Companies employing people with disabilities come in all shapes and sizes.
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This year’s Disability Equality Index marks a landmark edition for several key reasons.
Firstly, the authoritative measurement tool, put together by corporate disability benchmarking experts Disability:IN in collaboration with the American Association of Disabilities, marks its 10th anniversary this year since it was first published in 2015. Additionally, 2024 marks the first year the index will expand outside the United States, now incorporating a total of 753 global organizations, including data analysis from countries such as Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Japan, the Philippines and the UK.
DEI uses survey questions to help organizations measure their disability inclusion efforts by scoring in key areas such as culture and leadership, company-wide access, hiring practices, community engagement, supplier diversity and responsible sourcing. Large organizations and brands such as Best Buy, Dell, Microsoft, Salesforce and Accenture regularly participate in the index. Accenture leveraged insights and analysis from Disability:IN to develop its groundbreaking 2023 report, “The Imperative for Disability Inclusion.”
Year-over-year growth
On this landmark anniversary, among the most useful insights to emerge from this year’s accompanying Index report are some important comparisons of how corporate disability metrics have changed over the past decade.
For example, in 2015, only 41% of participating companies had policy requirements to ensure that digital products were accessible and usable by people with disabilities. Today, that number is 71%. In 2015, 25% of participating companies gave job candidates the option to request interview accommodations; that number has since risen to 60%. Today, 57% of organizations have a centralized accommodations fund or allow managers “budget headroom” for disability accommodations, up from 31% in 2015.
But according to Jill Houghton, president and CEO of Disability:IN, there’s one decade-long trend that stands out above all the others.
“If there’s one change we’ve seen in the last 10 years, it’s disability-focused employee resource groups,” Horton says.
“We truly believe that having a disability employee resource group made up of an executive sponsor and an executive ally, or someone who publicly identifies as disabled, is part of our recipe for success. When we began our DEI journey in 2015, 68% of participating companies had a disability employee resource group. Today, that number is 93%.”
Another encouraging finding from the DEI report is that 45% of participating companies now publish diversity reports that include disability data, up from 24% in 2023.
However, as highlighted last year, improvement is needed when it comes to disability inclusion at board level: only 11% of companies report having directors who are openly disabled on their boards, and only 3% voluntarily report on disability at board level. 8% of companies include disability in their corporate governance charters that govern the nomination of new directors.
When it comes to supplier diversity initiatives, 24% said they have disability-focused goals in this area.
important point
However, while this progress at a granular level gives reason for optimism, nothing should be taken for granted at this point, especially as it relates to DE&I in the U.S., given the backlash we’ve seen in Republican-leaning states over the past few years. Disability inclusion, traditionally a bipartisan issue, will hopefully remain more insulated from these potentially dangerous headwinds, but if we were to pick a word to describe U.S. politics in the summer of 2024, that word wouldn’t be “predictable.”
Meanwhile, in some of the regions where Disability:IN is expanding, the winds may be blowing in exactly the opposite direction: for example, the adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive by the European Union is the first modernization to include disability in mandatory sustainability reporting standards.
The DEI report outlines that “Upcoming legislation such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will make disability reporting a significant issue for over 50,000 employers once they are fully implemented. Local legislation such as the Canada Accessibility Act and the EAA provides clear compliance obligations that companies operating in certain jurisdictions must follow.”
“In the United States, issues of sustainability, diversity and inclusion have been stalled by political polarization,” said Ted Kennedy Jr., co-chair of the Disability Equality Index and former president of the American Association of People with Disabilities.
“Some companies that had a pipeline for recruiting talent from underrepresented groups are now taking a more cautious stance. But that’s not the case at all in Europe, Canada and elsewhere. They’re charging ahead full steam ahead and simply don’t understand why the U.S. is questioning its sustainability efforts, which include a large part in hiring people with disabilities.”
But Kennedy strikes a more positive note, saying: “Most of the large companies and institutional investors we speak to have no intention of taking their foot off the gas when it comes to hiring people with disabilities and are hungry for more data.”
Still, given the uncertainties, this appears to be a case of slow and steady rather than full steam ahead.
This perhaps explains why, among its key recommendations for 2024, Disability:IN focuses on traditional disability inclusion staples rather than reinventing the wheel. These include continually encouraging employee self-identification, leveraging disability-focused employee resource groups, and, if you’re really ambitious and passionate, modernizing your corporate governance directives to include disability as a criterion for board diversity.