupidity (as they have never been taught otherwise). It fits into their trope of deaf people being unintelligent, slow, and not worthy of being given a chance.

Its easier to continue to think that deaf kids are just dim than it is to challenge our belief systems. And we grow up still believing it and never challenging this way of thinking.

Ultimately, it is only when our unconscious bias is pointed out to us that we can become aware of it.

It takes someone to 'call us out' on our own bulls**t.

But, for the Deaf Community, that rarely happens. Its a vicious circle. As we are not represented in professional life, we cant call people out. We are absent - but nobody misses us as we've never been there....

So, when D/deaf youngsters apply for jobs, their CV's are going to be sent to 'hearing' professionals - people with no concept of the Deaf-Discrimination that these young candidates have already been subjected to throughout their life.

The CV will (or course) lacking in both adequate qualifications (because they've been taught in a language that they can't hear), and will also be written very poorly as it is a language that they are disenfranchised from.

It's the language of the hearing-world - not theirs. And yet, they must conform to this 'societal norm' if they want to apply for a job.

It is not a surprise that they don't get invited to interview - and if they do, they rarely get the job, because 'hearing' recruiters think that they must be stupid if their ears don't work.

Train yourself & your staff to 'buck this trend'. Be the recruiter that looks more deeply at the CV of a D/deaf applicant, look past the ears into the brain, the spark, the character and imagine what you can learn from them.

Perhaps you could be the law firm that starts a Deaf Sponsorship programme to get D/deaf kids into law?

Ireland are in the first privileged position of having the FIRST deaf barrister Sofiya Kalinova BL - maybe your firm would like to see representation in the UK?

If so, what are you going to do about it.

Train yourself out of your unconscious bias - let me challenge your thought processes and knock the 'hearing-centric' stereotypes that you didn't know you were holding on to.... out into the bin where they belong.

Find us online at www.deafandequal.com