Leveling the Playing Field: Attracting, Engaging, and Advancing People with Disabilities

People with disabilities experience significant challenges in finding employment. The participation of people with disabilities in the workforce and their median income are both less than half that of the civilian workforce. They work part time 68 percent more frequently than people without disabilities. These disheartening results persist despite the enactment of significant federal legislation aimed at making the workplace more supportive and accessible to people with disabilities. The Conference Board Research Working Group (RWG) on Improving Employment Outcomes for People with Disabilities was convened to address how to overcome these disparities. It was sponsored by the Employment and Disability Institute at Cornell University, under a grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research of the U.S. Department of Education. The RWG members focused on four questions: 1) The business case: Is it advantageous for organizations to employ people with disabilities? 2) Organizational readiness: What should organizations do to create a workplace that enables people with disabilities to thrive and advance? 3) Measurement: How can success for both people with disabilities and the organization itself be determined? 4) Self-disclosure: How can people with disabilities, especially those whose disabilities are not obvious, be encouraged to identify themselves so that resources can be directed toward them and outcomes can be measured

Data Representativeness in Accessibility Datasets: A Meta-Analysis

As data-driven systems are increasingly deployed at scale, ethical concerns have arisen around unfair and discriminatory outcomes for historically marginalized groups that are underrepresented in training data. In response, work around AI fairness and inclusion has called for datasets that are representative of various demographic groups. In this paper, we contribute an analysis of the representativeness of age, gender, and race & ethnicity in accessibility datasets - datasets sourced from people with disabilities and older adults - that can potentially play an important role in mitigating bias for inclusive AI-infused applications. We examine the current state of representation within datasets sourced by people with disabilities by reviewing publicly-available information of 190 datasets, we call these accessibility datasets. We find that accessibility datasets represent diverse ages, but have gender and race representation gaps. Additionally, we investigate how the sensitive and complex nature of demographic variables makes classification difficult and inconsistent (e.g., gender, race & ethnicity), with the source of labeling often unknown. By reflecting on the current challenges and opportunities for representation of disabled data contributors, we hope our effort expands the space of possibility for greater inclusion of marginalized communities in AI-infused systems.Comment: Preprint, The 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2022), 15 page

The dual process account of reasoning: historical roots, problems and perspectives.

Despite the great effort that has been dedicated to the attempt to redefine expected utility theory on the grounds of new assumptions, modifying or moderating some axioms, none of the alternative theories propounded so far had a statistical confirmation over the full domain of applicability. Moreover, the discrepancy between prescriptions and behaviors is not limited to expected utility theory. In two other fundamental fields, probability and logic, substantial evidence shows that human activities deviate from the prescriptions of the theoretical models. The paper suggests that the discrepancy cannot be ascribed to an imperfect axiomatic description of human choice, but to some more general features of human reasoning and assumes the “dual-process account of reasoning” as a promising explanatory key. This line of thought is based on the distinction between the process of deliberate reasoning and that of intuition; where in a first approximation, “intuition” denotes a mental activity largely automatized and inaccessible from conscious mental activity. The analysis of the interactions between these two processes provides the basis for explaining the persistence of the gap between normative and behavioral patterns. This view will be explored in the following pages: central consideration will be given to the problem of the interactions between rationality and intuition, and the correlated “modularity” of the thought.

Gender Artifacts in Visual Datasets

Gender biases are known to exist within large-scale visual datasets and can be reflected or even amplified in downstream models. Many prior works have proposed methods for mitigating gender biases, often by attempting to remove gender expression information from images. To understand the feasibility and practicality of these approaches, we investigate what $\textit{gender artifacts}$ exist within large-scale visual datasets. We define a $\textit{gender artifact}$ as a visual cue that is correlated with gender, focusing specifically on those cues that are learnable by a modern image classifier and have an interpretable human corollary. Through our analyses, we find that gender artifacts are ubiquitous in the COCO and OpenImages datasets, occurring everywhere from low-level information (e.g., the mean value of the color channels) to the higher-level composition of the image (e.g., pose and location of people). Given the prevalence of gender artifacts, we claim that attempts to remove gender artifacts from such datasets are largely infeasible. Instead, the responsibility lies with researchers and practitioners to be aware that the distribution of images within datasets is highly gendered and hence develop methods which are robust to these distributional shifts across groups.Comment: ICCV 202

Organizationally Sensible vs. Legal-Centric Approaches to Employment Decisions With Legal Implications

This article is intended to: 1) alert human resource (HR) professionals to the risk that they, and the managers they serve, are unnecessarily contributing to the impact of legal considerations on the management of employees as a result of “legal-centric decision making”; and 2) provide information and guidance that will assist HR professionals in promoting better informed, more organizationally sensible responses to employment issues that have potential legal implications. The “legal-centric decision making” construct is introduced and illustrated, a model of the primary factors contributing to legal-centric decision making is presented, and keys to avoiding legal-centric decision making are identified and discussed

Uncertainty ahead: Which way forward for transport?

This is the final report from the CIHT FUTURES initiative. CIHT FUTURES involved a series of 11 workshops across the UK in 2015/16 in which over 200 CIHT members participated. The workshops explored members' reactions to uncertainty over the future and the plausibility of four divergent scenarios of how transport and society may play out in around 30 years' time. They went on to examine the transport professionals' views concerning how we currently approach, and how we should approach, the task of transport planning, policymaking and investment in an uncertain world. The report paints a rather sobering picture of a transport profession that acknowledges the level of uncertainty we face and is collectively rather unhappy with the current approach we have to policymaking and investment decisions. It also captures the views and ideas of workshop participants regarding how we might go forward. Recommendations are made for the attention of the CIHT, transport professionals and strategic bodies

The Future of Disability in Alaska Summit & Follow-up Survey

The Future of Disability in Alaska Summit was held in Anchorage in the summer of 2013, May 9-10. The purpose was to gather perspectives from a diverse group of stakeholders to inform a vision of the future for people with disabilities in Alaska in five broad topical areas: 1) Housing Arrangements, 2) Advocacy, 3) Relationships, 4) Economic Wellbeing, and 5) Health. About 76 stakeholders participated in the summit including people with disabilities, family members, advocates, service providers, policymakers, and others. A follow-up online survey was conducted to gather information from a broader range of stakeholders and to get a sense of the highest priorities in each area. The purpose of the report and other products coming out of this effort is to inspire stakeholders to periodically reflect, individually and in groups, on how they are working toward the vision in a relevant area and taking action in the context of advocacy, policy/regulation, funding, and services/resources. The report states a vision for each of the five topical areas and includes many suggested strategies to accomplish it.Funded in part by Grant Number T7320663 from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Health Resources and Services Administration; and Grant Number 90DD0009-02-00 from the Administration on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Administration for Community Living; both in the U.S. Department of Health and Human ServicesList of Tables / Executive Summary / Introduction / Method / Participants / Result