Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to The Nature and Scope of Discrimination in Hiring under ADA Title I conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star then zero on your touch-tone telephone. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today''s conference, Ms. Robin Jones. Ms. Jones you may begin.
Thank you and welcome to everyone who has joined us today for this ADA Audio Conference Series. I know for some of you it is the afternoon and for some of you it is the morning, and we have people from all over the country, and that is the exciting part of using various types of technology. We have individuals joining us today via the telephone, we have individuals who are using real time captioning over the internet, and we have individuals using streaming audio over the internet. Our speaker Ill introduce in a minute, but I want to let everyone know and affirm this is a program sponsored by the network of regional Disability and Business Technical Centers, also known as ADA Centers across the country. We are funded by the National Institute on Disability Rehabilitation and Research within the U.S. Department of Justice -- sorry, of Education. This is our seventh year in the ADA Audio Conference Series, and I hope that if you are a first-time joiner you find this program useful. If you are someone who has joined us on a repeated basis, hopefully the reason you are coming back is because the information is valuable to you. Just so that you will know how the program runs today, I will do a brief introduction of our speaker, I will then turn over the session to our speaker, who will provide information to you. Everyone should have received a copy of the handouts that have been provided by the speaker. They were part of your registration process, so you should have been able to download those, and he will be referring to those throughout this session today. If you did not get a copy of them, please make sure that you contact our office, and we can work through with you what the problem might have been, or why you did not get those particular materials in advance, which you should have. This program is being recorded and a caption, I mean, a transcript of this session will be edited and be posted to the website, www.ada-audio.org within 10 days following the program. So you can always go back to the archives and access any of the previous programs, both the materials as well as an audio recording and the written transcript, which is then used by anyone for whatever reason you might decide to do that. So let me go ahead and introduce our speaker today, and go ahead and turn things over to him so that he can get started and has a lot of good information I think you''ll find very useful and interesting, and probably will leave you with more questions than answers about what is going on out there. But we are pleased today to have Brian McMahon join us. He is with Virginia Commonwealth University, Department of Rehabilitation and Counseling. Brian is a native of Chicago, which is a good thing, and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He is a full Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and holds appointments in four schools, including the School of Medicine, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and he served on national executive councils for different professional organizations, most recently the American Counseling Association. He is also the Past President of the American Rehabilitation Counseling Association and recipient of its Career Research Award. Other honors include awards for Teaching Excellence and Alumni Achievement Awards from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as well as Milwaukee and IIT. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow with the U.S. Department of Education, and in this capacity he studies workplace discrimination and disability for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is the body of work hell be presenting for us today. His previous body of work related to proprietary rehabilitation, the vocational consequences of head injury and hate crimes towards people with disabilities. As a side note, Brian also heads up a project for which he serves as the Head of the Coordination and Outreach Center, research center for the national network of centers for ADA Centers across the country. So we have been working directly with Brian and staff and many of his colleagues and individuals across the country through that relationship to direct the research agendas and activities that are a part of the regional ADA Centers. This has been a good relationship over the last couple of years, and we are looking forward to our ongoing work with Brian, especially the work he is doing currently with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. So I am going to go ahead and turn the microphone over to Brian at this time, and we will come back in a little while for some questions so everyone will have an opportunity to provide some input. Go ahead, Brian.
Robin, thank you very much. As always, its great to be back here on the Audio Conference program, sponsored by the national network of ADA Centers. I am very proud and pleased to be affiliated with this group and to be allowed to participate from time to time in this training. I want to say hello and welcome everybody there from coast to coast, good afternoon, or good morning if you are on the west coast, and really always want to commend the participants, such as yourselves for taking the time and effort to learn more about ADA and how it is playing out in our society. That is really what our topic is about today. And it is just great to be back, and great to be with you all. I think we will have a very productive visit today. And I do promise to leave ample time for questions, if you will allow me to get through my prepared remarks first. I am a little bit irritable today, and it is nobody''s fault in particular, except about 5:00 this morning, it was still dark, I was awoken by my son and I was little groggy and concerned something was wrong, and I asked him what he needed, he is in 7th grade and he said, Dad I was wondering if you knew how to sign your name in the dark. And I said, Damn, Im not even awake yet. What time is it? And he said, Well, do you know how to do this? I said, I suppose so. He put his pencil and paper in my hand, and a little book behind it to support it, and he said, Sign your name right here. And he guides my hand to it and I am squinting a bit and I don''t have my glasses, and I said, Well, Dan, what is it I am signing here anyhow? And he said, You are not supposed to ask. I said Dan, what is this? He said, Its my report card, Dad. So I want you to know that really did happen this morning, and being awakened was one thing, but the grades on the report card was another matter altogether, and I never have gotten back to sleep since, so I am just a little bit crabby, but I am not going to take it out on any of our fine participants here. Okay. We are here today to talk about recent findings in hiring discrimination, and this is a part of , I will give people a little background, if they have not heard us speak on this topic before, but this is a series of studies, the most recent studies that have come out of what is known as the National EEOC ADA Research Project. And along with your slides, those of you who have those, I have provided a few handouts, and one of the handouts is called EEOC 2008 Bibliography, and if you were to just take a quick look at that, you will see that these are all of the studies that have come out of our project since 2004, so over the past three years. And our focus today will be on the last four studies: 34, 35, 36, and 37, and as you can see, all of these studies are going to be published in June in the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation, so if you really want the detail, I am not sure how many folks will, but there will be about 100 pages of graphs and tables and charts and figures and statistics. Everything if you are, for example, a researcher or user of research you will find everything published in that journal in June in a few short months. Our specific focus in those publications is on the topic of hiring. You can imagine there is all kinds of discrimination issues in ADA Title I, and today, we are going to tell you what we have learned when we completed those studies just a couple of weeks ago, specific to the matter of hiring. But if you have interest in other studies that are on the page, please feel free to contact us, and we will try to get your reprints or answer any other questions that you may have. Just want to give people a little bit of background, going to the second slide now. In terms of what we have in the database that we do research with. I live here in central Virginia, Virginia is a, it''s a beautiful day today, about 56 degrees, a little bit cloudy, very nice outside. Spring is upon us, and Virginia is one of a number of states where they do a lot of coal mining, and we are miners of a different sort, we are database miners. We mine this one