Intersectionality and disability: What monitoring will and won’t tell you about employees’ lives

Can people ever just be ‘one’ thing?

For example, is a disabled person ever ‘just’ a disabled person? Are all a disabled person’s experiences only affected to being disabled, rather than any other aspect of that person like their age, gender, ethnicity, or beliefs?

We set out to answer some of those questions in an extension of our work on The Great Big Workplace Adjustments Survey in 2023, with the paper Intersectional experiences at work.

Again, then, are people defined by a category or characteristic?

Human experiences, and the findings of our paper, would unequivocally say not. But the very human instinct for sorting, labelling and categorising the world around us – including people – still puts emphasis on individual labels, not a mix.

Categories can be much broader than they appear

This can carry over into diversity monitoring. A diversity monitoring survey which seeks to sort people into defined groups might define a person as ‘disabled’, without there being a who that person is aside from being disabled. Someone who is (and describes themselves as) a disabled queer woman, for example, is counted as ‘just’ a disabled person. Even if their experiences are both different to other disabled people’s and unique to being a disabled queer woman. In the same way, recording the person as ‘just’ a woman would miss out the difference in experience posed by being disabled and queer.

This is the problem with choosing only one label – it misses out large amounts of information. But categorising and finding common threads is something we do by instinct.

Do the usual categories tell us enough about different employees?

Many employees we surveyed suggested that common ‘characteristic’ labels didn’t adequately describe their lives or experiences, not least because they didn’t see themselves as being defined them. Individual characteristics were singled out less than a sense of someone’s ‘whole self’ in terms of the effect on someone’s working life. That ‘whole self’ was defined by various characteristics, each interacting and affecting people in unique ways.

This was reflected in our findings. The numbers of disabled employees reporting that their age, gender or gender identity, race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion or belief had an impact on requesting adjustments or discussing their disability at work were quite low.

Or, more specifically, it often wasn’t any specific characteristic alone that had an impact. As one employee put it:

“Age: people talking about how young I am while I am in the bathroom. Religion: people thinking I am overly sensitive because I flagged that I don’t think it is appropriate to laugh about people with a particular belief. [Not being] confident: coming across confidently is almost a required behaviour. Disability: I can’t work as long hours as is wanted, I need breaks and that can be seen as disruptive.”

A less-measured characteristic with major impacts

But a majority did cite the impact of a characteristic we haven’t mentioned yet, and which often isn’t measured in diversity surveys: that of a person’s assertiveness and confidence.

Confident personalities were happier to self-advocate for adjustments, or about their needs, at work, and many also felt confidence and extroversion were more acceptable in workplaces.

But even for those with higher confidence, other characteristics still affected experiences. As one employee said: “What would be labelled as ‘assertive’ for men is ‘aggressive’ for [disabled] women.”

This persistence also led to these same employees using the complaints and/or grievance processes when adjustments requests weren’t answered. In turn, one in five disabled employees said they felt having made a complaint had prevented them from being treated fairly or getting support and adjustments.

Conclusions: Lives, not labels

So, do intersections play a big role in employee’s lives? Yes, but not in the straightforward sense of each characteristic like age, gender, sexuality, religion, beliefs and disability affecting a person in isolation, or even of employees viewing themselves through the lens of these different characteristics. Instead, different aspects of a person interacted in unique, complex ways, and were often situation-dependent.

Our key recommendation to businesses was to explore ways of gathering information about employee’s intersectional experiences through more personal, targeted means where possible. The strongest insights from our work in this space didn’t come from the numbers as such, but the words and experiences of employees we spoke to. You can find our full set of recommendations on our Intersectional experiences at work page.