5 Women with Disabilities Who Should Be On Your Radar
We are approaching World Disability Day. As December 3rd gets closer, the media will be awash with “inspirational” stories of people with disabilities. While some level of disability awareness needs to be done to educate the general population, much of the media coverage ends up focusing on mere platitudes. If we are to have meaningful discussions about disability, the learning needs to be a two-way street. People with disabilities have a lot to teach the healthy society, just as society has much to teach them. But disability is a wide field. Where do you start?
According to the World Bank’s Disability Inclusion Overview, people with disabilities account for fifteen percent of the world’s population. That is an estimated one billion people. Out of these, an estimated 300 million are women. While all disabled people are considered vulnerable, disabled women are more vulnerable than their male counterparts, and women without disabilities. This anomaly is due to the exclusion of women with disabilities from the mainstream women empowerment initiatives. You will hardly see them in your Top 40 Under 40 countdowns, or meet them at social gatherings. They may not even be common at your workplace. So, where do you find them?
With the increased availability of the internet and the widespread use of social media, it has become easier to connect with people. This has made it easier for women with disabilities to slowly emerge from the shadows and be active members of society. Here is a list of five remarkable women with disabilities you should be following:
Maysoon Zayid
Born and raised in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, Maysoon’s parents moved to the United States from Palestine. Maysoon developed cerebral palsy due to birth complications resulting from prolonged labor. Because her parents were unable to afford physiotherapy, they enrolled her in dance classes instead. She developed a passion for the performing arts, and has acted in several TV shows and plays, including performing on Broadway. She attended Arizona State University where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting.
Maysoon is the co-founder of the long-running New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, which held its first edition in 2004. The festival was launched at a particularly sensitive time, when the country was still reeling from the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks. With this project, she hoped to change the negative perceptions of Arabs in the media. She is also the founder of Maysoon’s Kids, an organization that helps Palestinian children with disabilities gain access to education.
Maysoon is passionate about mainstreaming disability, especially in the entertainment sector. This includes sensitizing casting directors about the need to audition disabled actors to play the roles of disabled characters in plays, TV shows, and films. She spoke about this in her 2014 TED Talk. In 2020, she published her memoir, Find Another Dream.
Josephta Mukobe
Josephta is a Kenyan civil servant. She was born with a congenital disorder, which affected the development of her arms. Despite being born in the sixties, at a time when stigma against children with disabilities was at a higher level, she found a great support system in her parents and her grandmother. With this confidence and elevated self-esteem, she concentrated her efforts into her studies, becoming among the top students in her class. She attended Alliance Girls High School, and later joined the University of Nairobi for her undergraduate studies, and obtained a degree in Social Sciences and Humanities.
Josephta is the highest-ranking government official with a disability in the Kenyan government, where she has been a Principal Secretary since 2013. Away from her professional duties, she is passionate about mentoring the youth. She is also a member of several organizations which advocate for disability awareness and inclusiveness. One of these is the community-based organization called Women Challenged to Challenge, where she serves as the Secretary General. Based in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, this is an empowerment initiative that brings women with disabilities together to help them advocate for their issues. It is now in its twentieth year, and has registered members in all forty-seven counties countrywide.
Haben Girma
A child of an Ethiopian father and an Eritrean mother, Haben was born and raised in Oakland, California. When the Ethiopia-Eritrea civil war broke out, her parents moved to the United States as refugees. As a result, Haben was a full beneficiary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). After graduating high school, she attended Lewis and Clark College, then later joined Harvard Law School.
At Harvard, she was the first deafblind student to attend and graduate from Harvard Law School. She then spent the next three years working with Disability Rights Advocates. During this time, she successfully defended the National Federation of the Blind in a case against the digital library Scribd. In its judgement, the court ruled that the ADA was applicable to apps and websites. Scribd agreed to make the necessary changes for its library to be accessible to its blind customers.
Although she no longer works in active litigation, she collaborates closely with organizations that work with disabled people. She does this by providing accessibility training and consultation services on leadership and diversity. She is a recipient of the Helen Keller Achievement Award, and has previously served as a board trustee for the Helen Keller Services for the Blind. She was also named in Forbes Magazine’s 2016 Top 30 under 30: Law and Policy. Haben currently works as a human rights lawyer. Her autobiography is titled Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law.
Jennifer Arnold
Jennifer is an American physician. She grew up in Florida, and was born with dwarfism. After attending the University of Miami for her undergraduate studies, she secured admission at John Hopkins School of Medicine, where she qualified as a doctor. Today, she works as a neonatologist, treating critically ill babies. She is also married and a mom of two.
Alongside her family, she starred in the TLC show, The Little Couple, which aired for fourteen seasons. The goal of creating the show was to break down the negative stereotypes that society had about people with dwarfism. It featured the lives of Jennifer, her husband, and their two children, who all have dwarfism.
Due to her experience as a patient during her formative years, child healthcare is a priority for Jennifer. As a result, she is a national ambassador for Speak Now for Kids, an advocacy group that raises awareness about the challenges that medically complex children may face. Some of these challenges include the coordination of a patient’s medical files among several specialists. Coordination can also be a challenge when the doctors are spread out in different states across the country. Jennifer and her husband jointly wrote a book about their lives with disability, appropriately titled Life is Short.
Anne Wafula-Strike
Anne is a former British Paralympic wheelchair racer. She was born and raised in Kenya in the seventies, and contracted polio when she was two years old. Due to the cultural norms about disability at the time, Anne’s parents were advised by the community to send her away. Despite the initial stigma, she continued pursuing her education. She successfully completed her A-levels, and graduated from Moi University with a bachelor’s degree in Education. She later worked as a teacher at the Machakos Technical College.
At the turn of the millennium, Anne decided to re-invent herself. She made the leap from teaching to becoming an athlete. Four years later, in 2004, she became the first Sub-Saharan African wheelchair athlete to participate in the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. She represented Kenya at the time. She later got married and acquired British citizenship. She went on to compete for Team GB (Great Britain) in the 2012 London Paralympic Games.
Since retiring from competition, Anne has continued to advocate for disability inclusion and create awareness on disability issues. She partners with several charities, besides running her own foundation, the Olympia-Wafula Foundation. Through her organization, she aims “to provide healthy living solutions for disabled and disadvantaged people”. One of the foundation’s projects is making custom-made wheelchairs in developing countries, including Kenya, Swaziland, Malawi and Nepal. In recognition of her disability work, she became an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire), in 2014. She wrote about her disability journey in her autobiography, In My Dreams I Dance.
Conversations with disabled people don’t have to be all about doom and gloom. When given opportunities (with necessary accommodations where appropriate), people with disabilities can be fully contributing members of society. Instead of being viewed as a constant liability, people with disabilities and women in particular, should be treated as valuable assets in the community. We should tap into their pool of knowledge, and exchange ideas on how to improve the society. So, if you meet people with disabilities, especially women, please spare some time to engage them in conversation. And the discussion doesn’t always have to revolve around disability. You will be pleasantly surprised by how well-informed people with disabilities are about their environment and current events. Let’s end the stigma against disability, and keep the conversation going.