database in particular that the EEOC has provided us access with. And in the database as you can see on the slide, we have 369,182 closed allegations under ADA, and that is every closed allegation that meets our extraction criteria, over the first 13.2 years of the ADA. So beginning back in 1992, with the first effective date and going through September 30th, 2005. Our database grows at about 5% per year. Now, you have another handout which is an overview of the special issue in June, and this one is called Overview, and it would be a very nice summary of what you are going to hear today, but also it gives you a little bit more background. The first three pages, it is a very short document, the first three pages is background on the project, explain how the database works, explains what the project is, and then the last page or page and a half is a summary of our hiring findings, which is what that special issue is going to be all about come June. Looking back at the slide here, you can see that there are four kinds of major variables in the database. The first one is about the people who bring the complaints, which the EEOC refers to as the charging party, or the person with the disability. And what we know about them is the type of impairment, and their race and gender and age. You can see on the slide that this group has 45 unique known impairments, and therefore, one of the things we have been able to do, referring back again to the bibliography is create a number of disability-specific profiles of discrimination. We have done profiles on how are people with diabetes discriminated against, people with cancer, people with epilepsy, and so on. That is an example of the type of study we do. Not the type we are talking about today, but an example of the type we do. The next variable we have has to do with the respondents, and the respondents are the people who have been charged with discrimination, alleged to have discriminated against a person with a disability in employment. And what do we know about them? These are the employers, of course. Well, we know what their industry classification is, we know how many people work where they work, and we know their location, which we described in terms of usually the United States Census Region. So what does this information enable us to do? It enables us to do industry-specific profiles of workplace discrimination. For example, how is discrimination different in manufacturing or in healthcare or in education or more specifically in higher education? There are 20 different industry groupings that we have begun to study, and obviously this helps us a lot when we are attempting to educate people in business and industry, human resources professionals who really want to know what the flash points are in ADA, what their strengths and weaknesses are in terms of ADA compliance in their specific industry. Again, that is a type of study we have the capabilities of doing now. It is not the type of study that we are going to be talking about today. The third type of study is the type of study we are gonna be talking about today, and that has to do with issues. And an issue is a type of discriminatory behavior. There are 25 such types and you could free-associate, I think, and pretty quickly come up with most of them, if we were just to brain storm this as a group and write them all on the blackboard; it wouldn''t take us but five minutes or so. But these are things like, you could discriminate against me I suppose in terms of my wages, in terms of my hours at work, vacation time. You would fire me because you don''t think I am performing well. You could fail to promote me when I think I deserve it. Again, this word think and this matter of perception of discrimination is important. Because that is what an allegation is. An allegation is a perception by the charging party that they have been wronged or grieved by the respondent. That does not mean that it is a factual event in terms of discrimination; it does not mean that discrimination has occurred. But they are alleging it occurred and they feel it has occurred with a strong enough valance or strong enough emotion or conviction that they have taken themselves down to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and filed a complaint. Issue studies is the type of study we are talking about today. And we are talking about specifically the issue of hiring. So that is exactly what it is we are going to talk about, and then the fourth type of study we can do, and we will do this for hiring, is we can look at the outcomes of the allegations. So, how many of the allegations for example in hiring have merit, and how many did not have merit. An allegation has merit if the allegation has been substantiated. In other words, the person''s perception is believed by the EEOC upon completion of an investigation to be accurate. The EEOC agrees that in point of fact a discriminatory event has occurred and that is what is known as a merit resolution. If the EEOC investigation finds there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that the employer discriminated, that is what is known as a non-merit resolution. Okay. Now if you have been with us before, you have had that education before, and I don''t want to belabor it. It is always a trick juggling an audience to estimate how many people have had that kind of background. And I appreciate your patience if it is taking you through it again. I did promised in this discrimination to really get to hiring as quickly as I can, to tell you all of the really new and exciting information we now have about hiring discrimination in the workplace, because it is quite a compelling story. So those are the types of studies we can do, and the next slide shows those kind of graphically. And to be brief, the green quadrants says these are the types of studies we can do about charging parties or claimants. Over on the right the purple one, these are studies we can do about employers. We can do studies about location or region. We can do studies in the orange about the type of discrimination, and that is what we are going to talk about today. And you can see what all those types of discrimination are. And you can also see that one and only one of them is the subject of hiring. And then finally we can study outcomes. Is the charging party supported with a merit allegation when the investigation is complete? Does a merit allegation favors the individual or the charging party? Or is the resolution one that favors the employer, a non-merit resolution. So that is just kind of a colorful graphic to show you the types of studies that are possible. If we move to the next slide now, we begin to look at issues, and where we are at in this five-year cycle of our research project now, we are middle of the second year, and our real commitment is to really, really understand these top five discrimination issues. The first one that says Donald Trump, I shouldn''t say that, but that is to remind you that that is about people getting fired, so that is firing. Discharge or constructive discharge, termination, if you will, choose whatever word you want, but everybody knows what that means. And as you can see, those bars are in thousands that -- that bar represents 140,000 out of 396,000 allegations. So the largest group of allegations is about people getting fired. And we talked about this before. Everybody understands the reasons for this. That is the same under every Civil Rights statute, whether it is about African Americans or women or other ethnic minorities, or aging. People are far more likely of course to file a complaint with the EEOC if they have been discriminated against in firing or discharge than any other type so it isn''t that it necessarily happens more often, it is just that if it does happen to you, you are probably more likely to file a complaint for the obvious reasons. It is a final, it is a, you feel it is a damage to your reputation. Do you just get very emotional and angry about it, but you have got the time to file, after all, you are not working tomorrow. So it is just rather natural and not the least bit unusual that that is so high. The second at 66,000 is reasonable accommodation. Followed by third is HINT, that stands for harassment, disability harassment, and intimidation. Fourth is the terms and conditions of employment, and the fifth is hiring. Now keep in mind we did say that there are about 25 or 26 different issues, there are actually about 40 issues but there are about 25 or 26 issues that have any real activity in them, and we are committed just to studying the top five. But if you look at the bottom of the slide there in the right-hand corner, you''ll see that those top five, if you were to add up all of those bars that represent thousands of allegations, they represent 76% of all allegations of Title I ADA discrimination. In other words, if we could eliminate those five or substantially reduce those by focusing our prevention efforts and education efforts in that direction, we could bring -- we could have a greater impact on reducing workplace discrimination than if we were to focus on