Stu Hirst was already a CISO when he started to go deaf. It was 2023, and the hearing loss crept in over months, enough for him to adapt, to lean on hearing aids and captions, to quietly reorganize his calendar around the cognitive load of processing sound. It was manageable. Then, in July 2025, it wasn’t.
“Without my very powerful hearing aids, I cannot hear speech at all,” Hirst says. “I might hear very loud, high-frequency noises, a running shower or a flushing toilet, but holding a conversation is impossible.”
Today, Hirst is the CISO at Trustpilot, one of the world’s most widely used consumer review platforms. He is severely deaf in his left ear and nearly profoundly deaf in his right. He runs security strategy for a global organization, mentors teams on crisis management, and speaks publicly about leadership. He does all of it by simultaneously lip-reading, listening through powerful hearing aids, and reading live captions on an iPad, often all three at once.
His story is unusual in its specifics but representative in its broader outline. Across the IT and cybersecurity sectors, deaf and hard-of-hearing professionals are entering the workforce in growing numbers and, in some cases, leading it. The data, though, paints a more complicated picture of what the landscape looks like for most.
The numbers behind the gap
The employment picture for deaf people in the United States has stubbornly resisted improvement for nearly two decades. According to the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes, only 57.7% of deaf people are currently employed, compared to 73.4% of hearing people. That gap of roughly 15.7 percentage points has persisted since at least 2008, surviving recessions, economic recoveries, and a significant expansion of legal protections.
NDC research published in 2019 found that deaf workers are “frequently hired to do low-level jobs that lack career development and advancement,” burning through energy navigating a hearing world “with few accommodations, considerable challenges, and low expectations.” Many simply opt out.
Among deaf people who hold degrees, however, computer science and information technology stand out as fields with some of the highest employment rates. This is one of the few sectors where the gap between deaf and hearing workers meaningfully narrows, and it points toward where the real opportunity lies.
Why tech, and why cybersecurity in particular
The case for cybersecurity as a promising field for deaf and hard-of-hearing professionals is structural as much as aspirational. The work is predominantly text-based and screen-driven. Remote work is normalized across the sector. The outputs of the job, threat analysis, code, incident reports, security architecture, are produced and evaluated without any requirement to hear.
Justin Pelletier, director of the Cyber Range and Training Center at Rochester Institute of Technology’s Global Cybersecurity Institute, frames this as a strategic argument. “To become better at cybersecurity, to defeat the hackers who are always trying to think differently about how systems can work, we need more cognitive diversity in the workforce,” he has said. “That means we need to be proactive about recruiting people with different backgrounds and abilities to the cyber talent pool.”
Pelletier’s institute partnered with RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), the world’s first and largest technological college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, to create a cybersecurity bootcamp designed entirely around ASL-using students. The program has expanded considerably since its launch. Its current form is a 32-week professional bootcamp developed in partnership with DEAFCYBERCON and ThriveDX, fully remote, taught in American Sign Language, valued at $15,000, and offered free through scholarships to qualifying participants. Graduates leave prepared for industry-standard certifications.
RIT/NTID places students with co-op employers including Microsoft, Amazon, and General Dynamics Mission Systems, a roster that reflects industry demand.
What deafness feels like at the top
Hirst is careful to distinguish between different kinds of hearing loss, a distinction with real practical consequences.
“Deafness isn’t just about volume,” he explains. “For me, there are two key facets. The first is frequency recognition. Speech sits in the middle frequency range, and losing the ability to recognize these frequencies makes comprehension extremely challenging, even with hearing aids. The second factor is damage to the inner ear. My sensorineural hearing loss means the auditory messages transmitted to the brain are fundamentally broken. You could repeat the same thing multiple times, even louder, and I still might not grasp it, because the signals are simply not translating correctly.”
This shapes the practical adjustments he asks of colleagues: changing word order, using slightly different phrasing, allowing him to position himself in a room where he can lip-read as many people as possible. These are reasonable requests, and yet making them required its own process of adaptation.
“Disclosing my disability is not just about vulnerability,” he reflects, “although I believe vulnerability is a critical element of modern leadership. We are, after all, human beings.” With his second, more severe onset of deafness, the option of quiet discretion disappeared entirely. “I simply cannot pretend things are normal anymore. They are not. I have had to accept and acknowledge that reality, while also being clear that I am still highly capable.”
In large meeting rooms or workshops, he listens, lip-reads, and reads captions simultaneously. The captions, he notes, are “often inaccurate and half a second behind,” so the cognitive task becomes triangulating across three imperfect channels at once, in real time, throughout the working day.
The social dimensions of his career have taken a harder hit. Conferences, dinners, and informal networking events, the settings where professional relationships are built and careers shaped, are now among the most challenging environments he faces. He is currently exploring captioned glasses as a potential aid for exactly these situations, and he has come to accept that some events will be genuinely difficult or, at times, out of reach. “I have had to accept that some of these events will either be more difficult or, at times, simply not possible,” he says.
The case for structural change
Hirst’s situation, adapting at the individual level with a supportive employer, is by his own account an unusually fortunate one. For many deaf and hard-of-hearing professionals, that support is absent.
The National Deaf Center’s Carrie Lou Bloom, Ph.D., describes the mission in terms of sustained access: “It’s our job to ensure that deaf people have equal access to continuing education and training after high school, to have the best chance to be competitive in the workplace and stay on track for career advancement over time.”
That emphasis on career advancement reflects something the data makes clear. Even where deaf people are employed, earnings gaps persist. The median annual income for deaf people working full-time stands at $52,000, meaningfully below the figure for hearing peers. The problem extends well beyond getting in the door.
The EEOC’s guidance on hearing disabilities under the ADA now explicitly addresses modern technology-based accommodations, including CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation), video relay services, and captioning software. It represents a meaningful, if partial, step toward closing the gap between legal protection and workplace reality. Alongside it, programs like RIT’s bootcamps are doing something different: they are building pipelines from scratch, creating pathways into cybersecurity that are designed around deaf and hard-of-hearing learners.
Pelletier’s argument, and Hirst’s career, both point toward the same conclusion: that the cognitive diversity deaf and hard-of-hearing professionals bring to security work is an asset to the field, one the industry has been too slow to recognize.
A new perspective on resilience
Hirst’s experience has changed how he thinks about the work itself, beyond the practical adjustments.
“One area I’ve found particularly challenging is maintaining a level of authority and positivity during times of crisis,” he says. “I spend a lot of time mentoring my team on crisis management, and my experience has given me a new perspective on resilience.”
For a CISO, a role centerd on the ability to function under pressure, to communicate clearly when organizations are most vulnerable, and to maintain strategic clarity when events are moving fastest, that observation carries weight. Crisis management is the core of the job. And navigating severe hearing loss while performing it has, he suggests, deepened rather than diminished his understanding of what that job demands.
“This journey has fundamentally changed how I approach my role,” he says, “but it has not diminished my commitment or my capability. It has reinforced the need for clear communication, flexibility, and honesty in the workplace.”
Communication. Flexibility. Honesty. For Hirst, these have always been at the core of the job. His journey has simply made their importance impossible to ignore and raised the bar for what practicing them means.
