Introduction: [00:00:00]

Guest Introduction [00:02:02]

Interest in Disability [00:03:43]

Role of Data in Research: The Two Ticks Accreditation [00:08:31]

Business-Oriented and Government Disability Policies in the UK [00:20:20]

Disability Employment Prevalence [00:37:35]

Personal Impact of Disability on Research [00:43:39]

The Future of Research: Democracy and Advocacy [00:55:06]

Conclusion [1:03:20]

Nick Bacon  

[0:00 - 0:15] Many disabled individuals without work actually have very work-related skills that they use throughout their daily life in order to get through. So they're phenomenally creative, ingenious, tenacious, all the things that employers say they're looking for.  

Chloë Atkins  

[0:26 - 0:32] Welcome to Season 3 of Broadcastability, a podcast by, for, and about people with disabilities.  

Lark Huska 

[0:33 - 1:28] Broadcastability is a PROUD Project production based in Toronto, Canada. Visit theproudproject.ca to learn more. This podcast was recorded and produced on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the 

Haudenosaunee, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. This territory is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, a treaty made between the Anishnabeg, Mississaugas, Haudenosaunee, and Allied Nations to protect the resources of the Great Lakes and the surrounding areas. This podcast was also partially produced on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We also wish to acknowledge the Indigenous Nations across Turtle Island, also known as North America, where we conduct our research and record this podcast.  

Chloë Atkins  

[1:29 - 2:01] Welcome to the third season of Broadcastability. In this episode, we meet the delightful Nick Bacon, a Professor of Human Resources Management at the University of London in the UK. He's a numbers scholar, a big data guy. For me, what is fascinating about his work on disability employment, is that his quantitative studies support much of the same conclusions of our qualitative studies on disability employment. He focuses on the efficacy of government policies on DEI or EDI, however you want to express it, in the UK, with a particular emphasis on disability-positive efforts. 

Nick Bacon  

[2:02 - 3:20] When my wife was 25, she acquired a disability, so she had a very serious illness, and getting back to work and staying in work was phenomenally important to her, so I supported her through that process and learned a lot about what it's like. And then, as a result of her joining in with disability activism—so she joined the local disability activist network, Action Network Dan, which was in the UK, and then various disabled people movements that followed on from that—we then developed a network of friends with disabilities and learned a lot about the barriers that people encounter in daily life, participated in various campaigns around a whole range of things, from benefits changes to accessible transport and et cetera. I just became phenomenally impressed by people's challenges, and also the realization that many disabled individuals without work actually have very work-related skills that they use throughout their daily life in order to get through. So they're phenomenally creative, ingenious, tenacious, all of the things that employers say they're looking for. But then again, I would look at some of my wife's friends and think, “well, you know, you've got all the skills to be in employment, but nobody's giving you the chance,” so why is this?  

Chloë Atkins  

[3:20 - 3:42] It's interesting you say that, because my whole take on this is that society is missing out on a great deal of talent. There are always going to be some people who can't work, and there may be periods in your life where you can't work. I'm not trying to force people who can't work to work, but I just feel like it's an utter waste of the latent talent in the disability community that we don't use.  

Nick Bacon  

[3:43 - 5:09] So I would observe people who would run these groups, you know, phenomenal secretarial skills, organizing skills, meeting skills, and you think, “well, that's all employable skills,” but nobody's prepared to take you on and let you use those skills for paid employment. And that's heart-breaking in many ways, but also invigorating, because, you know, things need to change, and joining that struggle was important to me. So that was kind of my personal motivation, and then my academic side is that I have a long standing interest in employment and management, and I'd studied many different things before, and I was aware generally of the DEI literature, so obviously I turned to that DEI literature and started looking at it and thought, well, actually in terms of kind of management and organizational studies, there's very little on disability. So typically the people in universities who study disability are often in social policy departments, or the medics, but it just struck me that in terms of kind of giving advice to employers and saying, here are the employer practices that work, this is the evidence as to why they work and what you should do, and what can we do to get employers to adopt them, there was insufficient work in that area. So I therefore thought, well, here's an opportunity to match my personal interest and my academic skills to try and find out more about what works. So that was my kind of initial kind of motivation to get involved in the field.  

Chloë Atkins  

[5:10 - 5:44] I was fascinated that you work for a Faculty of Management, because we finished a study a couple of years ago, we've just finally written it up, but one of the things that I find is that when we started to look for disability employment literature, the search engines were just producing management articles to us and rehab or medical ones. So how do you manage the disabled, “difficult” employee? What do you do about all these disabled people? But I'm just intrigued, how do your colleagues sort of view your work in a Faculty of Management?  

Nick Bacon  

[5:44 - 7:05] Yes, so basically, like most university departments, we have lists of journals to which we expect academics to publish in. And as long as I can publish on disability in those journals, people don't care what you study. So as long as you're meeting the requirements, you're publishing good work in top journals—so as long as those journals are willing to accept work on disability, and generally I find that they are, then it's not a problem. I think, you know, I think people look at it kind of with interest, because normally kind of in university departments, when they think about DEI, they'll think primarily about gender, and then they'll think a little bit about race, not too much about other things. So when we have, you know, a DEI committee, it's like, you know, it will be obsessed with Fraser, Athena, Swan accreditation, and that's what it will focus on. But I think, you know, academics are generally quite open-minded in terms of what other people can study. So as long as people think you're making a solid contribution, and of course it's framed within a broader contribution to understanding how DEI can be advanced in organizations, and of course all university departments will sign up to that as a name. So therefore I find that's okay, because that's quite different from how universities then might treat its own disabled staff.  

Chloë Atkins  

[7:06 - 7:10] Which is bad. My experience is poor, yes. 

Nick Bacon  

[7:10 - 7:25] Yeah, in terms of an academic subject area. I think management departments are relaxed about it, and there's now sufficient good publications in the area of management and organizations and disability to mean you can have a credible career. 

Chloë Atkins  

[7:25 - 7:41] Well that's good. I mean, what I've found is, it's interesting you bring it up, we have tremendous amounts of accessibility. Every university has an accessibility office, but it's aimed entirely at fee-paying students, and not at staff or faculty.  

Nick Bacon  

[7:39 - 7:41] My PhD, political science. 