five different issues. Okay? So to repeat that again, our priority is these five issues because collectively they represent 76% of all allegations even though there are as many as 40 possible issues we could be studying. So if we go to the next study, our issues, publications are now underway. The publications that you see before that under bibliography number 1 through 33 are non-issue studies, but we are finally beginning these issues studies, because frankly, the EEOC has asked us to, and they have asked us to study these five because they are the most prevalent. Now then you said well what order would they like us to study in? Because to study each one takes about a year. And they said to us, we would like you to study hiring first, and we said, well gee, hiring is in fifth place in terms of prevalence, in terms of the size of it, and you could see that they don''t want us to go from the biggest to the smallest, the order of importance to our friends at EEOC is hiring is first. One, it has the most expensive remedies because it involves compensatory remedies and things like back pay, so it is a very expensive hiring issue financially for business, and two, it is obviously most responsible for there being a low labor market activity rate among Americans with disabilities. You all heard that number of less than 30% of the people in the work force of Americans with disabilities of working age are employed in any particular year. There is a lot of problems with that statistic, by the way, we wont get into that, but labor market activity rate is probably not a very good indicator to use to begin with. But the point is, if we are ever going to improve that, we need to improve that through hiring. So that makes hiring very important to all of us who are concerned in employment and disability. The second one they would like us to study is reasonable accommodation. Again, it is not the largest but it is the second largest. And their interest in that of course and all of our interest in reasonable accommodation is it is the only unique type of discrimination under the ADA. You don''t see reasonable accommodation as a requirement in the Civil Rights Act, or in the ADEA for older workers, so, you know, reasonable accommodation is of course very, very important in ADA and the more we can learn about it the better. And then we will study firings or discharge and constructive discharge, and then harassment intimidation, and fifth and last we will study the terms and conditions of employment. Now while we are doing these studies, you know, we are also engaged in other work. We have other groups. There is about 50 researchers around the country working on the database at any point in time, and some of them continue to do the other types of studies that we talked about, like disability-specific profiles, industry-specific profiles, working on matters of gender, working on matters of ethnicity, those are some of the other things going on at the same time. But our biggest priorities and real commitment in terms of the deliverables we have to NIDRR under our grant is to complete the study''s, real extensive, improve our understanding of these five issues in the next, before the next three and a half years are up. Now if I could tell you one thing that if we go to the next slide, you will see something pretty interesting. You notice that it is a finding, certainly that hiring is relatively small with only 20,000 allegations out of 360,000. And you say, well, you know, what is going on? And part of the reason, I am sure everybody understands is, if you applied for a job, and you did not get the job, and you think maybe I was discriminated against in that employment process somewhere because of my disability, you know, you have some very tough questions to answer. Do I want to pursue that? One, how can I be sure that it was because of my disability, or even that that was a likelihood? Another one is gee, I am out of work or I am eager to find another, different, or better job, and wouldn''t my time be better invested continuing the search as opposed to grieving this matter? And there are many personal considerations of course that go into that, depending on how flagrant the violation was that you may have encountered. Hiring, I was taught back in 1978 by a Professor in Wisconsin named Paul Lustig, who is quite a legendary figure, that hiring is one of the most invisible processes in the world. And it is really hard to get a grip on exactly the reasons that people were selected to be hired or not hired unless you were in the inner circle of those making that decision. And that is another thing, I think, that applicants feel, and they might be less likely to bring a hiring charge. Other people will say, because of financial disincentives to work and other reasons that people with disabilities, especially if they have been out of the work force for any period of time are not as active in employment-seeking behavior as they might be. Were they not disabled, and therefore, there is less - there is less application activity, and therefore less hiring, and therefore less hiring discrimination. But the point is, you know, there is all kinds of ways we could, I suppose explain or interpret a finding like that, but hiring discrimination is less than 4% of all discrimination activity as we are able to measure it in this rather large database. And that in itself is really a profound finding. And not one that I think makes anybody happy. I suppose employers are happy of course that either they are not discriminating, or it is not being reported, but one wonders if the intent of ADA was to improve the labor market activity rate and improve the hiring, that more hiring is -- is not occurring, and that hiring discrimination levels are relatively low. Now that is a topic for another day, but let''s just put it this way. Finding number one, hiring is in a distant fifth place in the hit parade of issues that are prevalent in workplace discrimination, vis-à-vis Americans with disabilities. However, looking at this slide, you see some hiring-related issues, and I want to point out that these are not included in our hiring study. For instance, if we were to add what you might call rehiring on the first line, things like reinstatement or recall after a person has been laid off, for example, we could add almost another 8,000 allegations. If we were to include prohibited medical inquiry, we could add another 2,500. Qualification standards, 615. People who feel they have been discriminated in the testing process, 398. Exclusive or segregated unions, 372. The lack of posting notices at work, 193. Lack of access to apprenticeship programs or inappropriate or inaccessible advertising, almost another 100. So the point is, some day I think it would be nice for us to redo this study and not just include things related to the hiring decision, that is what we are talking about today when we say hiring, we mean the actual hiring decision to hire or not hire an individual with a disability. But things that bear upon hiring in kind of the front door of employment like these other things, well, we could increase that 20,000 figure by another almost 12,000 to something over 31,000. And then, yes, hiring would still be, that''s a typo there; it says fourth place, it should say fifth place. Hiring would still be in fifth place even with all of those, but it would really be tied for third. Because after the first two, discharge and reasonable accommodation, the others are all at about, the next three are all at about 31, 32,000, 33,000. So, there is you know, hiring is a bit bigger, at least 50%, 60% bigger than it appears to be if we were to add the hiring-related dimensions. We did not do that for the studies I am going to describe to you. But I just want to show you that hiring is not as tiny as it appears to be. Okay. At this point, what I would like to do, well, let''s do one more slide, and the next slide, you say for each issue, in this case for hiring, these are the studies we have. These first four lines in red correspond to those publications those references that are on the bibliography the last four. 34, for example, is entitled Characteristics of the Charging Party, Hiring Discrimination Against People with Disabilities. 35, Characteristics of the Employers. 