10 powerful women who have triumphed by embracing their disabilities

Americans with disabilities face a much higher rate of unemployment than U.S. workers without disabilities. In 2021, just 19.1 percent of disabled Americans were employed compared to 63.7 percent of non-disabled Americans. In honor of October’s National Disability Employment Awareness Month, MAKERS has compiled a list of 10 extraordinary women with disabilities who share their inspirational stories of overcoming obstacles and changing the world for the better.

1. Carson Pickett

This summer, soccer player Carson Pickett made history when she became the first athlete with a limb difference to compete for the U.S. Women's National Team (USWNT). The 29-year-old was born without a left hand and forearm but that has not stopped her from reaching her goals. “While I know that I am confident and comfortable with showing my arm, I know there are so many people in the world who aren’t,” Pickett wrote on her Instagram in April. “I hope to encourage anyone who struggles with their limb difference to not be ashamed of who they are. I want to be an advocate for others like me, and for the longest time I didn’t use my platform well enough. Let’s all try to love ourselves no matter what we look like and let’s all be kind to each other above all else. Different people are my kind of people. The world needs more of that.”

Carson Pickett will be on stage at this year’s MAKERS Conference, which runs from October 24 through October 26.

2. Marlee Matlin

Marlee Matlin, who made history more than 30 years ago as the first deaf performer to win an Academy Award, accepted the award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at this year’s Screen Actors Guild Awards for Apple TV+’s film CODA. “We deaf actors have come a long way,” Matlin communicated to the audience through an interpreter. “This validates the fact that we, deaf actors, can work just like anybody else. We look forward to more opportunities for deaf actors, deaf culture.”

3. Temple Grandin

In 1986, Temple Grandin became one of the first people to publicly discuss living with autism. She became a prominent animal scientist and author and now has published a new book, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions.“I get a lot of satisfaction when people say to me they read something in the book that helped somebody get a job or helped them go to college,” Grandin told MAKERS. “I want to see the kids that are kind of different succeed. This is really important to me.”

4. Lauren Elizabeth Potter

Best known for her role as Becky Jackson on the FOX series Glee, Lauren Elizabeth Potter is also an outspoken advocate for people with Down syndrome. In an interview with Popsugar, Potter said she has some advice for those in charge of hiring. “Employers should know that they will not go wrong hiring a person with Down syndrome. Not only will they be helping someone reach their goal of working, but they and other employees will learn so much about acceptance and love. Everyone I know with DS works hard and gives 100% of themselves. We're all more alike than different!”

5. Senator Tammy Duckworth

In 2016, U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth was the first woman with a disability elected to Congress. She told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah that there are too many misconceptions that still surround disabled people in the workplace. “It’s everything from prejudice that they’re going to be more expensive to employ, or that you’re going to have to do something with your workplace to accommodate somebody with disabilities and that’s going to cost too much money. Those are really false arguments,” Duckworth told Noah. “In fact, studies show that when a disabled person lands a job, they become very loyal and they stay in those jobs for far longer than anybody else. There is far less turnover with persons with disabilities once they’re able to land a job. And they make really good productive employees once they can get employment.”

6. Erin Brockovich

She became a household name when her story was featured in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, but few may know the outspoken environmental activist battled a learning disorder while growing up. “I was a dyslexic and very early in my life I was labeled,” Erin Brockovich told MAKERS in 2019. “Every time I came home from school with another ‘D’ stamped on a test and feeling defeated, my mom would say, ‘Oh, you have to buck up Erin. Where is your stick-to-it-ness?’ And that struck a chord. Even today when I hit that wall, I hear my mother. It’s that persistence, it’s that obligation, it’s that stubbornness. You can rise and you can do it.”

7. Tamika Catchings

Tamika Catchings is one of the top players in WNBA history. She is a 10-time WNBA All-Star and has four Olympic gold medals with Team USA. As a child, Catchings suffered from hearing loss and often got bullied at school because of her hearing aids and speech problems. “I got made fun of every single day. I would beg my mom, ‘Please don’t make me go to school,’” she told MAKERS in a 2017 interview. “For me, it started with, kind of, that monkey on your back, wanting to fit in and finding something that I was passionate about. And that was basketball. My mindset was so different than most kids that age, that I was going to do whatever it took to make it.”

8. Susan Sygall

Susan Sygall co-founded Mobility International USA to help advance the rights of people with disabilities. In a tragic twist of fate, Sygall was studying recreational therapy for disabled people when she was in a severe car accident. She became a paraplegic and learned quickly that her career path suddenly looked very different.  “When people wouldn’t give me a job because I was in a wheelchair, I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’” Sygall told MAKERS in 2014. “Now looking back on it, the disability was not a tragedy; it’s the life of people with disabilities and not having opportunities that is really the tragedy.”

9. Trischa Zorn

American Paralympic swimmer Trischa Zorn is the most decorated Olympic athlete in history with a total of 55 medals, including 41 gold. Zorn, now 58, was born with aniridia, a rare eye disorder that made her legally blind.In a Storycorps interview, Zorn said those gold medals don’t matter if she still can’t get her message across. “Medals are great, but they don’t define me,” Zorn said. “I think the defining moment for the Paralympic movement is what our actions have been throughout the years when we were competing and training and educating others on what the Paralympics were. I mean, this country is still not educated on the Paralympic Games, unfortunately, and it still needs to get the word out.”

10. Lorella Praeli

Lorella Praeli is a powerful activist for the Dreamers movement and a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). An undocumented child of immigrant parents, Praeli faced another huge challenge when she lost her right leg at the age of 2. But she told MAKERS in a 2015 interview that her father’s guidance helped her push through. “When I was little and I was learning to walk, I would fall a lot. My father never let anyone help me up. He would stand next to me and say, ‘When I get up, I fall, when I fall, I get up again.’ It was really a message about life. You’re going to fall and you’re going to get up and you’re going to fall again and you’re going to get up again. And that was very true to what was happening in that moment, but it was bigger than that.”