That’s the question recently addressed by a Fordham student’s faculty-mentored research project. While scholars have long suspected that people with disabilities tend to get left behind in schooling, in employment, and in other sectors of life, the research by Emily Lewis, FCRH ’22, found that there is even more of this inequality in richer countries. And it suggests that policies may be needed to ensure growth and development benefit all people in a society.

Disability “tends to be ignored when we speak about inequalities,” said economics professor Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., co-director of the disability studies minor and founding director of Fordham’s Research Consortium on Disability. “And yet, disability is key when it comes to understanding people’s livelihoods, people’s standard of living.”

Mitra was the mentor for Lewis, an economics and philosophy major who spent last summer analyzing international disability data with support from a summer research grant. Such funding for student-faculty research is a priority of the University’s current fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student.

Lewis, Mitra, and economics doctoral candidate Jaclyn Yap are co-authors of the resulting research paper, Do Disability Inequalities Grow with Development? Evidence from 40 Countries, published April 25 in the academic journal Sustainability. The research sprouted from another project led by Mitra that highlights disability inequalities worldwide.

The Disability Data Initiative

Since 2006, more than 180 countries have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, an agreement to treat them not as objects of charity and medical treatment but rather as contributing members of society.

To support this goal and help policymakers move forward, Mitra spearheaded the Disability Data Initiative, a report on 180 nations’ census and survey findings regarding people with disabilities from 2009 to 2018. She led a team of graduate and undergraduate students, including Lewis.

Presented at a UN conference last June, the report showed that about one-quarter of nations didn’t ask about disability in their national surveys. In those that did, the data showed major gaps in the areas of education, health, employment, and standard of living between people with disabilities and those without them.

The database opened the possibility of doing an extensive study across countries to see if these gaps increased with development—something that had been long hypothesized but not tested on a large scale.

Eager to explore this question, Lewis made it her summer project. Her interest in the disability gap had been sparked during one of Mitra’s classes, at a time when she was looking for a way to get involved in undergraduate research.

“Seeing examples of how different researchers are approaching these questions was really interesting, and got me excited about how I could design this project for myself,” she said.

It was a big project—and a summer research grant gave her the means to spend the required time on it.

Help from a Fordham Benefactor

This and other grants to students were made possible by an alumni benefactor who has long funded undergraduate research—Boniface “Buzz” Zaino, FCRH ’65, whose long career in the investment world exposed him to the joys of researching and learning about new industries. “Once I got into it, it just opened the world, because you do get to explore and focus on areas that become very interesting,” he said.

He has funded students’ research for years, energized by the students’ enthusiasm for their projects, by what their projects have taught him about the world, and by the benefits to the student researchers themselves.

The research process, with its wide reading and focused inquiries, gives students a base for developing their interests and learning about new things over the long term, he said. “The University provides a student with the opportunity to develop a research process, and that’s got to be very helpful for them going forward, no matter what they do in life,” he said.

The Disability and Development Gap

Lewis met weekly with Mitra over the summer to design and carry out the project, examining 40 countries that have comparable data on peoples’ self-reported difficulties with seeing, hearing, walking, cognition, self-care, and communication.

Working on the Disability Data Initiative, they had already gotten glimpses of a wider disability gap in wealthier countries.

For instance, in low-income nation of Cambodia, 75% of adults with any kind of difficulty caused by disability were employed, just shy of the 79% for those without disability. But in economically booming Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, the gulf is far wider, with just 15% employment for those with any difficulty, compared to 56% for those without.

To see if such disparities represented a trend, Lewis crunched a big data set including lots of variables—levels of disability, gender, age, and urban versus rural location, as well as a nation’s place on Human Development Index, or HDI, a UN indicator of nations’ wealth and overall development.

She found that for many standard-of-living indicators, like adequate housing and access to electricity, there was little difference in the disability gap between richer and poorer countries.

But the story was different in three areas: education levels, employment rate, and a multidimensional measure of poverty. Gaps in all three increased as countries’ HDI increased. The results held up when Lewis looked at the data a few different ways, such as focusing on different development measures or population subgroups.

The results, the co-authors wrote, “suggest that as a country develops, policies, specifically in relation to education and employment, need to be implemented to narrow and, eventually, close the gaps between persons with and without disabilities.”

The research shows that while disparities may be greater in wealthier nations, disability inequalities aren’t just a problem in rich countries with older populations, Mitra said. Low-income countries have them too, even if they’re less pronounced.

“Even when almost everyone is poor, well, people with disabilities seem to be even poorer,” she said.

Lewis found it exciting to be involved in the research process and see it through from start to finish—figuring out the approach, changing direction as needed, and working independently. “[It’s] something I consider myself really lucky to have been involved in,” said Lewis, who was planning to work as a project assistant at a New York law firm after graduation to explore her interest in law school.

Mitra said that undergraduate research not only teaches students valuable skills but also gives them an inside look at how knowledge is produced, as well as all the caveats and limitations that come with it—an awareness that will serve them well in whatever field they pursue.

The University’s research grant program for undergraduates is “a unique opportunity for students, but also for as faculty,” Mitra said. “So I hope it does continue to attract the generosity of donors.”

To inquire about giving in support of student-faculty research or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, our campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.