36, the Nature of the Closure Status. In other words merit versus not merit, and then 37 is a Chat Analysis, what is called Predictors of Merit. So in those publications you see the first four types of studies we would do for each issue. The next two which are in progress, but are not done yet, is a trend analysis. So how did hiring discrimination change over time from 1992 to 2005 from year to year? And then the final one is to build a hierarchal linear model. This is somewhat of a theory building exercise, but it really ties everything together so that you get a very comprehensive model about all of the previous studies as well as some additional dimensions that are a little bit too technical for today. So for each issue we would like to do six studies like this, and as you can see four are done now. And that is enough for us to go ahead and present to you what we found, and the other two will be completed by about July, if you want to check back with us then, we should have those, and then we will move on to reasonable accommodations, spend a year on that, and then we will move on to discharge and spend a year on that. So you can kind of see where we are headed and what our plan is. Now I would like you to leave the slides for a time, if you will, and walk, cross walk with me over to a handout that you have, and the handout is called Hiring Tables, 03-18-08 Robin, for our host, Robin Jones. Give people a minute to put their fingers on that. And you will see in considerable detail now, we are really into the meat of today''s presentation. Exactly what we learned about the subject of hiring. And the first page of that handout says Charging Party Tables. And what you see in this table and I will, for those of you who may not have it or don''t have access to it presently, I won''t read it verbatim, but I will describe it to you as clearly as I can. What you see in that table is how we do a study like this. So basically we take the target group, which is hiring, which is 19,572 allegations, and hiring is defined as the failure or refusal by an employer to engage a person as an employee. Again, there are other hiring-related issues, when the EEOC uses this code for hiring, they are talking about the go or no-go decision to hire an individual worker. And then we take that group and we compare and contrast it with a comparison group, which consists of the other prevalent issues that are in the database, not all of them, just the other four most prevalent issues. And those are discharge and constructive discharge, which as you can see is about 127,000, 128,000; followed by reasonable accommodation, 65,000; followed by disability harassment and intimidation, 33,000; and followed by the terms and conditions of employment, at 32,000. And you see the definitions of all of those things. Well, all of those allegations 259,680, they are all collapsed into the comparison group. Okay? So we are not dealing with the rest of the database and all of the small issues. We are comparing and contrasting hiring, the target group, with an aggregate of the four other prevalent discrimination issues known as the comparison group. And that includes again discharge, constructive discharge, reasonable accommodation, harassment, and the terms and conditions of employment. Now for the researchers out there, I dont think they will call in with this question, but they will say aren''t these groups of rather unequal size? One is only 20,000, the other one is 260. And the answer is yes, but there are a number of statistical machinations you do to address that. It has to do with the type of statistics we use, the alpha levels we set, some of the controls we put on, some of the limitations of the study and the way the data is interpreted, but it is entirely valid when you are dealing with tests of proportion, which is how we test these things to go ahead and compare groups that are that different in size. Okay. So you get to see what is going on there. The next thing I would like you to look at then, is the next page of that same handout, Table 2. And now you begin to see hiring and non-hiring allegations by impairment types. So first we are going to talk about charging party characteristics, and we are going to talk about the person''s type of impairment. Okay? And the columns to focus on, you say, my gosh, this is a busy page, and it is, but the columns you want to focus on are the columns that say percent. And if you look in the middle of the page it says hiring percent. And if you look into the next column, you will see non-hiring percent. Now if you follow down the column called Hiring Percent, you will see frequently an ampersand symbol, like a letter a with a circle around it. And every time you see that, that is an impairment type in which the proportion, not the number, the proportion of allegations related to hiring is higher than the proportion related to the target group. So, for example, just scanning down the list, what you would notice is that on a proportional basis, please remember that qualifier, on a proportional basis, if you look at hearing, for example, people with hearing impairment, deaf people and people with hearing impairment, you will note that the proportion is 9.5% of all allegations filed by people with hearing impairment relate to hiring, whereas for the non, in the non-hiring, excuse me, 9.5% are derived, of all hiring allegations are derived from hearing-impaired people. Only 3.6% are derived, are non-hiring issues. Okay? In other words the prevalence of the proportion of hiring allegations is three times higher in deafness than it is for non-hiring allegations. Okay? Vision, 7.9 as opposed to 2.7. Again, almost three times higher in vision impairment. And you begin to see, then, who is having difficulties in hiring. Who is having a disproportionate level of filing a disproportionate level relative to their population size of allegations in hiring. Another high group is, really, frankly amputation, but missing digits and limbs at 3.3%. Again, as it is compared to the control group, the target group, I am sorry the comparison group of 1.1%. Respiratory and pulmonary conditions: 2.9 compared to the comparison group 1.2. Paralysis 2.8 compared to 0.9. Now you don''t want to get trapped up in something like gee, these are really small percentages or small numbers. That is not the point, that is not the comparison that is being made here scientifically. What is important here is to compare the percentage column and the percentage figure in one column to its counterpart in the other column. That is where you begin to see what significant differences are. So hiring is also much bigger for people with cerebral palsy, for speech impairment, for schizophrenia, and for disfigurement. These are the disability groups that are expressing on a proportional basis far more complaints of hiring discrimination. The first and most overwhelming thing you notice about them is that most of these are sensory or physical disabilities, with the exception, frankly, of schizophrenia. Now the same column of hiring percentage, when you are looking at the number sign, are impairments that are much lower and have far fewer allegations of hiring on a proportional basis than the comparison group. An example is right at the top. Back injuries is 15 compared to 16.9. Non-paralytic orthopedic impairments 8 compared to 12.2 that is an enormous reduction. And what that tells you is those are types of impairments are experiencing discrimination that is not hiring related, that has to do more with job maintenance, obviously in back injury, for example, those are probably a lot of worker compensation claims, and as opposed to people who were seeking employment. [coughs] Excuse me. So that table is for your benefit to show you in a comprehensive sense if you have a particular impairment group of interest, where there is a over-representation of allegations in hiring, that is the ampersand, and when there is under-representation of allegations in hiring, that is the number sign for that impairment group. That is simply how you interpret that. Next the research question there, is how does impairment matter when it comes to hiring discrimination? And as you can see, that is a fair amount of that, those are some pretty important findings. If we move to Table 3, we will finish off charging party characteristics. We will look at the age of people, their ethnic status and their gender. Under Table 3, again, looking at the hiring percent, and looking for those ampersands, you see much higher proportions for younger people. In the 18 to 21 year group, 22 to 29, 30 to 39 group, all of those age groups are elevated; they all have ampersands. Their numbers are higher than the number in the far right-hand column, in some cases substantially so, as in the 22 to 29 year old group. That tells you something very different. That tells you ADA discrimination in hiring is disproportionally directed towards younger job applicants, under the age of 40, but particularly elevated in the 18 to 29 year old age groups. Now, again, we will speculate a little bit later on in terms of why that might be, but what does it, you know, tell you already even as a practical matter, all of you who are out there working in the area of school to work transition or working with young adults, or working in disability populations, which are predominantly young adults, for example, spinal cord injury or brain injury, your efforts to educate people about their ADA rights and your efforts to educate employers about their particular vulnerability towards applications from younger workers, is time well spent. If you look down at the next item, you can see ethnicity, and the research question here is how does race matter or how does race and ethnicity interact with disability in the area of hiring discrimination? And here you see only two elevations. You see an elevation, a very substantial elevation among white or