It was an overcast day in San Francisco and I was nervous about an interview with an up-and-coming tech company designing high-end robotics for kids. At the time I was walking with a cane and utilizing leg braces, but it was getting increasingly difficult and I had just started using a manual wheelchair, part-time.
This would be my first interview in a wheelchair.
I spoke with the director several times over the phone and he was in love with my work, design philosophy and excited to work together. I was a perfect fit as I had both toy and high-end ID design experience. I had completed the necessary stages of art tests and interviews — all that was left in the hiring process was a meet in person.
Most of us get nervous about interviews but my experience is compounded by the elephant in the room. Me. I'm in a wheelchair. I'm perceivably “disabled” and I will be unfairly judged based on this fact.
I can't tell you how difficult it is to roll into a room thinking about all the possible ways you will be perceived and examined. In those first two seconds of meeting, people think they know all they need to know about you. This did not escape my mind as I struggled to push myself into their inaccessible building.
Around this time my upper extremities had begun weakening. I had just started using a chair for long treks, but found it difficult to push under certain criteria, like inclines or thick carpet. In my mind, I kept mulling over possible barriers that would make me look more “disabled” and thinking of ways to overcome them.
As I rolled into the lobby and waited, I soon saw the director come in. His eyes met mine and then quickly darted around the room as if he was checking to see if his interviewee was somewhere else to be found. But I was the only one sitting there. When he realized the interviewee was indeed the woman in the wheelchair, he greeted me.
I had to hide all my nerves and insecurities brought on by the wheelchair in the room. I had to smile and be confident, as if that would hide my chair and redistribute his focus back to my resume and portfolio he raved so glowingly about. But, inside my stomach was turning.
We did a tour around the building and talked about my experience and design vision and then he guided me towards a room for a discussion – when I saw IT. Between me and the destination was a fresh thick sea of carpet. My heart sank.
“I can't push through this,” I thought.
But I had to appear cool and confident as I nonchalantly asked him for help. My potential future executive was now pushing me across the carpet. This can't be happening. I felt so humiliated. Of course he is not going to hire me now.
I didn't end up getting the job and had several interviews just like this. The process was always demoralizing and demeaning. So, eventually I gave up and went into freelancing and consulting. After all, no one could see my wheelchair if I was behind a screen.
Truth is, I got to this moment because I left a previous company because of discrimination.
I had received a job as a designer a few years before this San Francisco interview. I had just moved to Los Angeles and the hiring manager gave me a design job without knowing I had a disability. This was before my wheelchair milestone. On paper, he also thought I was a man.
Using a cane and leg braces, I made sure to get to this interview early so I could hide my cane because this is what disabled people are forced to think about. I was hired as contract and he didn't even know I had a disability until my first day. But even when he realized something was different about me, this person never ever made me feel disabled and I was treated with respect. I loved working in this group.
Some time later I was switched to a different group within this same company and managerless for a period of time. In reality, I was hired in this new group for menial design work and overqualified but it was the only the full time position available and the company president wanted me to stay after my contract was lifted, so he moved me there. So I made a point to go above and beyond and soon moved past this menial design work to big projects. In that time I worked really hard and excelled, giving pitches on my own for new properties, vision and new branding ideas – quickly earning respect from Directors, Vice President, President and managers, including marketing and engineering counterparts. After being named the designer for a “show piece” for the company and having success in pushing my vision, I was later finally assigned a design manager who was a popular employee, someone I once respected and even casual friends with.
But soon after, I began experiencing abuse, threats and discrimination all behind closed doors from this person. This person began quietly removing me from my own projects I pitched and created, and wouldn't invite me to my own meetings. When upper management began confronting her, this person would take me into a room and berate me while gaslighting me; using my disability as an excuse for their odd behavior — pretending as if they were “looking out for me”. But the real disclosed reason was this individual felt I was new to the group and getting too much attention for my unique design skill-set, as she desired other employees she favored to get that attention.
