Built to Exclude: Why Disabled Leaders Are Still Underrepresented
About this Episode
In this episode of DEI Will Not DIE, Dr Bree Gorman is joined by leadership coach, speaker, and CEO of the Disability Leadership Institute Christina Ryan to discuss the barriers disabled leaders face in the workplace, and what it takes to create diverse, inclusive and flexible workplaces that work for everyone. Hint: It’s not hard!
Bree and Christina chat about what disabled people need when it comes to leadership development and the different assumptions that come with those programs. Christina gives her top 2 barriers that disabled leaders face when it comes to seeking leadership roles, and what it really takes to be a leader in today’s landscape.
This episode is for organisations wanting to design systems and structures that work for everyone, and move beyond surface-level inclusion.
What You'll Learn
Christina’s top 2 barriers disabled people face when seeking leadership roles
Why disability is often not shared in the workplace and the prejudice that comes when it is
How we design positions that result in less burn-out
Every single human is unique, how do we create systems to reflect this?
Resources Mentioned
Visit the Disability Leadership Institute website for more on their programs and membership
Christina’s TEDx Canberra talk: Why merit-based recruitment is getting in the way of diversity
Follow the DLI or Christina Ryan on LinkedIn
Keep Learning & Connect With Bree
Want practical strategies for navigating resistance and building real momentum in your DEI work? Access my free webinar on evidence-based DEI strategies here. It’s packed with tools you can start using today.
If this episode sparked ideas or questions and you want to talk more about how I can support your team or organisation, book a free 20-minute callwith me. I’d love to hear what you’re working on and explore how we can move the work forward—together.
And don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for fresh insights, events, and tools to support your inclusion journey. Because real change doesn’t happen in silence.
-
Bree Gorman: Hello and welcome back to DEI Will Not DIE. I want to start as usual by acknowledging that I am on Wadarung Country and pay my respects to Elders past and present, and a call out to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who might be listening in today.
I've got a guest with me who I have interviewed once before — for those of you who used to watch the LinkedIn Lives I did, which feels like a very long time ago now. We had a great conversation then, so I'm really looking forward to another one. Christina, did you want to introduce yourself before we get going?
Christina Ryan: I hate introducing myself! Okay, I'm Christina Ryan. These days I run the Disability Leadership Institute, which I founded a decade ago because there was absolutely nothing being done in leadership for disabled people in Australia at the time — and globally, not much more. That's what I do, after a long career in community sector management and disability and gender equality rights. That's me in a nutshell.
Bree Gorman: Ten years!
Christina Ryan: I know, it's actually really weird. I thought I'd give it a couple of years and see how it went.
Bree Gorman: Ten years later — still seeing how it goes?
Christina Ryan: No, no — we're very much in the looking-forward-to-the-next-ten-years strategic phase now, building for the future. Which is a very different space. But it tells us something big: disability leadership was seriously in the "time has come" space, and the gap in that market was sorely needing to be filled. Almost as soon as we got going, people from all over the planet — from disability communities, rights networks, everywhere — started getting interested. It has become much more than we ever expected.
It really tells us there's a real need for this. A real need for disabled people to have somewhere to go for community. We're a massive network now, and that community space matters because it can be very isolating if you're the only disabled person in your faculty, your branch, your political party. It can be very difficult. That community grew organically into something marvellous — and we never expected it.
But it's also that continual presence of leadership development for disabled people that was just never there before. Our programs and courses keep growing, and more and more organisations are coming on board wanting us to run them in-house. The real message out of that is that the need is there. Disabled people need specialist leadership development that is actually about us — that focuses on us, that knows about disability, that talks about disability from the inside — and that is also seriously about leadership development. Not just "get out there and talk more." Actual, rigorous leadership development that any mainstream program would include. We need that in disability, and we need the specialist space so people can really learn hard — not having to mask or pretend, not constantly worried that their disability and their leadership role won't match.
Hell yeah, they match. You just have to do it, and you need to know what you're doing.
We've had specialist spaces in so many other diversity areas over the years. It started with gender equality, of course. The LGBTIQ+ communities have had specialist leadership programs. There are specialist First Nations leadership programs — the Indigenous Leadership Institute was very helpful in helping us set up the DLI. And of course people from culturally diverse communities. All these other spaces have leadership programs. Nobody ever bothered thinking disability needed one too. Apparently it did. So here we are.
Bree Gorman: I love it. And I'm racking my brain — I really don't think I know of any other program specifically focused on people with disabilities.
