10 October 2005
Disability is ‘Diversity Cinderella’ – results from the Disability Standard reveal
The Employers' Forum on Disability today releases the results of the world's
first benchmarking exercise on disability for both public and private sector
organisations. Eighty UK employers took part and the Forum's unique comparison
of key questions across three benchmark surveys on disability, race and gender
reveals that disability is not a diversity priority.
Of the 80 organisations that participated in the Disability Standard Benchmark Survey, 26 also benchmarked their performance on race and gender over the past year. Thanks to information supplied by Race for Opportunity and Opportunity Now, the Forum has been able to compare organisational performance on disability with that on race and gender.
It is clear that organisations invest significantly less in disability, compared to race or gender. This pattern even holds true for those organisations that are outstanding in their commitment to self-improvement across all three diversity strands. The findings show that:
- 90 per cent of organisations have an allocated budget to support race equality and 68 per cent have a budget on gender equality compared to just 48 per cent on disability equality.
- 89 per cent have policies to support race equality, 74 per cent have policies to support gender equality yet just 43 per cent have policies to support disability equality.
- 93 per cent assess impact on race, 69 per cent on gender but only 15 per cent assess impact on disability.