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October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, which seeks to celebrate the many work contributions of Americans with disabilities and to educate the public on the employment difficulties they often face.
In 2015, there were about 5.2 million people with disabilities employed in the United States. While the largest share of employed people with disabilities worked in management, professional, and related occupations (31.3 percent), this was smaller than the share of people with no disabilities employed in these same occupations (39.2 percent). Employed people with disabilities were more heavily concentrated in service occupations and in production, transportation, and material moving occupations than their counterparts with no disabilities.
Occupation | People with a disability | People without a disability | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Total | Men | Women | Total | Men | Women | |
Total employed |
100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
Management, professional, and related occupations |
31.3 | 28.7 | 34.3 | 39.2 | 35.7 | 43.2 |
Service occupations |
21.7 | 17.5 | 26.7 | 17.2 | 14.0 | 20.9 |
Sales and office occupations |
22.9 | 16.3 | 30.6 | 22.6 | 16.4 | 29.6 |
Natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations |
9.7 | 16.6 | 1.6 | 9.2 | 16.5 | 0.9 |
Production, transportation, and material moving occupations |
14.4 | 20.8 | 6.9 | 11.8 | 17.3 | 5.5 |
Highlights from the 2015 data:
These data are from the Current Population Survey. For more information, see "Persons with a Disability: Labor Force Characteristics — 2015" (HTML) (PDF). The employment–population ratio is the percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population that is employed. To learn more, see our page on people with a disability.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Celebrating National Disability Employment Awareness Month at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/celebrating-national-disability-employment-awareness-month.htm (visited December 12, 2024).