Chloë Atkins  

[7:41 - 8:30] Political science. So in political science, they're always talking about, you know, social justice. And I'm a political theorist where that really happens, okay, where everyone is sort of conjecturing about what ought to be, or what is. And when I bring up stuff around disability, they just don't think of it as being a real topic for social justice. They just don't. Okay, actually my big question is this, sorry, as a fellow researcher, is we had huge problems. Recruitment is always an issue when you do a study, and your two ticks, and your disability competence study, which I read your paper on that, and I'm fascinated: how did you get so much access? Did you have some sort of authority behind you that got you access to all these firms? Because we had great difficulty speaking to employers on our study. 

Nick Bacon  

[8:31 - 18:11] Okay, so I'm a researcher. So I need big data, and I need big data sets. And one of the problems with surveys is that employer response rates have been declining over many years, to the extent where now there are real kind of selection problems with surveys. So you need to use kind of robust surveys. And fortunately, with disability competence, there was 

robust survey data already collected. So in terms of looking at two ticks, there was a government-run survey that's got matched employer and employee data. So we've got data from the employer about which disability practices they have, and lots of other, thousands of other questions. And then data from each employee, including whether they're disabled or not. So we'd already got that data collected, which is the Workplace Employment Relations Survey in the UK. It's a little old now, the last one was 2011.   

But we're not allowed to know which firms participated, because it's anonymized. But those firms are known. So we could go to the secure data lab, where the data is lodged, which is a government agency run by the Office for National Statistics. And we gave them a list of employers with two ticks accreditation, which is publicly available, 10,000 on the government site, and said, can you match these employers into this data? We're not allowed to know which individual employers are in this data, because it's a random sample. But for those that had allowed secondary matching, the Office for National Statistics could do this match. So we then knew which workplaces had this certification. So we could then say, “does certification lead to better practices, and more disabled people, and smaller gaps in the experience of work between disabled people and non-disabled people in the same workplace, and across workplaces.” So because we'd got that data.  

Now, our problem then was 2011 data. So we could look at two ticks, the previous version, but not Disability Confident, the current version. So we needed another data set. So I'd been asked to speak about disability by an organization called WorkHealth. And WorkHealth was run by Lord Mark Price. He was a Conservative Minister. And I'd gone on to conferences and done him a favor, speaking about disability. So I then said, well, “Mark, you've got this data, which is all of these employee survey respondents from all of these firms, 136,000 of them. Would we be able to analyze by matching in whether they had Disability Confident? And then to look at whether some firms employ more disabled people, and again, would the gaps in work experience be different?” So Mark said, “sure, yeah, fine. Here's the data.” So again, we matched in the data.  

So as a Constitutive Researcher, I'm not reliant on individual employers giving me access or not to a disability-related study. They're participating in general surveys, and then I can match in disability aspects, like accreditation. So that saves me the trouble of collecting all the data. Now, the pain is matching, because I was matching 20,000 firms with Disability Confident into 136,000 respondents. And although AI helps a little bit, you know, you still have to ultimately eyeball your data and believe that the match is right. So it's very painstaking doing the match. But that's the pain you go through. And then, of course, the statistical analysis is painstaking. But the data collection itself becomes a bit easier. So these are schemes that were set up by the government. So the government was interested in voluntary initiatives to try and get employers to adopt more, better disability practices and to employ more disabled people. So what it said is, well, we've got this certification. And if you sign up for this certification, you can then display it on your job boards to make you look like a good employer of disabled people. This plan to attract more disabled people to apply to you. But in return, you've got to do one or two things. And these were really soft things. So these were things like, you know, say that, you know, you're interested in employing disabled people and you will give them a fair crack for the money. Say you're interested in one or two of these things, select which one you're interested in. Are you interested in giving disabled people apprenticeships, et cetera? And a lot of employers were hooked into this scheme through the local job center. So when they went along to the job center and said, we've got this job, the job center would say, “are you willing to employ disabled people in this job?” And the employer would say, “yes, in principle, yes.” And they would then say, well, “there's this government scheme, which will give you some credit for being a positive employer and open-minded about this issue if you sign up for this scheme.” So employers were entrapped, if you like, through the job center to sign up.   

The government told all government departments, you've got to sign up and demonstrate good practice. Councils, local NHS, hospitals all signed up because they all wanted to do the right thing. Lots of big private corporates signed up saying, look, we support this agenda, it's a positive agenda. So they all signed up to say they were trying to be better employers of disabled people. So come 10 years later when we're assessing it, are they or are they not? And disability—two ticks have got various levels within it. So the idea is that you start off at this level, you then make some more commitments, you then get a better level, and then ultimately you end up at the top level. So it's supposed to be incremental improvements in employer practices. As I said, employers were very proud to display it on their job boards. They've gone to most job boards of most corporates and it's a display of how great they are. So it's positive for working women, willing to employ veterans, willing to employ disabled people, this will be confident. So that potentially is quite an important signaling effect. So if disabled people, when they went along to the job center and said, “I'm looking for a job,” often job center advisors would say, well, “why don't you target firms with disability confidence certification? Because these are firms who are willing to engage with this. And you may have more of a chance of being employed,” et cetera. And you're showing that you're meaningfully looking for work, which is a condition for your benefits. So this was all happening. And whenever we went back to government and said, well, “can you do more to get employers to engage with us?” They would always just take us back to say, well, “disability confidence, two ticks, we've already got this scheme. It's brilliant. Employers say it's great. They love it. You have 20,000 that signed up for disability confidence. So something like a third of all employees were covered by disability confidence.” But disabled people to us would say, well, “yeah, but I work for one, but my experience is terrible.” So does it actually work? So we could test whether it works.  

So we could look at those employers with the certification and compare them with those that are not. We could control for features, their industry, their size, et cetera. And then we had data from employees. So from the employer, we could find out whether they were disability confident. We would also tell us some things about their disability practices. So we knew out of a list of five or six practices whether they did them or not. And then we also had data from their employees nested within each firm. So we could calculate what proportion of their employees were disabled using a very standardized measure. Employees themselves reporting to this anonymous survey to government whether or not they were disabled. So they're not reporting to their employer. They're reporting separately to an anonymous survey. So we could look at whether those with the certification have more disabled people. And then we could also look at disabled people's experience of work. So a set of questions where they would describe their job demands, the resources they've got, their job satisfaction, whether they thought they were being supported by their manager, what their career prospects were like, whether they felt secure in their job. And what we always find is that disabled people and non-disabled people in the same workplace feel different. So disabled people generally feel less secure, less supported, et cetera. So there's always this disability gap. So in those firms with disability confident, does that gap reduce or potentially even disappear? So we're interested in A, the number of disabled people these firms employed and B, this difference in the disability gap.  

