Hidden disabilities and mandatory pay gap reporting

A few weeks ago, it was announced that ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting will soon be mandatory for larger organisations, which many have hailed as a great step forward. As with existing gender gap reporting, employers of over 250 staff will now be expected to publish data on gender and disability salary disparities.

Now, on paper, this is great, as addressing disability pay gaps should lead to workplace inclusion, stronger retention, happier staff, improved morale, increased performance, and so on…

However, there is a slight problem that many organisations overlook: most disabilities are not visible, and employees are not obliged to disclose this information if they do not want to. 

What does this mean? Well, in short, the accuracy of the data will not be solely about numbers, it will also reflect a company’s workplace culture and how comfortable people feel about voluntarily disclosing their disability.

For many organisations, this reporting  could  act as a yardstick for how trusted and supportive they really are. However, if a large portion of staff choose to keep their disability a secret, there is a danger that the data is not only false, but also potentially misleading.

The number of invisible disabilities in the UK

If you have assumed that we are talking about minor figures here, think again. Approximately 80% of all disabilities are hidden, equating to about 13.5 million people in the UK. According to Bupa, 43% of those with hidden disabilities choose to keep them secret at work. That’s a much larger number than most companies realise.

So why hide? Well, the reasons for this are most often related to cultural issues in the workplace, largely stemming from fear of staff perceptions, stigma, and concerns about career progression.

In short, if your company has unaddressed cultural issues around disability, you are going to find it very difficult to gain a true understanding or to report accurate data around pay inequalities, and misreading these can also cause bigger problems.

The dangers of false data

In addition to providing the Government with factual inaccuracies, one of the biggest dangers of collecting false data is how organisations may respond to or act on it. For example, let’s consider a large company that appears to have very little, if any, disability pay gap. The HR team celebrates the annual report, shares the news internally, patting itself on the back as a ‘proven’ disability-inclusive organisation.

However, the reality is that only a small portion of people with a disability disclosed it in the report, and these were mainly people with visible disabilities (i.e. they could not hide them if they wanted to), who were in specific roles that were well established and secure within the company. Little does the organisation know that a statistically high number of people with hidden disabilities did not reveal them at all, and in actual fact, senior or higher-paid disabled employees are most underrepresented in the data. The result is that the company remains unaware of underrepresentation and low disclosure, and fails to understand the true pay gap issue, yet sees this as an inclusion milestone. 

Another example may be a company that comes out with the understanding that only 4% of its workforce has a disability. They choose to address this directly by hiring more people with disabilities and running inclusive recruitment campaigns to increase applications. However, they actually have many people with a disability who chose not to disclose, as they feel their colleagues would respond negatively, they would be completely unsupported, managers are untrained, and the reasonable adjustment process is notoriously difficult.

The result: the company directly targets applicants with a disability to increase the percentage of employees hired, and the percentage rises, but they are not retained due to a poor workplace culture that senior staff are completely unaware of.

Culture should come before compliance

Realistically, if we want disability pay gap reporting to represent something of value, we first need to address how well an organisation attracts, recruits, and retains staff with disabilities, and most importantly, we must create an inclusive culture.  

We should try and ascertain how many staff may feel uncomfortable disclosing their disability by surveying and analysing the results, such as how many staff anonymously select ‘prefer not to say’ when asked about disability. Whilst this isn’t a direct reflection, it may give some indication to how disability is culturally perceived.  

Usually, when staff witness you making any inclusion efforts, such as for example, improving the reasonable adjustment policies and procedures, aiming to become Disability Confident, creating staff case studies of employees with disabilities and so on, disclosure rates naturally rise.

Mandatory training and disability-awareness onboarding are other ways to improve these numbers. On many occasions, I have had people reveal that they have a disability for the first time in my training sessions, simply because they feel safe and ready, now that they have seen their company and colleagues are attempting to actively develop a more positive perception of disability.

We must also consider whether performance management processes and workplace support are implemented correctly and efficiently, and whether managers are knowledgeable and well-versed in working with staff with disabilities. We should assess which departments employ the most people with disabilities and consider whether they are represented across all areas of the business.

In summary, pay gap reporting is a positive step, but only genuinely worthwhile if it accurately reflects reality. We should also remember that whilst pay gap reporting can be a tool for measuring numbers, if we misinterpret these figures and do not consider our culture which impacts rates of disclosure and hidden disabilities, the results we obtain could be misleading or lead to false confidence.

So, remember, before we do anything related to disability reporting, we must address any potential cultural issues that could distort the data we gather and how we perceive and act on it.