Ask HN: Disabilities and DEI | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Disabilities and DEI

6 pointsgiantg24 comments

Are there any companies that track nuerodivergent or disabled metrics in their DEI efforts? Are there any restrictions preventing this sort of high-level or anonymous tracking?

My company usually puts out a report and makes a big deal about DEI and especially equitable treatment/opportunities. Yet they leave out people with disabilities. It would seem the people with disabilities would have just as much if not greater need for equitable treatment given their disabilities may impact job performance or how others perceive them.

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You really can't do that legally, at least not in the US. HIPPA prevents you from sharing other people's health info, which disability is. That includes sharing it in the aggregate when it would be easy enough to de-anonymize the data due to small or small-sh sample sizes.

If anything, we should be doing less of this information gathering not more. It's very creepy, for example, that corporations have made it normal for employers to ask their employees questions about their sexual preferences and store that information in databases.

There's also a safety issue at play. If you're part of an historically mistreated group, do you really want your employer cataloging that? What happens when the zeitgest changes and things get bad for that group again? There are plenty of Jewish people in America who are shocked at the amount of AntiSemitism being thrown their way - A lot of folks thought that was behind us. Likewise, Iran was a fairly liberal country back in the 70's and the tide turned very quickly the other way. And of course there's the issue of women's rights in the post Roe era.

- It's HIPAA, not HIPPA.

- HIPAA only applies[1] to "covered entities" as defined by HIPAA, under Title II and HHS[2]. That said, a lot of non-covered entities try to conform to HIPAA voluntarily.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_a...

2. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/subtitle-A/subchapter-...

I'm sure they have some data, but it is probably considered sensitive. If I have a disability that needs an accommodation to do my job, that would be something between myself, my boss, and HR.

There are also plenty of people with disabilities who do not declare that status. I've got one. It has zero impact on my work, so I don't report it to HR. So they might not publish even aggregate numbers because they are probably incorrect.

The other DEI metrics shouldn't be collected either then. People could respond as "other" or "decline to respond" to things like ethnicity or gender. In fact, my workplace DEI charts/metrics are only binary for gender. Clearly these are not accurate.

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