Caucasian job applicants with disabilities, as well as Native American, Alaskan natives. You see other ethnic minorities are lower with the exception of Asian, which is identical in terms of hiring and non-hiring allegations, and the allegations are on a proportional basis. You want to disregard the numbers and focus on the percent. And finally, with respect to charging characteristics as matter of gender, and you will see males are reporting far more ADA Title I complaints than females on a proportional basis. Far more, 65% compared to 15% for non-hiring allegations. Conversely, since one cannot be both male and female; these are mutually exclusive events, the proportions are reversed, you know, when you look at females, they are 50% in non-hiring, and only 34% in the area of hiring. So one wonders of course what is going on with ethnicity, gender, age, but the bottom line is age is one matter. You know, you can''t help but look at these three tables without saying, well, some of this, of course, is the influence of other civil rights laws. For example, if you are discriminated against and you are over the age of 40, you may bring your complaint under ADEA with the belief that maybe you will get a better shake under that law, or it is better developed, or it has more, there is more case law, or that you are not sure your discrimination was disability related, but you more likely believe it is weighted towards discrimination about age, or for the next table about my ethnic status, or for the next table about my gender. Well, I don''t think it is lost on anybody that younger workers under the age of 40 don''t have age protection, so they will bring their complaints under ADA if they are disabled. Caucasians don''t have ethnicity protections under the Civil Rights Act, so they are going to bring their complaints under ADA if they are disabled, and males, same situation. So, you know, it is entirely likely that what you are seeing going on in hiring there is a reflection of applicable laws that people are invoking to bring their complaint. Although, we don''t know that for sure. Okay. That is it with respect to charging parties. The next group then we look at, the next study we look at is what is going on with the employers? And what you begin to see is a slight elevation for small employers with fewer than 100 employees. That actually is a statistically significant difference, believe it or not, of 1.45% that 35.7 to 34.3. And so for obvious reasons the real small employer is 15 to 100, they don''t have developed human resources departments, and frequently, you are not able to access the type of training or take time from work to go to that type of training. You have all seen this in your various works. So there may be a little bit more vulnerable in the hiring area. That is always regrettable, because most hiring activity occurs among employers of 200 or fewer employees. So certainly a situation that even though the difference is small, we may want to address. Not a whole lot going on there. Much more interesting, perhaps, is the next, in what are the industries that are at the highest risk for hiring discrimination? And the answers there are public administration, educational services, huge differences there, really. Transportation and warehousing, also very big. Professional scientific and technical services are examples of industries that are disproportionally high in terms of hiring discrimination relative to the other prevalent discrimination issues. So that completes our treatment of employer characteristics, or the second article that we are reviewing today. Really, the most interesting articles, the ones I enjoy the most, have to do with the question of closure. Closure status, or resolutions. And what this means is, if you bring an allegation of hiring discrimination, what is your hit rate, if you will? If you are the charging party, what is the win rate? How often does the EEOC find in your favor as opposed to finding on behalf of the employer? And if you go to the next page in the handout, which is Table 6, Roman numeral 6, it says Closure Status: Hiring versus Non-Hiring Allegations. Here you want to look in the third and fourth column, where it says hiring proportion, and non-hiring proportion. And you want to go down quickly to where the letters are bubbled up for you, it says: Subtotal Merit. The numbers you see there, you know, jump out in you. And they are read this way. That for non-hiring allegations, the merit rate is 20.6%, roughly 1 in 5. For hiring allegations, however, the merit rate is 26%. It''s 5.4% higher. That is an enormous difference, my friends. Again, please try to keep in mind that you are only looking at things on a proportional basis and direct comparison. So it is 26 versus 20.6. That is an enormous difference. That means the merit rate is in itself 26% higher for hiring allegations than for other allegations, for non-hiring allegations in the comparison group. That is a very, very profound difference. And it is striking to me and I am not going to hesitate right now to get in to some discussion about this, because if as I was taught in the late 70s by Professor Lustig, if hiring is one of the most invisible processes in the world, then that might discourage me from bringing an allegation of hiring if I think I have been discriminated against. But if I do bring it, my merit rate is substantially higher than it is for other allegations. In other words, the EEOC has become quite adept at sorting through the mist, if you will, and making hiring a more transparent process than it has been historically because it is counterintuitive that we should have a higher merit rate in hiring than in other issues that are where there is more of a paper trail for currently employed people. That is an amazing finding. Then the reverse is true. If you go down two rows below that, you see a very important row called No Reasonable Cause. And this is where the employer is vindicated, not because of a technicality, but because there is not sufficient evidence to conclude that a discriminatory event occurred. And the allegation is not supported. What you can see there is that vindication happens less frequently, 59% in hiring, than it does in non-hiring at 68%. Again, feel free to ask me about this, if you want. But you say, is this really a big deal? 6% here, 8% there? And the short answer to it is yes, and I would be glad, if somebody wants to ask why we dealt with that in the previous session though. And I try to make it clear, you know, the type of analysis you are doing here is comparing one proportion against another, and in a large n like this, when you have large, tens and hundreds of thousands of allegations, 5, 6, 7, 8 percentage points is really a big deal, and has both statistical significance that is rather easy to achieve but it does have some practical significance in the real world as well. If you include the various kinds of technicalities that can occur, and you go down to the bottom row, you see Subtotal Non-Merit, and again, this is the percentage of cases that lack merit, and therefore, the employer is upheld at the conclusion of the investigation, the employer, the person with, in hiring is prevailing the non-merit rate is 74% versus 79.4%. So it is just the absent merit rate, of course, and there is still a 5.4 point spread. You will remember in our earlier training, the merit rate overall in the entire database is 21.9%, and therefore, when you get a deviation from that, it usually is quite a big deal. Now, that has to do with comparing, that is the third study, and that compares the merit rate for hiring and the merit rate for non-hiring. And to repeat the conclusion again, the merit rate for hiring is higher than the merit rate is for non-hiring issues. And that it was quite a surprise to us as researchers. What the next and the final study does is quite different. This is called Figure 1, a partial tree depicting drivers of hiring discrimination under ADA. And what you see there looks like a little decision tree. Let me explain to you what this is now. In this particular study, we are not looking at -- at hiring allegations versus non-hiring. We are looking within the group of hiring allegations only. Okay? The 19,500. Within hiring allegations, we know that 26% of the cases are of the allegations are prevailing in their claim, the 26% of the time, the EEOC believes as concluded that a discriminatory event has occurred. The question here, the research question here is, what drives that? What is moving that? What is that related to? And the answer comes in the first box right below that, and it is strongly influenced by age. That higher merit rate and hiring of 26% is very, very much influenced by age. As a matter of fact, if you look at the age group 16 to 34, you find the hiring rate goes all the way up to 34%. If you know nothing else about the person, other than their age, you know that they are going to have another 10-point elevation in their merit rate if they are under the age of 34. The next row says what is driving that 34% rate in the age group, 16 to 34. And the answer