Closing Disability Gaps at Work – Deficits in Evidence and Differences in Experience

Due to be launched in full at the end of November is a significant new report from Cardiff University researchers, By Ralph Fevre, Deborah Foster, Melanie Jones and Victoria Wass.

Attend our conference to pick up your copy of the report and get the latest expert insights into disability and employment in the UK, including the latest Green Paper.

Key messages

• While disability is difficult to measure, it is essential to do so. Addressing deficiencies in current measures is a pre-requisite to effectively monitoring trends in disability disadvantage at work and in evaluating the impact of policy and practice interventions.

• Disabled people experience disadvantage relative to their non-disabled counterparts across a range of in-work outcomes. These include objective measures such as hourly earnings but also broader subjective measures relating to the experience of work.

• Even those who are most directly affected often fail to understand the extent of disability discrimination they have experienced. A sensible debate about the causes of, and remedies for, the disability gap requires better knowledge of the extent to which the seemingly individual problems disabled people encounter in the workplace are part of a wider and more systematic pattern of less favourable treatment.

• It is important that the voices of disabled people themselves, and their experiences, are represented in policy debates, research findings and new initiatives. For this to happen it is important that the views of disabled people and their lived experiences, are better heard.

The full report will be available on this page at the end of November 2016.