Disability

Scottish Government's 'Equality Evidence Finder' reckons that 32% of all adults in Scotland have a disability.

The last time Equality Here, Now checked the performance of Universities in Scotland as an employer in delivering equality for disabled people was in 2019.

The research carried out then found :

The elimination of disability discrimination, a pivotal part of the general equality duty, requires an explicit acknowledgement by all public sector bodies that institutional discrimination is alive and well and exists within and across the structures, policies and cultures which create each organisation as an individual legal entity and yet bind it irrevocably to wider society itself.

No such acknowledgment has been made by any of Scotland’s universities in the employment equality data reports published in 2019.

Non-disabled people have held the monopoly on positions of power and privilege within Scotland’s universities as employers for decades, if not centuries in some cases. Legislation in the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st century aimed at eliminating disability discrimination has failed to break the monopoly that non-disabled people hold. The requirements of the Equality Act 2010 and specific equality duties in Scotland have found universities locked into a sterile two-year cycle of gathering workforce data and publishing often inaccessible and ineffective workforce profile reports – while the baseline evidence they reluctantly disgorge tells us that nothing is changing. Disability discrimination remains in place across the university employment sector.

There is a well-known quotation defining insanity [and often mis-attributed to Einstein] :

“doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.”

Scotland’s most recent attempts in the 21st century at framing equality legislation and regulations to eliminate discrimination are insane.

Equality Here, Now has researched the performance of the Universities in Scotland as employers of disabled people over a number of years, and the journey from then until now can be uncovered in the research reports published in 2017, 2015, and 2013.