So we were able to show that, unfortunately, the scheme had no effect. Employers with the certification were no more likely to employ disabled people. And the experience of work amongst disabled people in those workplaces was no better than outside those workplaces. And the gap was no smaller. So the scheme effectively wasn't working. And it's an interesting finding, because I'm not saying schemes can never work, but what we always say to government is, “we think your criteria for accreditation are too soft.” So if we compare it with something like the Stonewall Employers Scheme, which is a really effective scheme at getting firms to adopt LGBT practices, why is it effective? Because Stonewall monitor it, they assess these firms really carefully, and every year they make it harder and harder to get. So these firms have to ratchet up their commitments. 

So I have every confidence that a scheme that measures effectively, and really makes employers do it, can be effective. But unfortunately, here it was, well, for disabled people, a soft scheme is good enough. It's so difficult, employers are so unwilling to engage. We'll just make it so undemanding that loads of employers will sign up. And this itself would be a good thing. But of course, for disabled people, it's not delivering the returns. 

Chloë Atkins  

[18:11 - 20:18] At some level, it's meaningless. I mean, the study we did was we went and spoke to five, we went to five countries, in French and English. So we did Canada, the US, UK, Belgium, and France. And I had the typical North American belief that, oh, you know, France is going to be shit. So maybe Belgium would be great, because it's the seat of the European Union, there'll be a zoonotic effect. And forgive me for saying this about Belgium, but Belgium was the worst one. It suffers from one of the things that we do, which is you have two ethnic or language groups, and then it gets very complex to deliver proper legislation programs. 

But the thing that really struck me with France was interesting: it enforces its laws. And that made at least a difference in our ability to actually speak to employers and what they thought about it. Some of them were like, look, I think about it, and then I just pay the fine. You know, they were up front, “I don't really care.” But then one guy said, “well, at least I think about it. I never thought about it before. Like I didn't think about it at all.” Other firms were actually really proactive and wanted us to come back and see they still have problems with peers' acceptance of disabled people. And also people didn't want to identify because of the social stigma associated with disability. So that was a problem. But it really struck me as I mean, one of the recommendations we made is you have to enforce, like if you're going to make law, you have to have an enforcement procedure.  

And even if I mean, they're, you know, actually there, we've done an Accessibility Standards Canada here. And I was at a conference, probably two or three years ago, in which I stood up in the room, and there were all sorts of people, government people there. And supposedly firms who were under the federal legislation, should have by then at least sent their guidelines for you know, the policy about what they do about getting more disabled people, I think 20% had done so. And I said, well, “the fines that are in the legislation?” “Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna write them a strongly worded letter.” I'm like, no fines, like, just, just get going on it. Like, what are you doing? I mean, at some level, why are we making legislation that doesn't work, that doesn't do anything? Right. But anyway, tell me about your new study. I apologize, I'm talking too much. 

Nick Bacon  

[20:20 - 22:02] So just kind of going back to this issue of data. So I mean, it's clearly kind of in review, we've got a couple of papers where we use job advert data. So in job adverts, sometimes you will get disability provisions. So an ideal job advert for a disabled person is, is an employer that says, yeah, we will make reasonable adjustments in the process. You know, we're committed to employing disabled people. You know, we offer lots of benefits that would benefit disabled people, et cetera. So you can imagine if you like the ideal job advert, where you look at it as a disabled person, you think, “yeah, I'm really attracted to that. This looks like an employer who's really going to go to town here.” So, job adverts, again, give us an insight into which employers are actually taking this so seriously, that they're prioritizing it in their job adverts. 

Of course, always the danger of that, do they actually then do what they say? So they may promise a reasonable adjustment, but not deliver it. But at least they've gone to the effort of saying, you know, welcome, you know, maybe we support the access to works, the government scheme to help disabled people to work and support them. And so it's all these positive signals. So again, we can take that as a block of practices. So this is an actual employer behavior. So this is what they're doing in the actual jobs market when they're pitching themselves to people. And again, we can look and we can run characteristics of firms against that. So we've got 136,000 job adverts from one day in time. These are job adverts off the government's own job agency. 

Chloë Atkins  

[22:03 - 22:08] That's where you're finding them. So it's on the dot, they're on the government boards, you're not having to look through websites.  

Nick Bacon  

[22:08 - 26:03] So basically, this is the electronic version of the jobs board when you walked into your local job center. Yeah, so now it's all electronic. And for disabled claimants to get benefit, they have to show that they're looking for work. And one way they can show they're looking for work is that they've got an account on this particular job search system, and they're using it. And that shows the job center that they're engaging seriously. All of these jobs are real jobs, you know, they're real firms, so the government checks them. So that's what they are. And we can take, you know, all of these jobs being advertised on a particular day in the UK—I said there were 136,000—and we can look at the disability provisions within them. And we can say, well, which firms, which one of the characteristics of firms that are, have got these provisions and which ones are the characteristics of firms that don't. So what we find is that there's very few of these provisions full stop in job adverts, you know, rarer than hen's teeth, often. So, you know, this is kind of one indication.  

So two organizations that have disability competent accreditation, are they more likely to put these in? Slightly more statistically, but the vast majority of them don't bother. So they're not even, you know, putting the practices on paper, and saying they've got them to try and attract disabled people. We also look at kind of membership of lots of advisory groups. So organizations can join disability associations. So in the UK, they can join Mindful Employer. So there's 10,000 members of Mindful Employer, that they'll commit to training their managers on good mental health. They provide lots of evidence-based advice—it's run by an NHS trust—lots of evidence-based advice about how to spot mental illness in the workplace, and how to help people with mental impairments at the workplace. So we can look at whether organizations that are part of the Mindful Employer scheme, again, are they doing different things in job adverts, compared to those that are not? Does that sign, we have a business disability forum, which was set up by a Canadian, actually, initially in the UK. And there are 500 organizations that are part of this, who speak very vocally about leading best practice, being best practice practitioners, are their job adverts any different, and various other schemes. And generally find a similar thing to disability confidence, that there's no association between whether organizations are getting involved in these employers networks, and whether they're actually adopting the disability practices you would expect them to do so.  

