Barriers to inclusion and participation
The focus groups and interviews revealed the extent to which disabled engineers and technologists face significant and enduring barriers to inclusion and participation at work.
5.1 The triple burden of securing reasonable adjustments
Disabled participants described administrative, emotional and organisational burdens in securing and maintaining reasonable adjustments.
Administrative burden
Processes to get adjustments in place were described as lengthy, inconsistent, and emotionally draining, requiring individuals to repeatedly justify and explain their accessibility needs.
This ‘adjustment fatigue’ left many feeling that organisational systems were inadequately designed or developed.
"We have policies and things in place, but people don’t necessarily think the whole thing through."
Line managers and HR professionals also felt the complexity and inefficiency of internal processes. As one line manager said, ‘there weren’t defined roles for people, you know, responsible for things and you had to kind of make it up as you went along’.
Many felt ‘caught in the middle’ between the organisation and the needs of disabled employees, in the absence of more streamlined procedures and clearer accountability for decision-making.
An HR interviewee described it as sometimes feeling like ‘talking to a brick wall. And sometimes it’s for the company to actually take responsibility and change and they don’t want to do that’.
Emotional burden
Alongside the administrative burden, participants described in compelling terms the emotional burden of advocating for their own inclusion.
This includes repeatedly explaining the need for reasonable adjustments, sometimes re-living the trauma of acquiring their disability, advocating for implementation of adjustments, educating colleagues and challenging bias.
For many participants this work comes on top of the day-to-day management of the impairment itself.
As mentioned before, this is known as a ‘disability tax’ - the additional work required, on top of the day job, to navigate working environments that were never designed with disabled engineers and technologists in mind.
"I’m trying to be an engineer and on top of that I’m trying to organise these [adjustments]."
"I call it the disability tax of having to do many things that we don’t necessarily want to do but have to do"
HR professionals and line managers also recognised the impact of self-advocacy on disabled colleagues.
One manager described the ways in which they try to mitigate the need for self-advocacy by disabled employees by being ‘curious around you… and almost like to try and take the burden off the employees’.
Burden of organisational change
Linked to this was a recurrent finding that disabled employees are often expected to take on responsibility for driving organisational awareness and change around accessibility and reasonable adjustments.
Participants described being called upon to educate others, shape policy, or act as informal advisers.
This work can be empowering and create a huge sense of personal worth and satisfaction; however, it is often done without recognition, support or evidence that their advocacy makes a difference. To disabled people the efforts at inclusion can feel performative.
"You keep telling them how it could be fixed…but they just don’t. They just don’t do it. It just doesn’t happen."
A pervasive sense of fatigue emerged from disabled participants’ reflections on their long term engagement with disability inclusion work.
Many had seen minimal sustained change over several years, despite repeated commitments, reviews and initiatives from employers.
This sense of ‘stuckness’ erodes trust and optimism. Their fatigue was not only from the effort of self-advocacy, but from the dispiriting experience of sharing experiences and insights with organisations that appear to listen, but don’t act.
As one disabled participant commented, ‘we’ve been talking about the same issues for years – when does change actually happen?’
5.2 Ableist bias
You keep telling them how it could be fixed…but they just don’t. They just don’t do it. It just doesn’t happen.
A pervasive sense of fatigue emerged from disabled participants’ reflections on their long term engagement with disability inclusion work. Many had seen minimal sustained change over several years, despite repeated commitments, reviews and initiatives from employers.
This sense of ‘stuckness’ erodes trust and optimism. Their fatigue was not only from the effort of self-advocacy, but from the dispiriting experience of sharing experiences and insights with organisations that appear to listen, but don’t act.
As one disabled participant commented, ‘we’ve been talking about the same issues for years – when does change actually happen?’
Several participants described experiences of ‘misunderstanding, bias, microaggressions’ at work, and stereotyping from colleagues and managers about what it means to have a disability.
This was particularly the case for employees with invisible disabilities, who sometimes felt their credibility as a disabled person was being questioned, or that they were suspected of trying to get ‘benefits’ they were not entitled to.
