Profits are increasing
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A 2018 Accenture report, “The Path to Equality: The Disability Inclusion Advantage,” showed the business world that companies that promote disability inclusion tend to outperform their peers across several key commercial metrics.
Over the years, the report has become a cited authoritative source for those making the business case for increasing employment of people with disabilities in business.
Last week, the professional services giant again partnered with Disability:IN, experts in workplace disability inclusion, to release its latest report, titled “The Imperative for Disability Inclusion,” which aims to reframe the issue to reflect post-pandemic trends. Chief among these, of course, was the massive shift to remote work in the spring of 2020, which was in many ways the most sudden and far-reaching workplace disability inclusion in human history.
According to the report, new patterns of remote and hybrid work will continue to persist, making disability employment more sustainable for companies, leading to increased revenue and profits for companies that prioritize disability employment. Organizations that innovate around disability employment have 1.6 times more revenue, 2.6 times more net profit, twice the economic profit, and 25% more productivity than their competitors.
The study sample, which looked at 346 organisations from Disability:IN’s world-renowned Disability Equality Index benchmarking system from 2015 to 2022, consistently found a correlation between strong economic performance and high scores on the disability inclusion index, which is based on a company’s disability inclusion policies and practices.
Jill Kramer, Accenture’s chief marketing and communications officer, commented on the survey: “Disability inclusion is a topic that is very close to my heart and it’s essential from both a business and societal perspective to create accessible, inclusive environments where all employees can belong and thrive.”
“People with disabilities have long faced significant barriers to employment, even though they are well qualified and motivated to work,” said Ted Kennedy Jr., a disability rights attorney, former Connecticut state senator and former president of the Americans with Disabilities Association, another research partner. “Accenture’s recent report presents compelling evidence that hiring people with disabilities actually accelerates business performance, brand loyalty and shareholder returns.”
But another important study published this week in Nature Human Behavior that looked specifically at STEM jobs and academia found that inclusion of people with disabilities in these fields is far from thriving.
Based on survey data from 704,013 STEM PhDs working in jobs related to their fields, the researchers found a $10,580 wage gap between scientists and engineers with long-term disabilities and their non-disabled colleagues. In academia specifically, the annual wage gap between faculty with and without disabilities rose to $14,360. In senior academic positions, only 6.5% of professors surveyed, 9.4% of tenured faculty, and 5.9% of deans and presidents reported having a disability. These figures are in the context of a U.S. population where more than a quarter of the population has a disability.
One only needs to look back at the Accenture survey to find the key factors underlying this disability shortage in STEM and academia.
While this is fundamentally good news, demonstrating the potential for organisations to prioritise hiring people with disabilities and get it right, the report still found that 76% of employees do not fully disclose their disability at work, and only 4.6% of employees voluntarily disclose their disability status to their employer.
The STEM report authors suspect a similar lack of disclosure is happening in academia and related fields, where “the culture of disclosure is not yet fully established,” explains study co-author Bonnie Swenor, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Disability Health Research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Swenor’s co-author Jay Dolmage, a disability rights researcher at the University of Waterloo, adds, “The first step is to actually establish policies that protect the confidentiality of staff and faculty, and this includes providing accommodations in a way that doesn’t impact their careers.”
As of 2023, disability employment in companies has certainly come a long way from its low base, but there is still much to be done. Ultimately, while lack of disclosure may help individuals who legitimately want to remain inconspicuous, it also leaves disabled employees in the dark about career paths, mentorship opportunities, and best practice developments. Emphasizing an open and caring culture is the best way to ease fears about disability disclosure, and encouraging disabled employees to be as open as possible about their condition should further accelerate this process.