So again, it's another voluntary scheme. Yeah, you know, voluntary advice, you know, it's a selective scheme, only employers are going to join because they've got some interest in it. They're getting advice, the advice varies in terms of what it is. But again, little evidence that this kind of voluntary approach is making much headway. So again, when we go back to government, and we say, well, “you need to do more on this.” And they'll say, “yeah, but look, 10,000 employers have signed the Mindful Employer Charter.” And we'll say, “yeah, but it's not reflected in their practice.” And of course, we also added into the work health data that I mentioned previously, the, you know, the fact that you know, the hundreds of thousands of employee surveys we've got, and again, we can show they're no more likely to employ disabled people, and the disability gaps are no smaller. So we test lots of things. And those are two examples of the things that we test, which government thinks may help to improve disability employment. So our role as academics is to test them as vigorously as we can, and to say, well, “do they work or not?” So we've done a similar thing with working from home, et cetera, and other things, small firms compared to large firms. Again, kind of testing arguments that government often puts forward as to what they think will work to, you know, to just kind of improve knowledge and try and improve policy on these matters. 

Charlotte Flameng  

[26:03 - 26:30] Yeah, I have a question. So those two schemes are voluntary programs, right? So in your opinion, should the government move away from the voluntary programs and follow more of the path they've taken in France, where they have the six person coda that is actually enforced with a fine if you don't comply to the six person.  

Chloë Atkins 

[26:30 - 26:36] They audit, right? There's an annual audit, either you make it or you don't, right? So what do you think? That's a good question. 

Nick Bacon  

[26:38 - 27:30] It is a good question. So from all of the research that we've done, we worked very closely with MPs in the old party parliamentary group on disability, cross party, and made lots of recommendations and produced lots of reports. And then we also produced a disability employment charter, which is nine asks. And we developed this with disabled people's groups. So all of the major disabled people's groups in the UK, Disability Rights UK, major disability charities, all co-developed and signatories of the disability employment charter. And we then went out and got as many employees as we could to sign it. So this is a set of nine asks that we wanted government to do. The asks do not include quotas for a particular reason, which is that disabled people's organizations in the UK are very anti-quota. 

Chloë Atkins 

[27:32 - 27:35] Why is that? Why is it anti-quota? I'm intrigued. 

Nick Bacon  

[27:36 - 28:06] They regard it as creating the risk of an impression of tokenism. When you do attitude surveys, even amongst people who are disadvantaged in the labour market themselves about what kind of approach to equality they're prepared to accept, treating everybody the same, everybody supports that. Treating some groups differently to help, generally there's not a majority support, even amongst disabled people or amongst ethnic minorities. 

Chloë Atkins 

[28:07 - 28:13] That's a problem of discourse of democracy, is that sameness is somehow equality, and that's a problem, right? 

Nick Bacon  

[28:14 - 29:01] Yeah, so I don't disagree with you. And there's strong evidence that quota systems are effective. The OECD's review, evidence based on this, suggests that they can be highly effective in promoting DEI. But the organizations we're working with, and I can have my academic view and my findings, but I've also got my engaged view, which is that, you know, nothing about us without us, and I cannot be advocating policies publicly, which my colleagues in DPOs disagree with. So we have to move together. So we've got a united front around nine asks of government. These nine asks, two of them featured in the Labour Party manifesto and Labour won the election. So two of them are manifesto commitments, they were in the King's speech. 

Chloë Atkins  

[29:01 - 29:06] And what were they? Can you tell us? Because we're international, people listen to us all over. 

Nick Bacon  

[29:06 - 32:15] So one is pay reporting. So we currently have a consultation on disability pay and employment reporting. So following on from the gender pay gap reporting legislation, should we then extend this to ethnicity and also disability? So this would require every firm with 250 employees or more to annually report the proportion of their workforce who are disabled and also to report the pay gaps in their organization. So it's a similar reporting requirement as we have on the gender pay reporting. This itself is complicated because disability throws up lots of issues that gender necessarily doesn't. So getting enough support around this and consensus around this was a challenge and we repeatedly produced models as to how we think this legislation would work and how we think it would work in practice for employers.  

So although not all employers groups have supported it and some of them have come out against it in the consultation, some have not. So the Institute of Directors and you know traditionally a very kind of right-wing group of you know senior managers are supporting it and wrote a joint paper with us about how it works and how it should be done. So we hope that because it was a manifesto commitment and because so Labour's obliged to do it because the consultation will have enough employer support but not unilateral, not all employers will support it but it will have very strong DPO backing and we're hoping that you know this consultation will lead to legislation going down this line.  

Now an interesting part of this legislation is that gender pay gap reporting initially only asked employers to report and it didn't ask them to produce an action plan and this was partly because behavioral economists convinced the government that if employers have to report a gender pay gap and it looks bad they'll have to explain their plan about what to do with it. What actually happened is nearly all organizations did report their gender pay gap so they don't have a non-reporting problem but very few of them produced a plan about what to do about it. So there's new legislation coming in which will force companies to produce a plan, an action plan to address their gender pay gap but the nature of the action plan is brilliant, it's not just waffle on and tell us what you're doing, it's these are eight things that make a difference in evidence, are you doing each one? So it's a very prescriptive, you know, best practice model. We're not interested if you tell us that, you know, you celebrate, you know, women of the world day or something because it has no impact, you know, what we want to know is do you do the things that matter? So our model for disability pay and employment is similar, yeah, tell us where you are but here are the things that work, which ones of them are you currently doing and which ones are you planning to do? So it pins employers down to vendor things that we think are meaningful. So it's a reporting system but it's a reporting system that then has a consequence. 

Chloë Atkins 

[32:16 - 32:21] And who runs this? What department, like what national department oversees this? 

Nick Bacon 

[32:22 - 34:03] Yes, so it will probably fall under the business department effectively in the UK. So this legislation is often developed by the equalities departments but it's the responsibility of the business department to enforce. With things like the national minimum wage, it's the tax office, it's HMRC. HMRC are great at enforcing so any equality stuff you can get the HMRC to enforce is brilliant. Ideally I'd like it to be HMRC but it won't be, it will be the business department and our experience of these things is that the business department, because it listens very closely to big business, will get cold feet about this. So there's no guarantee that even after the consultation, even after the government produces its policy, that some minister in the business department will not pull the plug because they may try and do so. So it's a long battle, we've been at this particular one for five or six years. We've also got some changes currently which have gone in which were in the manifesto, like time off work for trade union equality reps to pursue equality issues in their workplace and that was something we nearly got in 20 years ago but the business ministry stopped it but it's now coming in under new legislation. So you know some of these things you know you hope you can get them done in five six years within this government, some of them you've got to wait for them to be elected again and you know it might take 15-20 years but you know you can get there eventually. So that's I guess, it's a lesson in perseverance!   

