With all due respect, while I can see your point from a larger cultural perspective, I’ve had two jobs in my own personal working life that make it hard for me to agree (at least speaking for me, as a person, and for my stutter). A number of years ago, I worked as a medical receptionist at an OBGYN practice who only worked phones and I personally took about 250 calls a day, since we had 7 doctors in our practice and about 4,000 patients. (So our total call volume was pretty far up there, daily!) There were, I believe, 3 phone receptionists and 2 window receptionists who dealt with patients in office. There were even fewer nurses/other formally trained medical staff we could call on when a patient needing medical advice called in, which was about 50% of the time, so we were trained to deal with these situations. Not quite a 911 call center, but when you’ve got a large number of medical patients and are always short staffed, you’re trained to and do spend a lot of time with many of them assessing whether their urgent situation is actually an emergency, whether they were mentally sound or struggling in that regard. (Sadly many patients were mentally ill.) I dealt with countless emergency calls, and thousands more that weren’t, and I’m sure I did my fair share of stuttering. It never once, ever, was a problem. I only left the job because I was moving out of state. Second, and this is more of an anecdote; more recently I worked for a big household name media company on their breaking news desk. I was in an entry level position, but everyday the entire team would meet with one of the two senior breaking news editors, who both were/are the top of their fields and command a lot of respect. One of them happened to have a stutter worse than mine. So everyday, we’d meet with him, and despite the fact that working on breaking news is so time-sensitive that being slow can literally cost the business revenue if they can’t keep up with their competitors; we met daily with this senior editor with a severe stutter, listened to his direction each day, even if it meant the meeting was a little slower than it could have been, and then go about our days. I get your point that maybe there are jobs that might seem like we shouldn’t do. Maybe there are many instances where you’re right. However, my point is 1) From personal experience, I haven’t really found that to be true, at least until yesterday, and 2) more importantly, just because an employee struggles with their speech doesn’t mean they can’t be a value asset. Even if that means the breaking news desk gets a later start to the day because our senior editor needed a tiny bit longer to get his points out.