This kind of discrimmination was almost worse because this person knew what I was capable of. I had spent time at this company proving my worth and talents and received success for it. But this person used my disability to control and cut me down in privacy without peering eyes, and it was destroying me daily. I had to witness the side no one else saw behind closed doors. It was lonely. This person exploited my disability for their own personal agenda and it was crushing.
I am my own worst critic. Nothing I ever do seems good enough to me. But one thing I do know is if I commit myself to anything, including a project, I give my everything. I have really high standards for myself and nothing I do is half way. I knew I was a good employee who on my own often worked nights and weekends to produce additional projects and ideas for this company.
I didn't feel I could report this to Human Resources because it is known that HR is there to protect the company and its managers, not employees. So I eventually left. My reasons kept secret.
In hindsight maybe I should have went to upper chains who were all confused why I was leaving. They tried finding ways to get me to stay including giving my husband a job in a different department (the excuse for leaving was Jason got a great job offer somewhere else. Partially true, but I wouldn’t have left this company if not for the abuse). This attempt to convince me to stay made my manager unhappy as she was happy to see me go. But after too much time dealing with it alone, I was emotionally drained and just didn’t know what to do. I was also afraid of the backlash.
I had worked so hard, I had cared so much. I couldn't bring myself to being known as the person who went to HR and played the “disability card” but I also had to much self-respect to deal with this kind of abuse. Sure, there are anti-discrimination laws but how does one prove it? And, then I would have to work in the misery after she found out I reported her. So it was easier to leave.
* * *
We then moved to San Francisco. This was such a difficult time in my life and afterwards I really struggled with confidence for a very long time. Experiencing interviews as a new person to wheelchair life didn’t help, either. For so long I didn’t talk about this experience and even felt shame and embarrassment, which I know today is unfounded for the shame was solely on this person…and an ableist society.
If we could just get beyond the tangible traits that have been assigned superiority, while eclipsing all the other facets that make humans immeasurable contributors, then perhaps we could diversify our minds and thus diversify the work, political and human landscape.
* * *
I face self-doubt all the time as a human, an artist, designer and a person with a disability forced to prove their worth in an able-bodied world. Disabled people often feel they have to do twice as much just to prove themselves to a society who often views us as “crippled”, useless, unable, incompetent and throw away segments of society.
I have two degrees, multiple scholarships, am a multi-award winning designer and artist and have proved myself beyond my body, beyond my disability. And, yet I still experience an ignorant society. So I can't help but think, even with all my accolades and experience, if I still face discrimination, what must it be like for people with disabilities who don't have access to education or lack job experience because no one will hire them?
The disability community experiences higher risk of poverty, lack of employment (unemployment rates at 80%) and education opportunities with lower wages paralleling increased costs that are often associated with disabilities. At one billion worldwide, we are the largest and fastest growing minority group in the United States (20-26% US population) and world, and yet we hear very little about the daily discrimination against disabled people and how the current inclusion socio-economic and equality conversation of race, gender and sexuality often excludes us.
The general public attacks those who are sick and disabled for being on medicare and disability, and we are often exploited and politicized during election time. The public cheers their politicians’ ideas of cutting medicare and SSI, a monthly check far below poverty level ($551 a month), especially since living a disabled life is way more expensive just to achieve access to gratuitous tasks that healthy individuals take for granted. For us, everything has to be specialized and our healthcare bills are nonstop. You can’t imagine all the out-of-pocket costs required just to stay alive or get inside your own home.
But the truth is the majority do not want to be on disability assistance. We want to contribute but we aren't given fair opportunities.
I’m lucky to have built my own career and path, but not all of us are able to successfully push ourselves through the jungle of able-bodied working society. And not all of us can build profitable advocacy careers. The truth is, if society hired us then we wouldn't have to utilize assistance. Most social issues are cyclical like this.
I am more than my physical ability to walk. I have skills and talent, but mostly, I've really seen and experienced life. I have life experience and perspective that separates myself from other designers and contributes to my vision-focused mind, which is just as important to a job. And, even though my condition is progressive, and one day I will no longer be able to move, I won't be any less of a designer because of it. I can still contribute to society using my mind, my breadth of life experiences, passion and compassion.