Chloë Atkins 

[34:03 - 37:34] What I'm noticing as you speak is that government is somewhat unilateral. So here you've just talked about different sort of elections. I'm interested when you talk about government, government doesn't do this—it's bipartisan. I mean governments don't do this. It doesn't matter what party that's in power. It seems to be that disability is kind of uniformly offset, put off to the side in that sense. So I know I'm just intrigued by the way you speak about that. One of the things that I've been wondering about is so the CDC, I ran across it and I've mentioned this a lot but it's puzzling me, is right now we say there's about—it used to be 12% of our population is disabled. Now they say well it's about 16% and I'm going to claim it's much at some level. Okay so I'm also someone, I'm not sure I like the “dis” of disability. I find that difficult. So one day I will write a paper, I'd like the word traits, other people don't like traits. I sort of just feel like we all have traits, some of which need a lot more accommodation than others and others that don't, right? So the CDC asked, I think it was in 2018, they published this on their website in 2019, a small paper, the CDC being the American Center Disease Control, which was not politicized at that point. So what they did is they asked 18 to 35 year olds about their state of health and 52% of them—so 18 to 35, your prime of life, you are meant to be your healthiest, like you are the markers of everything, of everything good that there can be—and 52% of them identified as having a chronic illness.  

Now I suspect that that is a medicalization of ourselves. Actually, my friends who are political scientists don't agree with me. I think somehow medicine has impacted who we are as citizens and that, you know, that we are much more likely to say I have depression or I have anxiety and that these things, you know, they're part of my identity and part of how I function in the world. And what's interesting, you can say, “well that, yeah, so what, that's not really that important,” but survival, like morbidity, mortality research on COVID, those not so important illnesses or syndromes actually impacted people's ability to do well or not do well with COVID. So they're not just off to the side. So if we have 52% and 26% of that 52%, I believe that's right, said they had two or more. So the other thing that I've been thinking is the advancement of medical science means that you can have someone working in your workplace, maybe a colleague down your hallway there, who's been living with blood cancer for five years and has cancer, but it's working, right? And your bus driver could have Crohn's disease and they're just, they're populated throughout because we now have, I mean, we're not, it's not perfect, but we have a lot of people out and around our communities who have things that are being looked after medically and might be considered a disability. So I've been wondering whether, in fact, the proportions are higher because we're willing to claim some of these things, and/or because we are actually in a realm in which medical capacity is expanded so that people who have a blood cancer don't die immediately, they can live for another decade. And so in fact, that's a much larger proportion of the population, and that it's actually in the interest of employers to do this, that they, you know, they've got, if they really want talent, they're going to have to adjust a bit. But okay, so that's my, it's my revolutionary thought. I wonder what you think. 

Nick Bacon 

[37:35 - 41:25] So I, you're absolutely right that disability prevalence has increased, the reporting of it. So in the UK, it looked as though the disability employment gap was declining, which suggested more disabled people were getting into work. But once you adjust it for increasing prevalence, what you actually find is it's fairly flat. So the increased prevalence itself is interesting. So where's it coming from? Much of the increased prevalence is coming from reporting of mental health issues. So, you know, is this a genuine reflection of more mental ill health out there, or people's more willingness to classify the issues they have as mental ill health? That's no doubt happening. For some of the disabilities, we've seen a rise in the number of people reporting and being classified with neurological conditions. Medics will tell me that there's no overall change in the number of people with neurodiversity, but there are more people coming forward with potential neuro deficits, who are then being classified and medicalized as neurodiverse. So those things are all important.  

Now, I think in terms of disability employment, what I think is particularly important is that government can use increased prevalence and increased numbers of disabled people in employment as evidence of a victory. But what I think is that the people who traditionally found it very difficult to get employment because of severe disabilities, the world's not changed for them. They're as likely to be out of work now as they were 10, 20 years ago. So in terms of kind of, you know, seriously helping people who are excluded from society and labour market activity, I think kind of much of what the government's done just hasn't shifted that dial, hasn't shifted that dial at all. Every government scheme to try and get more disabled people in employment, where it succeeds, it gets into employment those people who are really close to the labour market and really close to getting jobs. So at the margin, it helps those people who are very almost employable. Those people that need much more serious adaptation and adjustment, they're as far from the labour market outcomes as ever. Yeah, and those are the people that are really difficult to help. And those are the people who need most help, I think, in order getting in. So all of these governments kind of twinkling schemes around your advised job center advisors, job coaches, you know, they help at the margins, but not an awful lot. They don't really shift the dial in terms of the number of people employed. But I think you're absolutely right, that can be very deceiving if we just look at prevalence, because prevalence rates can be affected by your medicalization, the number of people coming forward, people's willingness to identify. So the particular question that you ask is something that we think about a lot. So we tend to prefer the question which was very heavily trialed by the Office for National Statistics. And it's a two part question for someone to identify whether they're disabled. The first part is whether they have a long term health condition or impairment likely to last longer than 12 months. And the second one is does it significantly affect their activities. So it doesn't mention disability. So people don't have to identify as disabled to have a long term condition. It's got to be long term, it can't just be a broken leg. Yes. And it's also got to seriously affect your daily activities. And those people we classify as disabled. And that's the kind of measure that when we want employers to measure and report, we want them to use a very specific standardized question. Because if they all make up their own question, then it's just unreliable. You just cannot measure one employer against another. So you're absolutely right, getting that question, that definition, right, is really crucial. 

Chloë Atkins 

[41:26 - 41:34] What is the statistics then, that emerges out of those two questions? I mean, you're asking the whole population or just employed population?  

Nick Bacon 

[41:34 - 41:48] You can ask the whole population, but you can also then just restrict it to the employment population. So it's higher in the UK than it is in Canada. So it tends to come out around 25 to 28%. 

Chloë Atkins 

[41:49 - 41:56] See, I'm not convinced it is actually higher. I think, again, it's the question and how things are viewed.  

Nick Bacon 

[41:56 - 42:21] Yeah, the question matters hugely. And when employers measure how many disabled people they've got, again, whether you report it to your line manager, you report it to HR, the question that's asked, you have the culture of the place, will all affect whether you will disclose, you know, all of these things matter. So it is genuinely very difficult to get a measure on the number of people who are disabled in any really accurate way. So you have to be very aware of the sensitivities of the particular question, the definitions you're using. You're quite right. 

