Navigating Your Career When You Have a Disability

Women at Work

Harvard Business Review

Entrepreneurship, Workplace, Business/management, Business/entrepreneurship, Progress, Resources, Gender, Equality, Business/careers, Women, Hbr, Careers, Management, Business, Harvard, Human

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Meredith Koch and Nicole Bettè are engineers who’ve bonded over conversations about their apparent and non-apparent disabilities. They recount how at different moments in their careers they’ve gotten the understanding and assistive technology necessary to do their jobs—and when they haven’t, all with the hope that you’ll be able to better advocate for yourself and your colleagues.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Harvard Business School Executive Education develops leaders who make a difference in the world.
0:06.0	In their programs, experience the power of fresh perspectives and connect with a world of new ideas.
0:13.0	Learn more at HBS. Me slash work.
0:17.0	That's HBS.
0:18.0	M. E slash work.
0:21.0	It's always work. And it's hard to answer it's like not literally nothing happened to me. I did not have any
0:37.2	accident. Yeah it's just I don't know how to answer I will say something like oh no I'm
0:41.8	okay I have a connective tissue
0:43.8	disorder and leave it at that. People are naturally curious I get that yeah and
0:48.5	when I'm like out in public I don't have this happen in my actual office, but I can be out and someone's like,
0:55.2	oh, were you in a car accident? And I just look at them and either A, no, and I wheel away, or B,
1:00.9	actually I had a piano fall on top of me, and I wheel away and then they just don't even know what to say and who's uncomfortable now.
1:08.0	Nicole Batetet and Meredith Koch are engineers who our podcast team met at a women impact
1:14.8	tech conference here in Boston. Over the past few years they've bonded over
1:19.5	conversations about disability, a topic that Meredith feels a lot of us are scared to talk about, including
1:26.2	at work.
1:27.2	I think because it's so personal and there's so much that you just don't understand about it.
1:34.1	While I'm very open about sharing that I'm an incomplete paraplegic,
1:39.5	how I got hurt, when people start being like, oh, what's wrong's wrong with you like that's not the right
1:44.3	approach get to know someone as a person and then over time it's like you begin
1:50.3	building these like partnerships like I've got a couple people at work that like I need
1:54.3	something I can text them and they will come help me and there will be no questions
	...

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