As one interviewee recounted: ‘It’s almost like they sit you down and go - so why are you disabled? When that question comes up it’s not the words but what they’re implying’.
Experiences of individual bias are compounded by an engineering culture that doesn’t yet expect to be employing disabled people. As another interviewee said: ‘How our engineers work and the equipment we give them, the expectations we have, the laptops we have, all of it’s just baseline assuming no one has any disabilities or additional needs’.
Decisions about whether to share one’s disability sometimes felt risky.
Some participants had experienced breaches of confidentiality or unwanted sympathy following disclosure; as a result, disabled people were weighing the decision to share information about their disability and their needs against the potential damage to their reputation, and their career progression.
"When I was a fresh-faced graduate, full of hopes and dreams and ready for my new opportunities, my director told me that I would never make it past senior engineer because I was disabled."
The cumulative effect is a lack of psychological safety for many disabled people in engineering and technology. As one participant said: ‘I’m happy to talk about it. But I know lots of people aren’t because they just have the embarrassment of what will other people think’.
This fear is perhaps more acute given the lack of diverse representation within the sector, and ongoing attitudes within the sector that engineers and technologists should just 'get on with it'.
One participant described the experience of moving jobs from a predominantly male-dominated engineering environment to one which was more gender balanced, saying ‘the difference was amazing.
If I’d have got my diagnosis when I’d been in my purely engineering role, I think I would have really struggled… they wouldn’t have dealt with me very well at all’.
5.3 Systemic and practical barriers
In addition to attitudinal barriers, participants also described a range of systemic and practical barriers to inclusion.
Cultural ableism: Systemic barriers include a culture in engineering and technology that values visibility, physical presence, and long hours as indicators of commitment.
As one participant described: ‘At that point sadly I had a really bad manager who wasn’t interested in supporting me in any way.
‘He just wanted me to be like everybody else and come to all the meetings he wanted me to be at, five days a week’. Those unable to conform to these norms described feeling marginalised or unwelcome at work, ‘like falling through a trapdoor’.
Reflecting on their own experience of working with disabled employees, one line manager commented on the barriers that were being put in the way of disabled people at work: ‘What’s coming across is people aren’t looking for the best engineers, they’re looking for the most physically able, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me’.
Inaccessible working environments: Despite advances in technology and policy, many participants also encountered inaccessible working environments, with physical, digital, and procedural barriers.
Office spaces, laboratories, and technical environments were often designed without accessibility considerations in mind, whilst digital systems, including HR software and security protocols, were not always compatible with assistive technologies.
One HR manager described the lengthy frustration of trying to get assistive technologies in place: ‘When we were going to our IT people, to our cybersecurity people, they were just like, ‘oh, it’s not a priority because it’s not for everyone’. And we’re like, ‘but it could be used by everyone and it doesn’t matter if it’s only one or two, if one or two people need it, you need it. And it took five years’.
Resource constraints: Another HR interviewee described the resource constraints that mean that standardising disability awareness is often not a priority for engineering and technology employers:
‘They probably have limited resources in terms of supporting managers to learn more. So I think it’s perhaps the resources, just the resource to make that time and effort and to put it on the agenda’.
Lack of implementation: Participants consistently highlighted the gap between awareness and implementation. They felt that many organisations knew ‘what good looks like’ but fail to translate that understanding into consistent practice.
Many employers have policies on disability inclusion, yet accountability for implementation was often not clear. This inconsistency left disabled employees feeling frustrated and undervalued, and in some cases to leaving the company.
As one HR interviewee commented: ‘There’s a lack of accountability because eventually people get tired of fighting for what they need and will just leave, either leave the company or change job roles’.
5.4 Manager variability
It’s clear from the study that the experience of inclusion for disabled engineers and technologists is heavily influenced by the relationship with individual managers.
Participants described inclusion as a ‘postcode lottery’, regarding the empathy, awareness, flexibility and willingness to learn of their line manager.