is, your type of impairment. Well, what type of impairment? The answer is, impairments that are not behavioral disabilities. Meaning, not psychiatric or drug addiction. This, again, is a really interesting finding to people who are psychologists such as myself and sociologists who study disabilities. What it says, if you look on the left for sensory physical and neurological conditions, as well as allegations that relate to the second, third, and fourth prongs of the ADA definition of disability, record of, regarded as, associated as a person with disability, the merit rate is 34% within that young age group. So, if you are young and have a physical sensory or neuro impairment that is what is driving this higher merit rate for the issue of hiring. There is one exception to that on the right side under behavioral, and that is behavioral is very much driven by certain industries, and that those industries would be the ones in the middle box at the bottom. Agriculture, real estate, mining, food services, professional and technical services, public administration. There is a lot of hiring activity and a lot of actual merit, real discrimination, not allegations of discrimination, not a perception of discrimination, but real actual discriminatory events for psychiatrically impaired people or addicted people in those industries. That is the only exception under the behavioral column. Why is that second to the last row such a big deal under impairment? It shows again we found this over and over in these studies, where the prevailing feeling in psychology is that the disabilities that people are most fearful of and that experience the most negative attitudes are psychiatric, addictions and a few exceptions of physical conditions, i.e., HIV AIDS, epilepsy, those would be the most common. And if you go out and measure the attitudes of the public in general, by measuring their attitudes, this is what you find, and it is also what you find if you measure the attitudes of employers. However, we don''t measure attitudes. We measure the behavioral manifestations of negative attitudes, i.e., who is being discriminated against? Or as you heard in my introduction, who are hate crimes being perpetrated against? And when you look at it in terms of non-attitudes, if you ask people who do you like and don''t like, and who gives you the willies out in the disability world, you get one answer, but if you look at how people are being treated in our society, in these behavioral manifestations such as hate crimes and real, real employment discrimination, you find it is blind people, deaf people, conspicuous physical conditions, and neurological conditions, and it is not things psychiatric with the exception of schizophrenia, as you will remember, or addictions. These are really amazing findings in the sense of they make us take a very different look at this whole question of workplace discrimination and even attitudes towards people with disabilities. To summarize it, if, I am reading now just a paragraph from the one handout I have provided for people called Overview, and the paragraph reads as follows: "The four articles that follow are intended to illuminate the topic of workplace discrimination under ADA Title I. This is accomplished by comparing and contrasting various aspects in the hiring database of 19,500 with the comparison group of 260,000, comprised of the five other prevalent discrimination issues. The first article elucidates the unique characteristics of charging parties who have hiring allegations. They are disproportionately male, younger, white, experiencing more physical or sensory disabilities. The second article describes the unique characteristics of employers. They are employers with 15 to 100 workers, or over 500 in the western United States, and include industries such as education, public administration, transportation, warehousing, professional, et cetera, agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting, and construction. The third study explores the merit rate in hiring, which are the outcomes of the EEOC investigations, and in simple terms, merit closures distinguish an allegation from an actual discriminatory event. Researchers found that in hiring the merit rate is elevated which is counterintuitive to the perception that hiring is an invisible process. Finally, the researchers attempted to identify those variables in the data state that differentiate merit from non-merit within the hiring category. Merit outcomes are heavily influenced by age (younger) and impairment (physical, sensory, or neurological) of the charging parties." My friends, these studies we think are of import because they allow us to, we are all in the business, if you chimed in on this phone call today, it is probably because you care about the Act and the Act meaning the ADA, and if you care about the Act, you want to, ADA is defined as an anti-discrimination statute. So we are all in the business of reducing discrimination. Some people look upon it as a fire that is out of control, some people look upon it as a virus, some people look upon it as a crime that needs to be eradicated, eliminated, controlled, minimized. We are all in that business, and our project here at VCU and around the country, the National EEOC-ADA Research Project, takes the position that, if you want to win a war like this, you have to know your enemy. And, by the way, our enemy is not the employer. Discrimination is every bit the employers enemy as much as it is for people with disabilities. Everybody wants the same outcome; everybody has the enemy. So by taking workplace discrimination, breaking it down on the issues, putting it under a microscope, looking at the characteristics of charging parties, employers, and investigatory outcomes as we have done here today, we come to know our enemy better and we become better equipped to combat and fight it in a successful manner. And that is the reason I am thrilled to be part of this particular project. You know, when we do some interviews and kind of qualitative work with employers about hiring people with disabilities and what is their resistance, we find and by the way it is substantiated in the data that there is markedly little resistance, that if a person has demonstrable qualifications and abilities and there is a willingness to accommodate upon the part of the employer, that hiring does ensue. But when you get employers that are more honest, and they tell you what is it that frames you most about hiring this person with a disability, and they will say it is that I might someday have to fire them, and maybe it is because of their performance, but maybe also because they are the last person in the door, and in these hard economic times where a layoff ensues it is last hired first fired, and that is gonna be harder for me to do. So it isnt about performance issues so much when we study the manner of firings and terminations and discharge, we will find some, we will be able to relate that to the hiring literature and have a better understanding of both. These are some, I know we have some human resources people on the line. I always value them and their input and their questions. These are some statements that were made, actually made; one of them was made here at the university on performance evaluations forms that resulted in the termination of a person. This is in the spirit of comedy, by the way. The first one says, imagine your performance evaluation and this was the concluding statement: His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity. Or, He would be out of his depth in a puddle. Or, these are actual examples now: This young lady has delusions of adequacy. She sets low personal standards and consistently fails to achieve them. And last but not least: This employee should go far, and the sooner he starts, the better. This is the circumstance that people are telling us they are trying to obviate by not hiring when they failed to hire a qualified person with a disability, because they dont want to be in that position, but those examples are all for performance reasons and that as I am trying to share with you is not the immediate concern of employers. It is more with, it is for other reasons, I would say. Let''s just put it that way. Not necessarily disability related. The big question we are left with in an HR sense is, are people hired for ability or personal likeability? Is hiring an invisible process or is it becoming more transparent as human resources gets more scientific and more sophisticated? And what is going on, what are the reasons that these differences within hiring occur by impairment groups? By gender, by race, by age? When you do database mining, the intent is to generate more research questions, and that, I think, you can see is another thing we have achieved. There will be many follow-up studies based on our work, by us and by others, but we have taken a big step forward here. Okay. We got about 20 minutes left. I would like to reserve that for your comments, your questions or observations. And I will turn it back to Robin our host and be happy to hear what you got to say.