Christina Ryan: When we were setting up, I went and sat down with all sorts of trusted colleagues in the disability rights community that I'd known and worked with over the decades. Between us, we came up with — I think it was six — leadership programs that had been run for disabled people in Australia over the preceding 20 years. All of them were once-off or pilot programs. That was all there had ever been. What we now have is a continuing presence, and that's the difference.
There are still organisations that periodically run a disability leadership program as part of their broader offerings, and state governments that will do something for a couple of years and then pull out. But most of them focus on entry level, making the rash assumption that disabled people are all just starting out in our careers — when of course nothing could be further from the truth. And globally, we know of only one or two other organisations with a specific leadership focus for disabled people, and they're not necessarily owned and run by disabled people. That's the other thing — everybody involved with the DLI is a disabled person. All of us. I don't know why it's so hard for others, but here we are. Hello.
Bree Gorman: I'm interested in following on from that — what do you see as the biggest barriers disabled people face when seeking leadership roles? And thinking of people listening right now who might be leading DEI programs or working in People and Culture: what are the things we should be working on removing?
Christina Ryan: A big one is what I just mentioned — specialist disability leadership development. A few more organisations are getting on board, but it's still very early days. Most organisations I talk to still ask: can we just tack on a module to our existing culturally diverse leadership program? And it's like — if you want outcomes, the content needs to be specialist content wrapped in mainstream leadership theory, and it needs to be run by disabled people. I'm not saying that just because I am one. I'm saying it because I've seen the results of our work over a decade.
But even before we get to that point, there's the basic recognition that disabled people do leadership. Ten years ago it was revolutionary to put those two words in the same sentence. Disability and leadership — together — hot flash, that was the thing. And it's still not really believed. Even people who talk about it, governments who now use the term, still have no policies that support it. There's still a pretty solid concrete ceiling that exists across the board — and that's fairly global, not peculiar to Australia.
There's still a lack of belief — and that's a weird word to use, but it fits — that disabled people can do the tough stuff in senior management and executive leadership. Which is absolute rubbish. Plenty of us do. But there's also a parallel assumption that disabled people only do disability stuff. We see something similar still in women's policy — an assumption that women can only speak to women's issues. Whereas I come from a gender equality background and moved into disability. We have members at the DLI who are lawyers, accountants, archaeologists, anthropologists, planning specialists, an astronaut. People across a huge range of industries. But the assumption persists that disabled people only do disability. There's real prejudice there. We're 20% of the global population — we should be out there doing 20% of everything. Because we're not visible in many spaces, people forget we might want to be in them.
Bree Gorman: Something that came up in a focus group I ran — leaders talking about having a disability but not feeling they could share that in their workplace and still be respected and seen as leaders. Does that resonate?
Christina Ryan: It's one of the biggest issues. It's a constant, rolling topic of conversation in the DLI members community. The big question of whether to openly identify — only the individual can make that decision, because only they know how safe their environment is. That's what it comes down to.
What our anecdotal evidence — ten years of it now, which is getting fairly solid — tells us is that the more senior the position, the riskier it is to be open. The underlying thing is trust. People just don't trust disabled people to make difficult decisions or to hack the pace at a senior level.
I get DMs regularly from people saying: I want to go for this position, but I can't work full time. Can I still do it? Of course you can work part time as a senior leader. At the last federal election we had candidates in Victoria who ran as co-candidates — wanting to job share as members of parliament. And here in Canberra we have Kim Rubenstein, one of our top constitutional lawyers, who's been right behind that push. There's an assumption that leadership only looks one way.
Kirsten Ferguson calls it the He-Man model of leadership in her book Head and Heart — worth reading if you're interested in leadership. She refers to this old Roman senator model: looks like a white bloke in a toga, in the modern day a suit and tie, flogging yourself 60 to 100 hours a week, job at the centre of your existence, balance optional. That's what leadership looks like, especially the more senior you go. It's why we're still working to get diversity into senior leadership spaces generally.
And it's why there's still a suspicion around disabled people at the executive level. Even our most senior members, when applying to run major agencies or go into senior commissioner roles, face constant question marks over whether they can hack the pace. It's a prejudice. People don't trust disabled people to do what it takes. When I would argue that flogging yourself 20 hours a day is not good for anyone. We've had prime ministers who proudly didn't sleep much and crashed and burned. That's not what we want as we move further into the 21st century.