These are some of the key findings from a new report and database called “The Disability Data Initiative,” released in June at the United Nations’ 14th Conference of the States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The project was spearheaded by Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of economics, co-director of the disability studies minor, and founding director of the Research Consortium on Disability, together with a team of seven undergraduate and graduate students. The initiative was supported by Fordham University, Wellspring Philanthropic Fund, and the World Bank’s Trust Fund for Statistical Capacity Building.

The Disability Data Initiative is one of the first of its kind to review and analyze comparable data on disability and inequalities across countries, Mitra said.

The idea for the project stemmed from the fact that more than 180 countries ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities since 2006, but there has been scattered and incomplete data around those with disabilities, which “prevents the development of appropriate and effective disability-inclusive policy,” according to the report.

Lack of Disability Data

Mitra and her team of students reviewed census and survey data from 2009 to 2018 for 180 countries across the world. They found that disability-related questions were missing from 24% of countries.

“It was quite shocking to see that one in four countries do not have disability questions of any kind in their censuses or national surveys,” Mitra said. “In many countries, people with disabilities continue to be invisible. We have no way of figuring out how they are doing from national statistics.”

If people with disabilities aren’t accounted for, their needs are easier to ignore, Mitra said.

“If they’re not captured, they definitely get less attention … and it’s going to be very hard for them to argue that their situation needs improvement,” Mitra said. “Policymakers can say, ‘well, they’re such a small minority, we have other groups to worry about.’”

Their analysis found that people with disabilities are a sizable group as people in “more than one in four households have a functional difficulty,” such as difficulty seeing or walking, Mitra said.

The main question related to disabilities that the team found on many censuses and surveys was “Do you have a disability?” which doesn’t allow for clear and comparable data, according to Sophia Pirozzi, FCRH ’21, who was an undergraduate student on the initiative and was responsible for collecting data from more than 1,000 surveys in 180 countries.

“Disability itself is a concept that only recently has been embraced as a socio-political [notion], as opposed to a medical deficit,” Pirozzi said. “So if we’re looking at international comparisons, a lot of the time the way the disability is defined varies greatly.”

Mitra said there is often stigma attached to the question, so people don’t always answer honestly.

“They may only think of very severe situations to qualify under the word disability,” she said. “If disability in general is stigmatized in society, they think that, ‘well, perhaps I do have a disability, but I don’t feel comfortable answering yes.’ It doesn’t produce useful data—it produces very small prevalence rates, and only captures the most extreme disabilities.”

Disparities for People with Disabilities

The team closely analyzed data from 41 countries who had comparable questions, usually based on questions from the Washington Group Short Set (WGSS) that have become the “gold standard” of surveying people about their level of disability. The questions cover topics such as mobility, seeing, hearing, communication, and cognition, and allow people to respond with a range of answers. Mitra and her team said that they would like the WGSS to be adopted and used by more countries.

“A lot of these were where we were able to compare persons who said, ‘I have no difficulty,’ or ‘I have a lot of difficulty,’ or a little bit. And that’s really useful information for us,” said Pirozzi, an English major and disabilities studies and sociology minor, who is currently interning at the United Nations in the department of economic and social affairs.

Mitra noted that this was “one of the first international efforts to document functional difficulty prevalence and education, work, health, standard of living and multidimensional poverty indicators for adults with and without functional difficulties.”

The analysis found that there was “a disability gap” in terms of quality of life between people with disabilities and those without This was true across countries in areas including educational attainment, literacy, food insecurity, and health expenditures.

For example, in Indonesia, 93% of respondents with no difficulties said that they had attended school, compared to 74% of those with some difficulty, and just 57% of those with a lot of difficulty. In South Africa, 45% of people with no difficulties reported being employed, compared to 40% of those with some difficulty, and 18% of those with a lot of difficulty.

Mitra said that this gradient of disparities from those with no difficulty to those with a lot of difficulty was one of their biggest findings.

“The degree of functional difficulties is associated with the degree of disadvantage, at least in education, in employment, and in some of these standard of living indicators, so that’s an important finding,” Mitra said. “That hasn’t been shown before.”

She said that this gradient shows the importance of not asking a “yes or no” question when it comes to disabilities.

“It implies that it’s important to measure inequalities for people on the spectrum [of disability],” she said.

Jaclyn Yap, a doctoral student in economics, who served as the data analyst for the initiative, said that understanding the varying needs of people with different levels of disabilities could help inform policy and resource decisions. The focus has always been on people with “a lot” of disability, she said, and while they study found that those people are struggling more, people with moderate disabilities still need services.

“They shouldn’t be taken for granted,” she said.

Putting the Work into Action

Mitra and her students said that they hope their work can be used by policymakers, researchers, and advocates to provide more resources and support for people with disabilities.

“We wanted it to be useful outside academia. And although we wanted it to be rigorous and scientific, we also took into consideration the general readers, which we’re hoping will advocate for persons with disability,” Yap said. “And also policymakers—they could use this as a means to help push for either laws or more budget for persons with disabilities.”

Funding for the project runs at least for another year, so Mitra said that they will include a new comparative analysis next year with different countries, including the United States.

“I’m hoping this will grow, because I’m hoping the data sets will become better and better, especially with the round of 2020 censuses,” Mitra said. “It’s starting with myself and seven students, and I hope it will grow into an international partnership among multiple universities.”

The Disability Data Initiative can be found at disabilitydata.ace.fordham.edu.