Great. Thank you, Brian for your information and for reviewing what is you know, can be complicated and technical in terms of looking at numbers and trying to understand how the review and the technical aspects of how that data is being looked at, but I think you have done a job of trying to help people understand how that can be practical and how that information can be used in their efforts to assist people with employment or assist people in knowing and understanding their rights under the ADA. I would like to at this time ask Operator to give some instructions to our participants and we will take some questions at this point, and let individuals in the audience ask Brian for some either additional clarification or just questions they may have about the information that he provided. So go ahead, Operator.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press the one key on your touch tone telephone. If you question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press the pound key. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press the one key on your touch tone telephone.
Okay. As we are waiting here for people to queue in for questions on this information and this data, Brian, when you were, a few points you kind of gave some information and gave some thoughts to people about if they for example, specifically the issue of youth as being a target group or group of individuals. From looking at the data, specifically from the perspective of let''s say additional training areas that you would think that employers might benefit from for more information either from those areas that were areas that we are showing are particularly problematic for employers or whatever, what would be your thoughts in that regard as some individuals in the audience may be involved in providing directly some training or assistance to employers?
I would think you know, the first implication I see for training employers is, you know, if I have got 8 hours of training to do with them, I am not going to do eight hours on hiring, because it is fifth place in terms of their list of risk level. However, when I get to hiring, I am going to tell them to, you know, alert the HR people, the people who are making the, who are doing the interviewing, and the people making the hiring decisions, i.e. the hiring managers, to pay particular attention to the applications of younger workers under the age of 34, because their risk level for receiving an allegation and having it verified, meaning that it will be proven positive is substantially higher than it is for the workers over 40. So, you know, those are the kinds of specific things that you can say that are very evidence-based, very data-based, to help them kind of prioritize things.
Right.
And I would be much more vigilant in making a hiring decision about a younger disabled person than I might be a little bit more relaxed if the person were middle age or older.
Of course obviously there is dual disability, dual disability issues there that somebody would obviously have to be concerned about. I mean dual protection, you have an older worker, like age discrimination law at the same time.
Right. Right.
That cautions the employer aside from the disability-related issues in that regard. What about the, again, do you think that given what the data and the statistics is showing about an increase or rise in the area of harassment, that employers are not necessarily thinking of harassment in terms of people with disabilities the same as they might be in other groups that more commonly or historically have been thought of from the area of harassment?
Well, absolutely. I mean, I am willing to bet if we have got, you know, 100 people on this phone call right now, that 100 people have at some point in their time been to sexual harassment training. I am willing to bet two people maybe disability harassment was brought up in the same context. The definition is the same, the definition is exactly the same as it is for harassment and intimidation under both laws, but employers aren''t even being alerted to the possibility that for Pete''s sake there has been over 35,000 allegations filed under ADA on disability harassment and what does that mean? What are the jokes and epithets and insults, and pejorative language and things that might, you know, require the same attention as it does in gender or race? So we haven''t gotten to that area yet, but when we do, it is going to be quite interesting. If we could insert in every two-hour harassment training program, 10 minutes on disability, we could go a long way towards bringing that number down.
Yeah. I think it is interesting of our time how that number probably again I think once you get into your studies more further in this area, you will have, probably be able to tease it out a little bit more, but how that is something that has you know, potentially grown.
Yes.
Not an area that was initially in the early years, but has been you know, more frequently seen in later years, and is that just because more people are coming forward on those issues, feeling more comfortable, more empowered? You know, what is it? I cant imagine that there is necessarily more harassment in the workplace; then again, maybe there is.
Yes, I will be able to tell, and who is coming forward?
Yeah.
Again, are younger people more sensitive about it, or are they more or less offended by things you know? So that is the kind of thing we will be able to answer in another couple of years.
Yeah, definitely. Okay. Operator, were there any questions? We have been talking so I havent come back to you about any questions we have from our audience.
Yes; our first question. Your line is open.
Good ahead. Go ahead.
If your line is muted could you please un-mute your line. I will go to the next question.
Sure.
Our next question. Your line is open.
Hi, we are actually in a group meeting and while you found the hiring the merit rate difference between hiring issues and non-hiring issues counterintuitive, I sat here and it made perfect sense to me, because in my mind, and also based on personal experience, somebody, because in hiring, most of the time an interviewer or manager is just going to, just wasn''t the right fit. We found somebody who is a better fit. And you can''t build a case on it just wasn''t the right fit. So if someone feels that they have enough case that is winnable to bring an EEOC complaint, then my gut reaction is they weren''t told this just wasn''t the right fit. They were told, We don''t hire people like you. Or, You cant do this kind of work, or something that is more blatant and easily more defendable to prove merit. If you are told, like most of us are, you are just not a right fit, you are not even going to think twice about trying to file a complaint, because you can''t support it. So I was wondering if there have been any sort of qualitative studies, actually looking at what the evidence was brought forth and to see if that really has a greater impact on the merit rate in hiring, that people believe, I have got to have a really, really good case, and Ive got to have a tape recording, or a letter, a witness, to support the hiring discrimination. Thanks.