As activist Alice Wong says, “We are modern day oracles.” We have a unique vantage point not utilized.
The term “disability” is misleading. It implies we’re void of capabilities. But our physical “impairment” is not the disability. An inaccessible society is. An ADA advocate once said the community chose the word “disabled” not to describe our physicality yet how society disables us.
Disabled are segregated, excluded and treated as second-class citizens, as if we cannot contribute in the same way an able-bodied person can. Yet, today there is technology to assist us, making our bodies more fluid. There are ways to rearrange work situations, like working from home, something people with disabilities were told we couldn’t do by hiring companies for years, thus we didn’t get the job. And, yet the whole world is now working from home due to Coronavirus and it was made instantly possible for “healthy” people — proving so much can be done if there is will.
We shouldn't be scared of disability. We shouldn't justify not giving a job or equal pay to someone with a disability for disability is part of the human condition and any one of us or our loved ones can become disabled either through genetics, an accident or plain getting old. This is something we must all experience if death does not catch us first.
I think some of the reasons for ableism is how we view worth in a world consumed by productivity, numbers and profit. The spectrum of worth stops there for most and we are immediately sidelined as incapable…unworthy...unacceptable.
This has to stop.
Society also fears mortality and people like us can be reminders of life’s fragilities. So it’s easier to keep us in the back room so we don’t have to think about it. So we can treat these facets as some distant reality that is impossible for us to ever experience, except that everyone of us are capable of becoming disabled or sick.
There is so much ignorance and instead of getting to know what we don’t so we can expand our perspective, we choose to remain ignorant. Most people feel disability is too far from them to understand or have anything in common with, except you are me and I am you…with wheels.
You don’t have to fear us.
Disabled people don't want hand-outs. We don't want to be pitied and seen as charity. All we want is a level playing field, opportunities and the same access as able-bodied. Society thinks because we have ADA laws everything is fine. There is no real way to prove job discrimination and no structure to hold those who violate ADA laws and we still have so long to go for equality, access and basic rights.
All of us in this great big world are looking for a place to belong to. A reason. A way to contribute. A way to make our voice heard. We all want to be a part of something and to be accepted, but it's really difficult to belong when society keeps shutting us out.
*Note: If you happen to know who this manager is or the company this discrimination happened at, please don’t mention the name. It doesn’t matter who or what anymore, the point in sharing is to shed light on pervasive discrimination people with disabilities experience.
Follow my wheelchair travels, art and musings at Instagram.com/kamredlawsk / art gallery / Facebook.com/kamredlawsk / Twitter.com/kamredlawsk
EDIT October 29, 2020: “October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month. Thirteen years ago I decided to go public about my condition, and it was a very conscious decision. I knew prospective employers could research me and find out I was disabled and was even advised not to come out because of this. Despite worrying about job discrimination, I felt sharing my experience was too important, especially for a condition that was so rare and, at the time, very few patients were willing to publicly speak of (basically a couple patients). In many ways I sacrificed my design career including all the time I spent on advocacy which could’ve been used to heighten my design career.
I’ve recently updated my professional Linked-In page to reflect who I am today. I uploaded this post to my Linked-In after years of trying to hide from the Industrial Design industry that I am disabled.
It reads: “I’m formerly trained as an Industrial Designer. I’ve worked in the industry for years while traversing this advocacy journey in parallel. I remember how scared I was to share this with the professional world (+linked-in) in fear of discrimination and industry judging what I can’t do before they met me. When I went into a wheelchair I experienced discrimination despite competent resume and work experience. I was forced into freelance and tried to keep my disability hidden.
It’s taken a long time to merge the two worlds as I’ve found my own way as a designer and now illustrator who illustrates tender moments inspired by her condition. This experience has made me a better designer, illustrator and human. Disabled is the largest and fastest growing minority in the US/world. We have major purchasing power and should be included. Society and the industry needs to diversify their world and remove this thinking that just because someone is different and can’t walk, speak or hear, that we have nothing to contribute. We hold valuable experiences and insight and I challenge my fellow design colleagues to expand their thinking and be more inclusive.”