Applying for jobs – When should you reveal your deafness?

-Ana

Graduate students, postdocs, and other academics applying for jobs face a hypercompetitive job market, limited geographic options, and a potentially withering assessment of their research productivity, teaching abilities, and overall potential. If you are deaf or hard of hearing, add to this scenario the weighty decision of when you should reveal your deafness during the job application process. In the United States employers are prohibited from discriminating against job applicants based on disability. However, not all countries offer this protection, and even in the U.S. many of us worry that unconscious, or even conscious, bias can often taint the work of search committees.

So what is a deaf/HoH job applicant to do? Do you reveal your deafness in your CV? Once you are offered an interview? When you are on site for an interview or visit? Do you reveal it to the search committee chair? To the human resources department? Do you request accommodations when invited for an interview, or do you wing it? Answers to these questions may vary depending on your degree of hearing loss, the ethos of the institution or position you are applying to, and your personal style. Answers may even vary depending on whether you are applying for a job today or several years ago, and your perception of the societal climate at the time.

The Mind Hearswould like to learn from academics who have navigated (or are navigating) the job search phase about the choices they have made, what they wish they had done differently, and what they have found particularly effective. Please help us out by answering this short survey (5-10 minutes) about your experiences. The survey will be available until July 18, 2019:

https://forms.gle/BWVjspLQAhuZLSreA

We would like to collate this collective knowledge and experiences into a compendium of anonymized comments to be posted at the end of summer as a blog post. By sharing the strategies we have tried, we hope to create a resource that can serve as a guide for all of us, and particularly for the upcoming generation of students and postdocs.