Discrimination renders disabled people invisible in Scotland's public sector workforce

Recent research into equal pay gaps across the public sector has looked at what if anything the sector has been doing to remove discrimination from the pay of those workers who identify as disabled.  The research also gathered data on the profile of public sector workforces, by gender, ethnicity and disability.

The ability of disabled people to obtain and sustain paid work opportunities is a decades-old challenge, and an area where the public sector has been expected to lead the way in dismantling barriers, discrimination and prejudice.  The evidence provided by the public sector itself in the shape of this comparative analysis of two research studies into equal pay for people with disabilities would suggest the sector has made little progress.

Government's own draft Equality Outcomes use an estimate of 23% as being the proportion of adults of working age who are disabled.

Table 17 shows that the best performer in the sector is in other public bodies [that is other than councils and health boards], with an average of 3.47% of the workforce identifying as disabled.  Universities are next with an employment rate for disabled people of 2.67% on average.  Councils are next with an average of 1.85% and Health Boards are, again, the poorest performers with an average rate of disabled people employed at 0.7%.

Looked at another way, the best performer at 3.47% is only 1/6th of the way towards having a workforce profile representative of the available adult population.  The worst performers, Health Boards, have barely crossed the line in having 1/32nd of the profile they should have if discrimination was removed.