Well, first of all, this is why I love doing these presentations because I learn something every time. Interpreting the findings is always something that should be done. Of course not by academics but by people like yourselves, and all of you who have feedback like that, I hope you will reach out and send it to me. Not only have you explained why many people who might think they were discriminated against because of disability don''t come forward, i.e., you are not a good fit, which is something legitimate that you can be told and you got to deal with, but you have also explained why those that do come forward are prevailing: because they have got the goods. And that is your take on your experience and that is extremely valuable to me to hear that. I don''t, I try to provide people with the numbers, and give some speculation as to what might be behind me, but I can never do that as well as you can, as the listeners can on this call. And I really always enjoy and appreciate hearing impressions like that. In answer to your question about qualitative, again, our project just does this large scale database mining to produce these kinds of findings. The hope would be that others that are more inclined to be qualitative researchers would do follow-up work to better explain the findings such as you are doing, but I am aware of no such work, not as it relates to charges of workplace discrimination. Thank you so much. That is a great comment, really.
Next question, please.
Our next question. Your line is open.
Go ahead. Hello?
No questions.
Okay. Our next question. Your line is open.
Hello. I have a comment and who is the Civil Rights Bureau Director for our Equal Rights Division has a question, and has to leave, so I will let her go ahead with her question and then I will make a comment, if you don''t mind.
Fine.
Okay, my question is, isnt it correct that people may file a complaint on more than one basis? For example, race and disability, age and disability. And I think that is correct. And if so, it seems that the reason for the statistics related to age, race, and all, must be for a reason other than people choosing what basis to file on.
No, you are absolutely right. Not only that, you know, people can also file on the basis of their ADA and their blindness, and they can file on one or more issues. For example, these 20,000 these are allegations, these are discrete allegations of hiring discrimination. They werent filed by 20,000 people, they were filed by about 12,000 people. When John Doe walks into the EEOC to file a complaint of discrimination, he or she is typically filing 1.6 complaints, 1.6 allegations. In other words, the person typically files more than one, you know, more likely to be two than it is likely to be one. Sometimes three or four or five or six allegations. And what you have pointed out here, is a real limitation of our work. When we study issues, we are looking at you know, think about these as crimes, and think about a person goes in and he does robbery and assault and murder in a single incident. I mm just, you know, looking at the robbery only, and what you are asking is, might there not be just more than one basis involved, like, Im not just a person with a disability; Im also, you know, I have a gender and I have an ethnicity, and I have an age. And they certainly may file under more than one statute. Now, by the way, we can get to that data, but that is gonna be years before we do. In other words, what are the patterns? When a person files a hiring ADA discrimination, what else do they file? And under what other civil rights law? We actually have that data available to us, but, boy, we are a long way from doing things that advanced.
Okay, thank you.
Really good question.
I have a comment.
Please.
I am a Hispanic female who has worked in Civil Rights for a few years. And our experience in the Equal Rights Division and the community is that people who are categorized as white do file complaints on race and gender and disability and what not. They, white people are protected the same as black people and Hispanics. But the problem is that people of color, your Asian, African American, Hispanic American, et cetera, folks who have a disability, suffer what we call a double whammy. And they are less likely to file on disability and race. They are more likely to file just on race. They are also less likely to want to be challenging because those cultures have not been acculturated to the mainstream of disability disclosure. We tend to think it is a taboo to come up with I have a mental health condition, or I am a diabetic, or I have XYZ. So I think that naturally, the number of charges coming from people filing as white and disabled, are going to be more frequent than those that may be African American and disabled, Hispanic and disabled, and so on and so forth. I don''t know if that is everybody else''s experience, but that is what I have observed.
Thank you very much for your observation.
I am not showing any more questions in queue at this time.
Okay. Thank you. So good dialogue. I think you get from the group of people who are participating, obviously they all work in a very broad diverse, you know, areas, and have different perspectives on, you know, the data, the work, the things that are happening out there in the streets, and I think as we have talked many times, many of us across the country involved in this work have talked many times, is that there is always the difference between sometimes what happens when you are strictly just looking at data versus what people may feel or think, you know, in the streets about what is going on. But of course data becomes very critical and very important when you are talking to prove something, or are you are talking to legislators or other people in different various positions within government and things of that nature so. But I think that you are correct in saying there are limitations of what you can look at. One, you are only looking at federal data, you are not looking at the differences in things between or the interplay between states, fair employment laws and things and employment and the ADA. And you are limited to what the data, the scope of what the data is and the work that you do. So, we do appreciate you giving us this second opportunity to hear about the work that is being done. And I think we will be tracking you in the upcoming years in regards to the ongoing rollout of the various other areas that you are going to be going into more depth in with the data you are looking at, and I think that there will continue to be good information there for all of us to monitor and watch and hopefully use in the work that we do, no matter what role we happen to play. Whether it is from an employer understanding what is happening out there, or individuals who are involved directly in the disability rights arena using this information for a variety of reasons. Before we go ahead and sign off, if you have other comments or closing comments you would like to make at this point, Brian, go ahead and do that.
No, just to thank you Robin for the opportunity and thank all of the good people who have come to participate today. I have enjoyed it, I always do. And maybe in another year or so we can do another update on reasonable accommodation.
Great, thank you. Okay, and just to let everybody know that our next session is scheduled for April 15th, and we are switching gears a little bit. We have had several sessions on employment and some other issues. Next month we are going to be talking to Howard Kallem, who is with the U.S. Department of Education, in the area of post-secondary education, and he will be focusing on, his topic is, There Are No IEPs In College, and this program will really highlight the issues associated with and understanding the differences for students, parents, anyone involved with individuals in post-secondary education students with disabilities, about those differences and how to be better prepared for the experience in college as it relates to reasonable accommodations, and the striking difference between what is eligible or available under IDEA for the K through 12 system versus what the laws protect and provide under the ADA and Section 504. So we invite you again to join us for that session, again, April 15th from 1:00 to 2:30 p.m. Central time. You can translate that into your own time. More information on the series is available at www.ada-audio.org. Once again, I want to thank our speaker Brian McMahon for joining us today and providing information, and I want to thank all of you on behalf of the regional network of Disability Business Technical Assistance Centers otherwise known as ADA Centers for joining us today for this program. Thank you very much, and have a good day, and the rest of the week.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today''s conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone have a great day.