Under-represented: Where are all the deaf and hard-of-hearing academics?

-Michele

Through working on The Mind Hears since Sept 2018, I’ve had the chance to meet some amazing deaf and hard-of-hearing scholars and researchers.Our backgrounds, areas of expertise, degrees of hearing, and jobs differ.But one very common experience for deaf/HoH at mainstream institutions (i.e. not at a primary deaf/HoH university), is thae lack of mentors who are deaf/HoH. This isolation drove us to start the blog. But our common experiences lead to the question: Where areall the deaf and hard-of-hearing academics?

The American Speech Language Hearing Association classifies degree of hearing loss on a scale of mild (26-40 db), moderate (41-55 db), moderately severe (56-70), severe (71-90), and profound (91+) (ASHA). Despite these straight-forward definitions, understanding the statistics on hearing loss requires nuance. While tests prove that many people have some degree of hearing loss, only a subset of these folks wear hearing aids or use signed language; even fewer request work accommodations. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the federal National Institutes of Health, reports that 14% of the working age adult population aged 20–69 has significant hearing loss (Hoffman et al., 2017). This 14% report a greater than 35 decibel threshold for hearing tones within speech frequencies in one or both ears (NIDCD). The number of people with high-frequency hearing loss is double the number with speech range loss (Hoffman et al., 2017). However, not hearing watch alarms or computer keyboards is not considered to be as impactful as missing speech range frequencies.

As Figure 1 shows, the statistics on hearing loss are further complicated by age, which correlates with incidence of hearing loss. Among folks aged 60–69 years, 39% have hearing loss (Hoffman et al., 2017). Within the larger disabled community, we crips joke that we are a community that can recruit new members. Joking aside, the reality is that if you are a hearing person reading this, there is a very good chance that hearing loss will affect you or someone close to you during your working lifetime. The Mind Hearscan be a valuable resource for folks with newly acquired hearing loss.

So where are the deaf and hard-of-hearing academics? Doctoral degrees are generally awarded to academics between the ages of 20 and 29; the incidence of significant hearing loss within this population is 2.2% (Hoffman et al., 2017). The National Science Foundation’s annual survey on doctoral recipients reports that 54,664 graduate students earned PhD degrees in 2017 (NSF 2017)—wow, that represents a lot of hard work! Great job y’all! Now, if the graduate student population resembles the general population, then we should expect that 1202 of those newly minted PhDs are deaf/HoH. Instead, the survey reports that only 654 PhDs, or 1.2%, were issued to deaf or hard of hearing people (NSF, 2017). This suggests that deaf/HoH PhDs have half the representation that they do within the general population.
Furthermore, the distribution of deaf/HoH PhDs is not even among the fields of the NSF doctoral survey. In 2017, as shown in Figure 2, each of the fields of Humanities and arts, Education, and Psychology and social sciences has a greater percentage of deaf/HoH than each of the fields of Engineering, Life sciences, Physical and earth sciences or Mathematics and computer sciences. It seems like I’ve heard of greater numbers of deaf/HoH scholars and researchers in the fields of Deaf Studies, Deaf Education and Signed Languages Studies than in other fields. This could impact the distribution. Or perhaps some fields are more friendly to deaf/HoH scholars and researchers. Nevertheless, deaf and HoH are underrepresented in all fields within scholars and researchers with PhDs.

So, what can we do? These numbers reveal why so many of us feel isolated in our experiences within academia. The Mind Hears is one effort to facilitate networking and raise awareness of inclusion issues for deaf/HoH academics.

References

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Available at https://www.asha.org/public/hearing/degree-of-hearing-loss/

Hoffman HJ, Dobie RA, Losonczy KG, Themann CL, Flamme GA. Declining Prevalence of Hearing Loss in US Adults Aged 20 to 69 Years. JAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2017;143(3):274–285. doi:10.1001/jamaoto.2016.3527

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), Available at https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics-hearing.

National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. 2018. Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities: 2017. Special Report NSF 19-301. Alexandria, VA. Available at https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19301/.