And honestly, AI is going to be very useful in helping us address that — getting the bots to handle the churning and dot-connecting, so we can do the humaning in leadership. The empathy, the EQ, all of it. And in my experience as a leadership coach, disabled people tend to have a high degree of understanding of what it takes to be flexible and supportive as a team leader — around people who aren't going to work the old 60-hours-a-week way.
Bree Gorman: I'm a huge advocate for job share. It works — for employees and for organisations. There's very rarely a downside when it's done well. But there's still this mentality that it's a bit too different, not quite what we're after.
Christina Ryan: Let me touch on a couple more things about flexibility, because it's a big space. Not all disabled people work part time. Not all of us want a job share. Not all positions actually need to be done full time. Things can be arranged.
We're growing that understanding at the DLI — and there are other organisations doing similar work. We have teams made up entirely of disabled people and we are still incredibly effective and efficient. We work around our disabilities. We understand that some days I'll turn up and just say: no focus happening today, I'm going to do the mind-numbing stuff, or the talking stuff, something that doesn't require intense detail focus. Things happen. And everybody has things happen in their life — picking up kids, settling an aged parent before heading to the office, whatever it is.
We now know that going into the office isn't as vital as all those able-bodied white men thought it was for all those years. And flexibility opens up other possibilities — the four-day work week, for example. The research has been in for a few years now: it's a productivity powerhouse. It's about willingness to look at how work actually functions in your organisation.
How do we design positions so that people work in a way that suits how their brain works, how their body rhythm flows? Are you an early person or a later-day person? Someone like me who has a nap in the afternoon and comes back for a bit more before dinner? How do we put that all together into something that ends up with people who are far more effective — because they're not wiping themselves out trying to be something they're not? We don't get sick as often. People don't start hating their jobs as much. You end up with people who turn up and go through the motions because they've been told they have to do it a certain way — what a lot of rubbish. You want the outcome. Get the outcome. The how is flexible.
Bree Gorman: Absolutely. And I think with all of the DEI topics we cover, there's always this overarching truth that it's just good sense. It helps organisations think more creatively, more flexibly, about how work gets done — and gets the best out of all employees.
Christina Ryan: It goes broader too. Let's think about the conversation happening right now around neurodivergent kids. Every single human is unique. Every single human has different ebbs and flows, different routines, different things that work for them and don't. All of us have different lives and circumstances that overlay all of that. So each one of us has our own set of things.
And that doesn't just apply to work — it starts at education, right from early learning. How we present information so young people can absorb it in a way that works for them. It extends into our health system. We can't treat people generically. If we do, we create a larger and larger group of people in our community who are marginalised — people who miss out on services, feel services aren't designed for them, can't access them.
My personal favourite example: getting my modified van registered. I have to go to a specific government shopfront — not the one near me, the one on the other side of town — only open Monday to Friday between certain hours. As a disabled person, I get on the tram, travel to Gungahlin, half an hour each way. Then I get a ticket and wait in a queue — five minutes if I'm lucky, another hour if I'm not. I'm looking at half a day, which for me means taking a day off my actual work time. So I just don't do it. That system is a barrier to me using it.
We're living in a 24/7 global economy where you can do your banking online at any time — and yet. It's the structures. The health system, if it treats us all generically — we now know the male and female experience of drug usage is different, that drugs were mainly tested on fit, healthy young men, which means disabled women don't necessarily respond the same way. We have to treat people as people.
And it's not hard. The immediate fear from managers and executives is: I can't run my organisation if I can't treat people as a generic job lot. But actually, you end up with a system that is far more robust because flexibility is built into it. Your pool of potential candidates is much bigger. People have far greater job satisfaction. They use the system properly, come back, make fewer mistakes. Productivity hack. Hello.
Bree Gorman: If we just design inclusively from the beginning.
Christina Ryan: That's it. For me, diversity has become a conversation directly related to our productivity as a nation and as a planet. We are cutting ourselves off at the knees by expecting everybody to operate the same way.
Bree Gorman: And that sounds like the perfect note to end on. I love how this conversation has moved from disability leadership specifically, all the way through to designing systems and structures that work for everyone — and recognising that if we take the time to do it right, we actually save time down the track and increase productivity. Thank you so much, Christina.
Christina Ryan: Thank you for having me, Bree. And thank you for your persistence in raising these issues and putting them in front of people — because it's not hard, and yet people think it is. So we need people like you out there making it accessible for all. That's really valuable.
Bree Gorman: We'll put links in the show notes to the Disability Leadership Institute so you can check out the fantastic work they're doing. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode.