Insights from the project team

In this section the project team shares some of their reflections and learnings in conducting a participative research study into the enablers and barriers of disability inclusion in engineering and technology.

We share these insights in the belief that they will have relevance for employers planning to conduct ‘listening’ sessions with disabled employees in the future, as well as for future research in this area.
 

Prioritising listening

Several participants commented on the positive experience of the interviews and focus groups.

The feeling of being seen and listened to was clearly extremely important; as one member of the project team said, ‘participants felt like their stories were heard and they mattered’.

Sometimes this meant the project team prioritising listening over getting through all the questions in the focus groups and interviews, which was a decision we initially struggled with, and then embraced.
 

Creating the conditions for participation

Participants were given a number of different ways to contribute to the conversations: in chat, verbally, on Mural, with their cameras on or cameras off.

As a project team we quickly learned three things:

• What works for one participant does not necessarily work for another for instance, rather than enabling participation, Mural created a barrier to inclusion for some participants.
• That creating a psychologically safe environment where participants felt they could openly share was essential.
• We needed to let go of our own discomfort and disappointment at not ‘getting it right’ first time, and be flexible in adapting our approach to meet the varying needs of the participants.
   

The vital importance of lived experience

Having facilitators with lived experience of disability was important and helped focus group participants and interviewees feel less ‘othered’ in the sessions.

At the same time the physical and emotional toll of hosting the conversations was significant; in the interests of building connection and creating safety for participants, facilitators sometimes shared their own stories of living with a disability.

The additional load that disabled facilitators experienced is similar to the emotional toll referred to in relation to engineers and technologists in the body of the report.

This was not something we talked about as a project team in advance and on reflection we could have done more to raise our collective awareness of, and respond to, the need for emotional and practical support for disabled facilitators.

We recieved an unexpected request from participants to enable the ability to connect with each other following the focus groups.

Given the anonymised nature of the data gathering process, we were unable to facilitate this in the moment, however are exploring ways to connect disabled engineers and technologists in the future, as a result of this request. 
 

A human approach

The importance of a ‘human’ approach was key to the focus groups and interviews – not ‘othering’ participants, or seeing them simply as a source of ‘research data’, but instead focusing on building a real human connection.
  

A microcosm of the wider context 

There were a number of ways in which the experience of the interviews and focus groups represented a microcosm of the wider context for disabled engineers and technologists.

• We struggled as a project team to recruit line managers and HR participants to take part in the project.
  
  We used several different approaches to contact these two groups and invite participation, but with very limited success, and we wondered to what extent this reflected a potential lack of experience and engagement in disability inclusion from employers.
  
  As one of the project team commented, ‘It feels like no-one has the time to give unless it’s something directly about themselves or something they see as an organisational priority or meeting a KPI. Inclusion in the workplace certainly doesn’t feel like everyone’s issue.’ 
   
• Sometimes the conversation in the group mirrored the stereotypes and bias described in the report and encountered by disabled engineers and technologists daily, for instance around the ‘fairness’ of reasonable adjustments. In such cases, the project team responded by clarification, or by challenging ableist narratives, depending on their personal approach.
  
  We did not discuss in advance how we might handle such challenges or the support we might need to do so; on reflection this is something we would do for the future.
   
• Despite having disabled facilitators on the project team, ableism appeared in our questions in the first draft, which asked about strengths related to disability.
  
  This reinforces the point above and highlights that, as disabled people, we too have work to do to break free of ableist mindsets.