Disability Inclusion in the Workplace
We’ve all done it.
“Are you going to the all-hands?”
“Let’s talk about it during the standing meeting.”
“It’s easy, I’ll walk you through it.”
“That’s an insane timeline.”
We often use language and ideas that center the body and mind and makes assumptions about how we move and think. These common turns of phrase sometimes use imagery that is close to the actual practice of an activity, but more likely, deviates far from it. Instead of accuracy, many workplace metaphors are employed as an attempt to convey meaning to something that is difficult to explain; in other words, they’re a linguistic shortcut.
Language scholars Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon describe metaphors like these as an aid that help people communicate by tying an abstract concept to a concrete idea; making it easier to understand. While shared terminology makes communication easier, these same phrases frequently rely on negative ideas about the people who make up our offices and teams. When we say things like:
That’s such a lame idea.
or
The presentation was tone deaf.
we’re relying on ableist assumptions about bodies, what they can do and what we expect them to do.
The Center for Disability Rights defines ableism as, “A set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities and often rests on the assumption that disabled people need to be ‘fixed’ in one form or the other.” Ableism is pervasive, subtle and ubiquitous; it’s everywhere.
At its best, ableism is the byproduct of unacknowledged advantages. At its worst, ableism in the workplace positions disability as bad, rare, unwanted and impossible to overcome.
The most conservative (albeit common) framing of disability derives from what some researchers term “difficulty with hearing, vision, cognition, walking or climbing stairs, as well as difficulty with self-care and independent living.” This starting point for understanding the over disability foregrounds what disabled people cannot do in a world made for nondisabled people.
A more expansive and holistic definition of disability centers the ways that social constraints shape the lives of disabled people. Disability justice activists from RESIST ask, “What do we do with bodies that have limitations, that are different, no matter how much we want to change them? How do we acknowledge that all bodies are different, while also not ignoring the very real ways that certain bodies are labeled and treated as “disabled?” Instead of thinking of disabled people as those who are “unable” to do something, disability rights activists think of disability itself as “something partly created by the world we live in.”
If we take this call to reimagine disability as a socio-political creation seriously, then the words we use matter. Language helps construct our world and thus it is often the first step in making our workplaces more inclusive and diverse. By thinking critically about common phrasing that can either erase or create stigma around disability, we can use language that is both more specific and inclusive. Consider the following substitutions.
Standing Meeting → Weekly Meeting
Walk Through → Take You Through It
Tone Deaf → Oblivious
Though inclusive language is a vital first step for workplace equity, it is only the beginning.
Disability justice leaders like Mia Mingus, Stacey Park Milbern, and Aurora Levins Morales call upon us to do more than change our language. In their landmark anthology, Sins Invalid, these proponents of the second wave of the disability rights movement ask us to think and act collectively. They write: “We can share responsibility for our access needs, we can ask that our needs be met without compromising our integrity, we can balance autonomy while being in community, we can be unafraid of our vulnerabilities, knowing our strengths are respected.” What might it look like for nondisabled people to “share responsibility” for our abelism?
Conversations about disability often begin with language, but must broaden out to consider more encompassing shifts. Universal Design can re-shape office environments; affecting everything from the placement of door handles to the provision of sign language interpreters for hiring interviews. Structured learning, through training and workshops can fill the gaps, telling nondisabled people what we don’t know so that we can begin to do better. If disability is indeed created by the world we live in, we must all work together to create a different kind of world, one in which disability and all the other identities with which it intersects, are centered. This radical reimagining can and must begin in the workplace.