DHM Blog: Creating an Accessible World Research on disabled people and employment

In the welcome week of 2024-2025 academic term, Katy Deacon, the Director of Towards Belonging Limited, Julian Gwinnett, a co-chair or Disabled Staff Network and Eun Sun Godwin started the fresh term together with a meaningful conversation on ‘Creating an accessible world’ (The podcast of this conversation is available to listen to on Apple, Amazon, Spotify and online).

The conversation is based on a scenario envisioning inclusive future of disabled people working in a manufacturing industry through inclusive digitalisation as a part of the research project “Manufacturing a better world”, funded by InterAct, an ESRC and Made Smarter led hub (please learn more about the project here).  It turns out to be a timely conversation as this year’s theme of the Disability History Month being ‘Disability, Livelihood and Employment’.

In this blog, Eun Sun Godwin, a Co-Investigator and Marisa Smith at the University of Strathclyde, the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project, would like to provide some contextual information to supplement the podcast based on some key findings from their research on disabled people and employment.

According to World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics on disability, an estimated 1.3 billion people or 16% of the world’s population experience significant disability (WHO, 2023), making disabled people the world’s largest ‘minority’. This figure is also increasing through population growth, medical advances, and the ageing process (WHO, 2023) while disability is the only minority everyone has the potential to join. As Katy highlighted at the beginning of the podcast, the prevalence of disability rises throughout people’s life stages with around 11% of children, 23% of working-age adults, 45% of adults over State Pension age and finally around two thirds (67%) of people aged 85 or over in the UK were disabled in 2022/2023 (House of Commons Library, Oct, 2024).

At the same time, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs estimate that 50% and 70% of persons with disabilities of working age are unemployed in industrialized countries, whereas the figure is higher with between 80% to 90% in developing countries (UN, 2024). In the UK only, 10.21 million people of working age (16 to 64), which is around a quarter (24%) of the working-age population, are reported as disabled while only 54.2% of the disabled people are in the employment (House of Commons Library, March, 2024).

Based on the team’s evidence review on disabled people and employment, previous studies find there are layers of factors, namely, policies/legislation related to benefits and employment of disabled people at a general level, other relevant regulation and practice in the labour market widely and at the organisational level specifically, which have impact on disabled people’s employment. These factors at different levels shape and are shaped by each other. For example the Black Review (2008) and The Marmot Review (2010) which “focus on individual pathology as the source of employment disadvantage and as the focus for policy intervention” (Jones and Wass, 2013) has contributed to the shift in the employment of disabled people from that of sheltered (sheltered employment and placement) to integrating them into a normal labour market (although Jones and Wass, 2013 criticise this has contributed to the ‘individualisation’ of the solution of disabled people’s employment through ‘reporting’ system).

Regardless of the intention of the Black and Marmot Reviews, these shifts inevitably affect the recruitment and workplace adjustment practices for disabled people at the labour market and organisational level. Several studies highlight that there is still discrimination against disabled people at the recruitment stage (e.g., Bainbridge and Fujimoto, 2018; Mauksch and Dey, 2023) while many disabled people are afraid of disclosing their disability or negotiating with their employers for appropriate workplace adjustment once they get a job (e.g., Bacon and Hoque, 2015; Baldridge and Swift, 2016). These practices in turn affect the perception of colleagues and managers towards the disabled people. Although explicit discrimination might be decreasing with the development of the relevant legislation (e.g., Equality Act), there is still strong perception towards disabled people that they are considered as ‘someone who needs help’ at workplace regardless their experiences and expertise. More profoundly, there were a couple of studies that have found that disabled people themselves regulate their own identities at the workplace to overcome these misconceptions or stereotypes (Holmqvist et al., 2013; Jammaers and Zanoni, 2021).

Our interdisciplinary research team,  comprising of social scientists and science & engineering experts, is exploring the potential role of digital technology to enhance inclusion of disabled people in the employment,  particularly in the manufacturing context. As envisioned in the scenario read at the beginning of the podcast (and please see here for the full scenario), digital technology, particularly that of AI, is advancing fast and some of the technology development imagined in the scenario either is already or will be available far sooner than 2040, the time set in the scenario. However, the findings from our research reveal that adoption and adaptation of such technology, both organisationally and individually, can take much longer than other technology development. Our results shows that this is often due to the cost involved in adoption, and adaptation, such as the cost constraints faced by Small and Medium Enterprises to adopt advanced technology. Complex supply chains involved in the manufacturing industry result in industrial machine tools having limited design considerations for the accessibility of disabled people, which results in organisations not adjusting the work process in an inclusive way.

Considering this, the team’s suggestion to the relevant policy makers is that government intervention and support in disabled people’s employment must be cross-departmental considering the opportunities that digital and advanced technologies can bring for disabled people’s employment and livelihood. In doing so, the team also suggests that the technology development needs to consider both the advancement and adaptation of the technology by offering appropriate support to design digital industrial technologies in a more accessible way.

If you have more questions on this blog or the research introduced here, please contact Dr Eun Sun Godwin at e.godwin@wlv.ac.uk

Please also have a look at the other part of the blog which is on Katy Deacon’s own experiences and reflections on ‘Disability, Livelihood and Employment’. Read the blog: Life and work as an engineer with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Creating an Accessible World.