Has Anti-Discrimination Legislation Improved the Employment Opportunities of Disabled People?

This article will first of all consider, in some detail, the recent efforts of researchers in the United States to determine whether the Americans with Disabilities Act has improved the employment opportunities of disabled people. It will then go on to examine data on the employment situation of disabled people in the United Kingdom and how this has changed during the period since December, 1997, when the Disability Discrimination Act came into force. Tentative conclusions are then drawn, regarding the effectiveness of the legislation. The article ends with a consideration of the ways in which the monitoring and evaluation of such major shifts in policy might be improved.