Charlotte Flameng  

[42:21 - 42:35] Do you have any colleagues working in disability employment or any other people in the UK working in that field? Or do you find that there's not that many people working on that?  

Nick Bacon 

[42:35 - 43:39] Yeah, it's a good question. So there are not that many. So I work with three colleagues, one of whom's just retired. So I work very closely with Kim Hook. And Kim works at King's. And with Melanie Jones, Melanie works at Cardiff. And Vicky Walsh, who also worked at Cardiff. Part of the link being that Kim and I many, many years ago, both worked at Cardiff. So there was a network there. So there are—there's not many people in kind of, management who study. We are all quantitative researchers, which is why, you know, we're able to kind of work together effectively, because we're on the same page. There are other people in other disciplines who also kind of contribute to the employment side. So Ben Geiger at King's is a professor of social policy. Ben does good work, looking at the impact of benefit changes. And I think Ben's just joined the government group that's looking at changing some of the benefit criteria. So Ben is somebody worth speaking to, as are Melanie and Kim. 

 Chloë Atkins 

[43:39 - 44:04] So I'm wondering also, do you find, I mean, obviously, your wife becoming disabled has had a huge impact on you. I mean, I don't think that when it comes into your life, yeah, you can't help but be impacted. Do you find this has impacted your other work? Do you do, you know, and, yeah elsewhere in your research, or even in your the way you sort of manage your, your professional or personal life as a result of all this? 

Nick Bacon 

[44:06 - 45:13] So, I think you, I think you become very aware, you become very efficient at the time you use. So, I know—so a lot of my colleagues will spend a lot of time socially at work, you know, chatting, you know, they'll go out for a meal. So for me, there's work where I do my work, and then there's my personal life. So although it overlaps in terms of my interest, and what I study, I don't mix the two very much. So when, as soon as you know, I work nine to five, you know, I'm very strict about my hours, you know, I need a lot of flexibility in the day when I need to go and help my wife, and we've got medical appointments and things to do. So, flexibility of an academic job is brilliant. And very few jobs are as flexible as an academic job. You know, it's, I think had I not been in a job that was so flexible, I don't think I would have been able to stay in employment over the years. Or certainly not full time employment, but just because, just because of the sheer flexibility that you know, ultimately, there's, you know, there's only so many days in the year when I'm studying in front of class when I have to be there, unless everything else gets moved around. 

Chloë Atkins 

[45:14 - 47:45] It's interesting you say that, because I feel the same way. I mean, I chose a career in the academy knowing that I needed, I mean, I got tenure, and I thought that would be my safeguard, and you know, et cetera. What I didn't think is, I have a neuromuscular disease, and I'm tenured at the University of Calgary, but it's at altitude. And so I can't breathe there, that started to collapse. And so I, what I thought was safe, no longer became safe. But what I'm intrigued by then is, it is a very flexible environment. And I've often said to my, to other people, to young people, though, I think it's going to get harder to do the path that I took, is to become a professor. It was difficult enough as it was, but is that it's great for family life, because of its flexibility, that you can, you know, you see your children a bit more, and then you might if you did something else.  

But what I'm intrigued by, and I find frustrating is that for such a flexible work environment, how hostile it is to actually having disabled faculty members, that this somehow just is, this is not something they want. And, yeah, I find that it's a paradox of the place, that they are so flexible, they often talk, you know, we're meant to be all left leaning and talking about social justice, and right, but nonetheless, disability, I literally sit in to and listen to papers in political theory, where they say, well, the unemployed and disabled, that's an exception. And right at the beginning of the paper, they're just thrown over here. Now, I'm going to talk about real people, right? And I just, I'm astonished that people don't find that difficult. And I've said this before, in this podcast, I think disability is fascinating as a theorist. Like, I just think it, it knocks at the door of what we think of as autonomy. And what is really that we're not all independent. It's again, so we have to be treated the same. No, we have to be treated with equal consideration and respect. That's what we should all be treated with. And, you know, we're all treated equally. Well, I don't need glasses, you guys should get rid of your glasses. That's, you know, we're all treated the same. Let's start there.  

I mean, I just find it perverse that we cannot seem to, anyway, I think disability just challenges these things around also about reason as well. You know, that the rational man standard that's in common law and that we adhere to as well as just simply gets thrown under the bus when you start to encounter real life situations of disability. But what do you think the future is for this type of work? And whether, I mean, given that I think, and you think the prevalence is higher, do you think we're going to get more buy-in? Or is there just so much stigma and difficulty around it? 

Nick Bacon 

[47:47 - 49:54] So I think there's a hierarchy of interest in equality. And I think it goes gender, race, LGBT, disability. And I think that's reflected in organizational attention and managerial attention. So when I teach about EDI to say to my MBA students, you know, I will start off with gender examples, you know, I will then bring in race examples, you know, bring in LGBT, and then I will bring in disability examples, but I don't feel as I will be able to start with disability examples, because they wouldn't immediately connect with it. So I think that's how it is. I think when you look at the proportion of work done in those different areas, gender far outstrips race, and race far outstrips disability in terms of volume of publication. So I think that kind of reflects it.  

You know, if we look at our kind of, you know, employers interest in these things, it's the same. It's the same thing. So I think it's, but there's always an opportunity to always argue, look, you've done this on gender, did it work? Well, why wouldn't you do it on disability? And this is what we're currently doing with the gender pay gap legislation. It's had a positive impact. It's narrowed after the introduction of gender pay gap legislation. So well, why wouldn't you do that for ethnicity? Okay, we accept that case. Yeah, it's different because there's different ethnicities. Yeah, it's different, but it can still be done. Well, why wouldn't you do it for disability? Well, again, yeah, people have got yes, they do. But people have different ethnicities. You know, it's a complicating issue, but it can be resolved.  

So we can piggyback on the back of other equalities legislation in that very useful way. To basically—it's a shaming, isn't it? That, you know, if you would do it for this group, surely you would do it for this group. And the ultimate card to play, I think, kind of in disability, it's just the disability gap is so much larger than the ethnicity gap and the gender gap in employment and in wages. So, you know, if you actually really want to meaningfully shift the dial on equality in the workplace, and in labour markets, you've got to deal with disability. 