Some participants described managers who acted as strong allies, but others experienced managers who were inattentive, dismissive or inconsistent. This variability created a lot of anxiety for disabled employees, leaving them unsure about the support they would receive if their manager changed. As one disabled employee said, ‘Line managers.
They can make or break you’. It also highlighted the gap between organisational commitments on disability inclusion, and the day-to-day experience of being managed.
The study highlighted a range of challenges that line managers committed to disability inclusion themselves face when it comes to implementation:
Managers not feeling empowered to support disabled employees in the ways that they would like, often through lack of confidence about how to do so, or lack of familiarity with the reasonable adjustment process.
As one disabled engineer commented, ‘I’ve seen disabled employees not being supported the way that their managers would like because policies are so prescriptive and don’t actually give power to line managers to make the right decisions’.
The actual or perceived cost of reasonable adjustments on disability inclusion. When the conversation about adjustments becomes about money, disabled people’s accessibility rights are threatened.
One participant commented ‘Certainly in our business [some managers] would be focused on utilisation and bottom line and anything that distracts from that they’re less flexible about’.
Misunderstandings about ‘fairness’. Managers sometimes struggle with a sense that providing reasonable adjustments to disabled people is somehow ‘unfair’ to those without disabilities.
Participants said that adjustments were sometimes seen as ‘special treatment’ rather than as enabling equity. As one HR participant commented, ‘I have heard from so many line managers over the years. Well, if I do that for that person, it’s not fair on anyone else’.
The fear of ‘getting it wrong’ when it comes to talking with disabled team members about their experiences of disability inclusion, describing ‘an environment that doesn’t enable that openness about the issues and solutions’ as a ‘key blocker’.
5.5 Visibility and role models
The absence of disabled role models in senior and leadership positions was seen as both a symptom and a cause of the under-representation of disabled people in engineering and technology.
Access to role models helps disabled people see themselves in senior leadership positions.
As one research participant commented: ‘having those kinds of role models, [you think], I can be an engineer because I can see that person’. The lack of disabled people in senior positions reinforces the belief amongst both disabled employees and organisations that disability and leadership are incompatible.
Where role models do exist, they can provide inspiration and confidence to disabled people, and to employers.
As one disabled participant commented: ‘[organisations] need like a real-life example that they can relate to before they start paying attention…they don’t have the confidence to take the risk’.
At the same time, there is some scepticism about the disingenuous use of role models by organisations to communicate a commitment to disability inclusion that disabled people don’t experience in practice. As one participant commented: ‘You just don’t want to be that token’.
5.6 Recruitment processes
The presence of senior disabled role models indicates – and depends on – organisations implementing inclusive recruitment and progression practices.
Several participants commented on the barriers to recruitment and progression faced by disabled engineers and technologists.
One HR participant noted the disconnect between intention on disability inclusion in recruitment, and implementation, and how recruitment often fails to consider the process from the perspective of the disabled person: ‘It’s that thing of going, right, we want people to apply for the job... Applying is part of the process.
But once they’ve applied the people who design these processes sometimes think it ends there, because they don’t have to go through it, [but it doesn’t]’.
Outdated practices also act as barriers to inclusion. One participant described the resistance encountered in implementing a more inclusive approach to recruitment by sending questions in advance.
Offering all candidates the questions in advance would remove a barrier for those who may require more preparation time and minimise the risk of it being seen as an unfair advantage.
5.7 The role of volunteers
The experience of disabled volunteers was raised by participants. The unpaid and often unrecognised voluntary effort that disabled people put into organisations to shift culture and practice, in addition to their day job was highlighted during our research. One participant talked about the hope that there would be better recognition of the time that volunteers put into this work.
A small number of participants raised concerns about gaps in legal protection on disability, particularly for volunteers and those in non traditional or freelance engineering roles.
They noted that while the Equality Act (2010) protects employees, it does not extend to volunteers. This is an important consideration in the experience of engineers and technologists on voluntary technical committees, for example, as it leaves them feeling they have no legal protection in cases of discrimination or exclusion.
As an organisation that works with over 4,000 of our own valued volunteers, it is clear something must be done to ensure they receive adequate support and protections.