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How we can make academia more disability inclusive

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 1324–1326 (2022)Cite this article

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The low representation of academics with disabilities is a longstanding problem on which progress has been slow. Drawing on my research on disability-related barriers and my experiences of disability, I make six practical suggestions for how academic staff and people with disabilities can help make academia more disability inclusive.

The low level of disability inclusion in employment is illustrated by the employment gap between people with and without disabilities. For example, in 2019 in the UK, the percentages of employment for people of working age were 52.4% for disabled women and 54.3% for disabled men, compared to 77.4% for non-disabled women and 86.0% for non-disabled men1. However, levels of disability inclusiveness are even lower than these percentages suggest, as they include people who acquired disability while in their current employment and therefore did not face the challenge of obtaining employment while affected by disability. The situation is no different in academia.

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Acknowledgements

I thank M. Levitt, C. Oppenheim and M. Thelwall for their helpful feedback, and F. Moreira for his helpful research support with the visually intensive parts of this paper.

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  1. Research Institute of Information and Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK

    Jonathan M. Levitt

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  1. Jonathan M. Levitt
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Correspondence to Jonathan M. Levitt.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Rachel Yerbury and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Levitt, J.M. How we can make academia more disability inclusive. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1324–1326 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01447-y

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