Chloë Atkins 

[49:55 - 52:47] So I absolutely agree with you. I think the fundamental problem is that once you become disabled, somehow you are not as human as all these other ones. And really, at some level, but as I was listening to you talk, I just think, “yep, they accept that women,” I mean, I remember when I was a child, when we were hearing, you know, businessmen arguing against, you know, childcare leave, you know, postnatal leave, right? And I'm never going to hire a woman of childbearing age again. Well, they did, right? And so what? You got parental leave. But the thing around disability, and I still encounter it, is that, “well, that's a separate it's just, you know, it's just not, you know, how can someone who can't walk really be a doctor?” They could, you know, why not? Right? It just, and there is something beyond, there's an attitudinal thing that I think that is universal. I think there is, maybe, I have often wondered whether it's instinctual, like there's, I think with ethnicity, there's a fear of other, right? There's this sort of group think of protection of other, but I also think there is a sense of, a sense of closing ranks around, okay, who's the strongest here? We'll tolerate some of these vulnerable people until we can't, like then it becomes too tight and we can't do it anymore. And the use of, I mean, the Nazis practiced their gassing techniques all through the 30s on disabled people with their mobile trucks, right? To those who are not worthy of life. 

So I, one of the things is somebody who's a political theorist, I just keep trying to think around trying to get people to understand that actually disabled people are incredibly human. So I'll tell you a study I want to set up as a simulation in which I try and show, I try and sort of disable somebody in a workplace, like tie one hand behind their back, put on a, I haven't done it yet, but I'd really like to do it, is put the, put a blindfold on and I'll say, “okay, you need to set up a meeting in the conference room down the hall in an hour, and I bet you get it done.” Like this has to be done this, and I can guarantee, I can almost guarantee you'll get it done, right? And, what I want people to learn out of that, I'm not going to work for, I'm trying to collect a team for this, is that what I would like people to learn is that immediately you start to adapt. Like you, you, you immediately start, figure out how to adjust yourself to get a task done, right? You can't see it, you put your finger on the top of the lid just to feel where the water's coming up to, just all sorts of things that you immediately start to suss about how you're going to do it. And to me, what I'm trying to explain is this is the incredibly adaptive, flexible behavior of all human beings, and that disabled people just happen to be doing it with what they're given at that point in time, but that we all do it no matter what, right? You know, that whether we walk into a meeting and we realize, oh shit, I'm underdressed, and sort of tidy ourselves, or we walk into an auditorium and we're talking too loudly, and we reduce the volume of our voice, we adjust, right? I don't, what do you, am I mad? I do, I think it's the very core of who we are, right? 

Nick Bacon 

[52:48 - 55:04] No, I mean, you're saying all of that, you know, I'm kind of thinking it's, we, employers just often do things that we know don't work. So when they think about training people on the area of disability, it's anti-bias training. And we know anti-bias training doesn't change bias. So, so just, just stop it. Yeah. But we know contact theory has got a lot more mileage, that the more contact you have with people who are different from yourself, you know, reduces stereotypes. Yeah. So, one of the things that Business Disability Forum did, which I think is a great idea, is that they get chief executives to come along and meet groups of disabled people. And these are people who often just in their daily life, just don't interact with many disabled people. So all of a sudden this fear of the other becomes, oh, actually people I know. Yeah. And people I realize that you're what they can do rather than just seeing the stereotype of what they can't do.  

So, I think kind of a lot of kind of contact experiential training, you know, is potentially there's a lot of mileage in this that, you know, once you, once you realize, you know, what you can do with impairments, if those impairments are, you know, substituted onto you, you know, it becomes amazing. And then you can appreciate what other people do, but also the challenges that they go through. So I think it makes you much more sympathetic to other people's lives and other people's circumstances. And it gets you thinking about those things. So, there's a lot of, I guess, you know, the policy implication of that kind of experiment is, you know, does it change people's attitudes and would it fundamentally change people's behaviors if we turned it into a broad training scheme? So there was a consultation on the national disability plan of the previous government. And some DPOs were putting forward, you know, the idea of, well, everybody should be trained in disability awareness. And is this a good idea? And when asked by government, you know, the answer is well, empirically, there's not a lot of academic evidence that disability training will work. I think if it's of the anti-bias, we will change your prejudices type. It will not work, but potentially the types of training, it depends what you mean by training. And you'd, you'd have to specify the types of training that firms give. Otherwise they will just go along to some, some local consultants or give them anti-bias training. They'll tick the box and move on and make no influence. So, I think, you know, such experiments are potentially kind of really interesting in terms of developing, you know, a scalable policy that could work if we can build up the evidence base. 

Chloë Atkins 

[55:06 - 55:24] Wow. Yeah. Okay. So where do you think the future is going? Do you feel positive about things in the UK? Do you, I mean, do you think you're going to, okay, let me ask you, I'm going to ask the question: is Brexit going to get reversed? Do you think it was useful to be in contact with the European Union around this? Was it not? What, tell me about what your thoughts are.  

Nick Bacon 

[55:24 - 56:50] So Brexit is very harmful for equality in the UK. Not only in terms of stirring, you know, stirring up and pandering to anti-immigrant sentiment. Most of the equality legislation that we have is because the European Union made us do it. Even conservative governments, the conservative government introduced the Disability Discrimination Act and said, look how progressive we are. Yeah. Because Europe was going to force you to do it if you didn't do it! So we're now lacking this European lead, this mainland European lead, which is a problem for us. So that's one problem. The second problem is that, you know, we have the same problem that the US does and many countries do, that we've now got a very popular right-wing party. So the Reform Party is currently way ahead in the polls. It's an extreme anti-immigrant right-wing party. It announced its front bench yesterday. Many of them are former conservatives. And the person who's been given the equality brief is a former conservative. And she said day one, they're going to rescind the Employment Act of 2010. So their plan is basically they will do away with all EDI employment individual rights on day one is their commitment. Now, it's a massively chilling effect because we know what Trump has done has had a hugely chilling effect on corporate America. 

Chloë Atkins 

[56:50 - 56:53] It has. And even here you can feel it a bit. 

