Your organisation’s attitude toward employing people with disabilities could be quietly getting worse right now, and you would have no way of knowing.
Last week’s newsletter looked at making this new financial year actually work — measuring, escalating, and changing, rather than repeating what didn’t move the needle last year. Around the same time, I shared a sector evidence stat: 46% of all AHRC disability discrimination complaints are about employment, and people currently employed report discrimination at less than half the rate of those who’ve left the workforce or never got hired. That post was about who gets missed by most inclusion measurements. This one is about what gets missed — because the figure I want to show you today isn’t about a population nobody’s counting. It’s about a trend nobody’s watching.
In 2022, 77% of employer responses were positive about the value and benefits of employing people with disabilities. By 2024, that had dropped to 74% (AIHW, Australia’s Disability Strategy Outcomes Framework, 2026) — a six-question composite, not one soft answer dragging the number down, so this is a genuine, broad-based softening. And it’s not part of a general drift: educator attitudes held flat at 63% over the same two years, health workers started at 71%. Of the three, employers are the only group that went backwards. This isn’t society getting slightly less accepting everywhere. It’s specifically what happens inside a workplace relationship with disability, which makes it your problem to solve, not a cultural trend to wait out.
There’s a second pairing worth putting next to it. Employers rate themselves 74% positive on valuing employees with disabilities. In the same strategy’s own data, only 54% of people with disabilities report feeling valued and respected by their community overall, dropping to 42% for the 25–44 age bracket, prime working age. Ask employers how they’re doing, and you get a 74. Ask the people on the receiving end, and the number drops sharply. Same pattern as the sector evidence post: a different dataset. The people doing the reporting and the people living the outcome are answering two different questions.
And here’s the part that should actually worry you: this took a national government, with real resources behind the measurement, two full years to notice. Most organisations aren’t measuring anything close to that closely. They’d never catch their own version of this at all — because even a good culture or engagement survey rarely asks a question specific enough to catch it. Most measure general sentiment, policy presence, or training completion, not whether attitudes toward employing people with disabilities specifically are trending up or down over time.
Why attitudes move backwards, even when intentions don’t
Nobody wakes up and decides to think less of employing people with disabilities. Regression like this doesn’t happen through a change of heart. It happens through accumulation — a hiring process that felt harder than expected, a workplace adjustment request that got tangled in approvals, a manager left to improvise without real support. None of that registers as an event at the time. It shows up two years later, as a number that’s quietly moved the wrong way.
This is exactly what I mean when I say remove invisible barriers, and you reduce the risk of ableism — a line I’ve been repeating for over 7.5 years, because it’s still the clearest way to say it. Attitude regression is invisible almost by definition: not written into a policy, not trained in a single session. It’s formed and reformed every time an organisation actually goes through the experience of employing someone with disability — and what that experience was like determines whether the next attempt happens with more confidence, or less.
Takeaway 1: If your organisation has employed someone with disability recently, ask directly — not generically — how that specific experience went for the hiring manager and the team. Not “how’s inclusion going,” but “what was hard about this, and would you do it again without hesitation?” Attitude regression usually starts with an unspoken “that was harder than I expected,” repeated quietly enough times that nobody ever says it out loud.
What actually protects against this
Positive attitudes aren’t sustained by good intentions. They’re sustained by good experiences — hiring processes that work smoothly, adjustments that get approved without friction, managers who feel equipped rather than anxious. Take any of those away, and attitude erodes, regardless of how genuinely well-meaning an organisation is.
Takeaway 2: Look at your last two or three disability-related hiring or adjustment processes and ask whether they were genuinely smooth, or survived through extra effort from one committed person. If it’s the second, that effort is invisible right up until that person leaves or burns out — and then the organisation’s attitude regresses along with it, because the thing holding it together was never actually structural.
Takeaway 3: Ask your managers directly whether they feel equipped to support an employee with disability, or whether they’re improvising. “Improvising” isn’t a training gap you can fix with one session — it’s a confidence gap that erodes every time it isn’t addressed.
Takeaway 4: Build one repeatable check into your process — a short, honest conversation with hiring managers and teams after a disability-related hiring or adjustment process, asked the same way each time. Most organisations know whether they hit their hiring targets. Almost none know whether the people involved came away more or less confident. This is how you’d actually start seeing a trend rather than just guessing at one.
Where this leads
Removing an invisible barrier starts with noticing it exists — but noticing once isn’t the same as knowing whether it’s getting better or worse over time. That takes something more structural than a gut check every couple of years: a genuine way of measuring whether your organisation’s disability inclusion work is actually producing outcomes, not just activity.
That’s exactly what next month’s Expert Pod is built around. I’m running a two-part DIOF Expert Pod through The Impact Collab — two 75-minute live sessions, four attendees per pod, for Australian organisations with 100+ employees.
Before Session 1, everyone completes AHC’s free Workplace Disability Inclusion Assessment. Session one starts there — each attendee shares a result that stood out — then introduces DIOF™ itself: three lenses (Leadership, Staff, Customers), five dimensions each. Session two is fully applied: each attendee presents their own mapped initiative to the group, and we work through what genuine evidence-based reporting actually looks like — the difference between activity-based reporting (what you did) and DIOF™ (what changed, mapped to the SDGs, framed to hold up alongside your other ESG reporting).
Registrations are open now.
Over to you
Stop for a second. Don’t answer generally — answer for your organisation specifically. If someone with disability joined your team in the last two years, do you actually know whether the people involved came away more confident, or quietly more hesitant? If the honest answer is “I don’t know,” that’s not a neutral answer. It’s the same blind spot that let a national figure slide for two years before anyone noticed. Tell me honestly in the comments.
Work With Me
- DIAP development and review
- Governance and committee reviews
- Co-design and stakeholder engagement
- Disability Inclusion Outcomes Framework™
- The Inclusion Lens
📅 Register for the DIOF Expert Pod 📋 Workplace Disability Inclusion Profile (free resource)
Making Inclusion Work is written by Ainslee Hooper, disability inclusion consultant and applied anthropologist. Remove invisible barriers. Reduce the risk of ableism.
Source: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia’s Disability Strategy 2021–2031 Outcomes Framework: 4th Annual Report (2026).
