Why a dearth of data is blocking disabled access to the boardroom

After Neil Hes­lop grad­u­at­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of New­cas­tle with a law degree in 1988, he con­duct­ed an exper­i­ment. Under­stand­ing that the fact he’d lost his sight could have an impact on his employ­a­bil­i­ty, he made 20 job appli­ca­tions. Iden­ti­cal in every oth­er respect, half of the CVs he sent out men­tioned that he was blind and the oth­er half did not. The 10 CVs with that dis­clo­sure land­ed him one inter­view, while the 10 with­out elicit­ed nine.

Hes­lop went on to spend 25 years in the tele­coms indus­try, serv­ing as CEO of US com­pa­ny Cincin­nati Bell mov­ing into the third sec­tor, where he cur­rent­ly works as CEO of the Char­i­ties Aid Foun­da­tion. 

He observes that his suc­cess is far from typ­i­cal for blind peo­ple. “For any­one with my dis­abil­i­ty, it’s pret­ty unusu­al even to be in paid work. And it’s extreme­ly unusu­al for them to have the kinds of careers that I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to have.”

Hes­lop is prob­a­bly right. When it comes to achiev­ing eth­nic and gen­der diver­si­ty on boards, numer­ous stud­ies have sug­gest­ed that some progress has been made and more work is still to be done. But it seems that dis­abled peo­ple are so under­rep­re­sent­ed at the top lev­el that the data is bare­ly mon­i­tored. Experts believe that both mea­sure­ment and man­age­ment are need­ed to change the sit­u­a­tion.

Going by what few stud­ies there have been, it is bleak. The Valu­able 500, a glob­al col­lec­tive of 500 CEOs work­ing on dis­abil­i­ty inclu­sion, sur­veyed FTSE-100 com­pa­nies last year and found that not one senior exec­u­tive or man­ag­er in these firms had dis­closed a dis­abil­i­ty. Research con­duct­ed by EY in 2018 con­clud­ed that 7% of CEOs had some lived expe­ri­ence of a dis­abil­i­ty, yet 80% of these were hid­ing that fact. 

Rea­sons for the lack of data vary from coun­try to coun­try, but non-dis­clo­sure is a key con­tribut­ing fac­tor, while many dis­abil­i­ties are invis­i­ble. Where com­pa­nies do pub­lish infor­ma­tion on the sub­ject, there are trust issues.

“Yes, dis­abil­i­ty is a char­ac­ter­is­tic that peo­ple won’t always be com­fort­able about dis­clos­ing,” says Sophia More­au, an award-win­ning anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion cam­paign­er and diver­si­ty, equi­ty and inclu­sion (DEI) con­sul­tant. “But that’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a fault of the indi­vid­ual con­cerned. It’s on their organ­i­sa­tion. Peo­ple have under­stand­able fears that their com­pe­tence may be ques­tioned by their employ­er if they dis­close their dis­abil­i­ty.”

Eth­i­cal argu­ments aside, there is a strong busi­ness case for hav­ing more dis­abled peo­ple in lead­er­ship roles, espe­cial­ly when it comes to iden­ti­fy­ing with dis­abled con­sumers and their fam­i­lies. This is hard to ignore, giv­en that KPMG has esti­mat­ed their glob­al spend­ing pow­er to be more than £5.8tn. McK­in­sey & Co has also found evi­dence that more diverse and inclu­sive busi­ness­es out­per­form those that aren’t. But anoth­er argu­ment for widen­ing the net is that peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties are inher­ent prob­lem-solvers – cru­cial for steer­ing an organ­i­sa­tion through test­ing times.

After Steve Ing­ham, CEO of recruit­ment firm Page­Group, suf­fered life-chang­ing spinal injuries from a ski­ing acci­dent in 2019, resum­ing his role was nev­er in ques­tion once he was fit enough to do so. Return­ing to work as the pan­dem­ic hit the UK, he found that thou­sands of employ­ees were look­ing to him for answers. 

Ing­ham was not fazed by the weight of expec­ta­tion. He believes that the key les­son he learnt from his acci­dent, “when I was lying in a riv­er with a bro­ken back, bleed­ing heav­i­ly and close to death with hypother­mia, was ‘do not pan­ic’. If I’d pan­icked then, I would have died.”

Page­Group went on to thrive amid the Covid cri­sis. “Our results today are high­er than they’ve ever been in our his­to­ry – with few­er peo­ple,” Ing­ham reports.

Rep­u­ta­tion­al­ly as well, good DEI attracts tal­ent­ed peo­ple for whom such val­ues are becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant. That’s one of the con­clu­sions of Stay­ing Ahead in a Chang­ing World: the skills lead­ers in finan­cial ser­vices need, a research report pub­lished in Novem­ber 2021 by indus­try body the Finan­cial Ser­vices Skills Com­mis­sion (FSSC).

Despite the strong case for get­ting more peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties on boards, there are clear­ly still fac­tors pre­vent­ing this from hap­pen­ing, which could be down to a lack of under­stand­ing. More­au points to the social mod­el of dis­abil­i­ty, which holds that peo­ple are dis­abled by bar­ri­ers in soci­ety – oth­er people’s prej­u­dices and lim­it­ed access – not by their impair­ment. 

Report­ing the rel­e­vant data would be a good start­ing point for tack­ling the prob­lem. Indus­try bod­ies such as the FSSC, the Con­fed­er­a­tion of British Indus­try and the Con­struc­tion Indus­try Coun­cil encour­age mem­bers to dis­close their per­for­mance on diver­si­ty met­rics, includ­ing dis­abil­i­ty, but it’s clear that not all employ­ers are on the same page. 

“We’re con­scious that some of our mem­bers are very small – they don’t have many resources and they may be new to this,” notes Claire Tun­ley, CEO of the FSSC. “But that’s no excuse for not look­ing at the issue.” 

Mean­while, the Valu­able 500 is seek­ing to lob­by stock mar­ket indices to make report­ing on dis­abil­i­ty met­rics a cri­te­ri­on for list­ing.

Busi­ness­es are also pilot­ing solu­tions. Microsoft is encour­ag­ing self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion through employ­ee resource groups rather than the HR depart­ment, for instance, while EY is estab­lish­ing a cen­tre of excel­lence designed to har­ness the skills of neu­ro­di­ver­gent employ­ees. 

Ing­ham says that, because PageGroup’s exec­u­tive board is not as diverse in its com­po­si­tion as he would like, the com­pa­ny has cre­at­ed a more diverse shad­ow board to chal­lenge its strate­gic deci­sion-mak­ing.

Solu­tions can be as sim­ple as ensur­ing best prac­tice in fair and open recruit­ment at senior lev­el. The word­ing of job descrip­tions is impor­tant in this respect. More­au warns that even stat­ing that pri­or board expe­ri­ence is desir­able may deter appli­ca­tions from per­fect­ly good poten­tial can­di­dates in under-rep­re­sent­ed groups. 

The pri­vate sec­tor may have made some advances in recent years in recruit­ing, devel­op­ing and pro­mot­ing dis­abled peo­ple to lead­er­ship roles. Despite this, it’s still uncer­tain whether Hes­lop would be spared the same lev­el of dis­crim­i­na­tion today if he were to repeat the CV exper­i­ment he ran more than three decades ago. 

The need to accel­er­ate progress is urgent, as research indi­cates that age and dis­abil­i­ty are close­ly linked. Giv­en that work­forces world­wide are age­ing, many peo­ple could be leav­ing employ­ment pre­ma­ture­ly when they should be prepar­ing to become CEOs.