Nick Bacon 

[56:53 - 58:43] Even in Canada. So governments, I always liked Frank Dobbin's argument that liberal states are administratively weak, but normatively strong. So we don't tell firms what to do in terms of EDI, but they set the framework about what's acceptable. And if you set the framework that types of discrimination are not acceptable, then employers get that normative message and it shifts social views. So there's good evidence that when America introduced, the American national government introduced the Gay Marriage Act, then all of a sudden attitudes to gay marriage changed and attitudes to LGBT people changed. So the state plays an important leadership role. And Trump knows that, I think. And you couldn't as an EDI, somebody who studies EDI, what he's done is very likely to have an effect. It's as though he's read the EDI books and thought, what matters here? You're reporting practices, having EDI people in organizations, all those things matter. If I get away with them, EDI will just dissipate. The traditional convention was that whichever government came in next, they never reversed EDI legislation. So it always felt like a long, steady march forward. As soon as the gloves are off and you have governments willing to just reverse, will Trump go for the Civil Rights Act at some point? It's not beyond the bounds of thought. But so the consensus around equality that was shared across all parties, so even though Tory Conservative parties never really pushed it forward much when they couldn't, they never reversed it. So you felt as though you're creeping forward. If we've now got political parties who are convinced they're going to reverse it, all of a sudden you just get sweeping away of rights. And that sends a very strong message to employers about how they're expected to behave. And it's very different from how we expect them to behave now. 

Chloë Atkins 

[58:43 - 58:55] And why do you think it's happening? I mean, you're there, we're here, but I mean, you know, it's happening in continental Europe, you've got Marie Le Pen in front. I mean, you've got these, what's happening, do you think? 

Nick Bacon 

[58:56 - 1:00:12] So you could, a lot of the support for far right parties is amongst working class people who've been left behind by globalization. So as a result of globalization, you know, they've not seen their living standards rise that much. Societies become more equal, a lot of the beneficiaries have been at the top. So they feel left out, they feel left out by traditional left wing parties. And a lot of the blame then is going on to immigration, which is not the accurate blame, but that's where it's gone. Yeah. And you can see a similar pattern, it's rather like, you know, the rise of Hitler in the 30s. That, you know, when people feel economically very desperate, and they feel as though the system is not working for them, they often then look for extreme solutions. And think, well, “I've got nothing to lose, really.” And they're going for those solutions. The most upsetting bit, though, is that people who benefit from these rights might also vote for those parties. So there are plenty of, you know, Black individuals in America who voted for Trump. And it’s the same thing here that right-wing parties have still got strong support amongst, you know, Muslim groups and Indian immigrants. So that is also happening and that’s much harder to explain.  

Chloë Atkins 

[1:00:13 - 1:01:27] I’ve wondered also if the internet has played a role, I mean social media and such, there’s manipulation, but I also think—this is my theory talking here—is this invidious comparison. That if you see people flying on their private jets, and you see them in their houses doing their TikTok and their Instagram, and you think “what the hell?” Like, you know, “I don’t have that.” There’s a sense of, I think, the rich get to parade their richness in a way that wasn’t visible before. And I think that—you know, in fact, I often say to my children, “we live like kings compared to a hundred years ago. We have hot showers everyday, like really we are so fucking lucky” excuse my language—fucking lucky at some level. And even the working class, I mean I’m not working class and we don’t talk about class so much here, but, you know, in the end, the base things of having a hot shower, central heating, like these are things that people didn’t have, you know back in the 30s even. We have them now, right? So I just find also that it’s probably the way that people see themselves in comparison to what is being displayed. I don’t know whether that makes any sense.  

Nick Bacon 

[1:01:27 - 1:02:42] Yeah it’s all there isn't it. I mean, my only kind of long-term hope is that often these right-wing parties are such a disfluent selection of grievances and there's a different selection of issues. So at the moment people who would vote Reform are, some out and out racist some people who would just wish the world was like it was in the 1930s, some immigrants who are looking to create a life, and some working class people who feel disadvantaged and aggrieved. But also some traditional, kind of, your left-wing Labour voters who think that these parties will pursue a state-led solution that they will generally make their health services better, they will make their schools better, they will repair their roads, all of the things that cause them problems in their life, because that’s part of what they play on. So, you know, I guess critics of this party look at them and say, well, “it’s actually just run by very wealthy people who will just line their own pockets, and they will use any argument to get you to vote for them, they’re not really on your side, your situation isn’t really going to change.” But that’s just not cut-throat. So it’s possible that you get one of these governments and it just, like, falls apart, because they do not address many of the things their voters think they are going to address. 

Chloë Atkins 

[1:02:43 - 1:02:48] Are disabled groups going right? Or, they’re not going right, the disabled groups aren’t heading for the reform? 

Nick Bacon 

[1:02:48 - 1:03:18] I don’t think they’re moving too much, but as you say, traditionally they don’t vote as much. So, it’s this kind of, you know, mobilized activism that you need. There is, one of my colleagues, Philip Connolly, so he’s a disability rights activist and we’ve worked with him for many years. And Philip’s kind of set up a group basically just trying to create political activism amongst disabled people just to get them out to vote more. And I think that’s really important, that’s really important.  

Chloë Atkins 

[1:03:20 - 1:03:34] We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. Perhaps it's understandable, given that Nick Bacon’s and my own work focuses on equal dignity and respect in democracies, that our discussion became quite politicized at the end. I wonder, Charlotte, as a European, what you thought of the discussion? 

Charlotte Flameng  

[1:03:35 - 1:03:58] Well, first, I really enjoyed this episode. I think his methods are brilliant and the way he gets access to his data is fascinating. As a European, it is true that I can recognize different patterns on the way government and the population can think about disability. And that was reflected both in his findings and ours in the Five Nations Study.  

Chloë Atkins 

[1:03:59 - 1:04:19] I really hope that we all have the chance to meet again. I really enjoyed learning about Nick’s scholarly work, as well as his activism and alliance with disabled activists in Britain. Across the seasons we’ve talked to some very interesting people. I'm beginning to think that we should put together a conference of Broadcastability guests and get them physically together for a couple of days. I suspect some interesting collaborations would emerge.  

Charlotte Flameng  

[1:04:20 - 1:05:07] Absolutely, that’s a great idea. We’ll work on organizing something like that. This episode of Broadcastability was hosted by Chloe Atkins, a professor at the University of Toronto, and an anti-ableist researcher, and Charlotte Flameng, a research assistant for The PROUD Project. This episode was also edited by Charlotte Flameng. Isabelle Avakumovic-Pointon created the artwork and Justin Laurie composed the music. Broadcastability can be found on Apple Music and Spotify, and at broadcastability.ca. Broadcastability is a PROUD Project production based in Toronto, Canada. Visit theproudproject.ca to learn more.