We love, salute and fete our super-human Paralympians. Those who have won the top medals now reside in a world of super-reality. Meanwhile back in the world of everyday reality, the employment gap between able-bodied and disabled people in the UK is still shockingly high at 30%, and it has remained static at around 30% for the last ten years, with very little sign of movement.
We offer massive congratulations to the marvellous efforts of our athletes at the Paralympics. Your country is quite rightly proud of what you achieved both in London in 2012 and now in Rio in 2016. But let’s spare a thought for the many ordinary Brits who are also disabled.
Many of us watched, enthralled at the sporting exploits of our Paralympians. They are British and are representing our nation. Of course, we were going to support them. We empathised with them; we felt their trials and triumphs. Our mirror neurons were working over-time, feeling their pain and their jubilation. The more we watched them, the more we became familiar with them. The more we knew about them; the less we, and ironically in this case, focused on their disability.
William Graham Sumner, the great ethnocentricity theorist, could have predicted that we would support “our own” back in 1906. It hardly takes a genius to work that out. They are like us, they are British, they are our own.
We knew something about many of them before they flew out to Brazil. Many had become celebrities after 2012, and some have won commercial sponsorship deals (and why not).
They will quite rightly be awarded honours in the New Year, they will speak at events as motivational speakers and they will inspire us.
When they retire from sport and if they need to go into jobs like the rest of us, we might even be the people that interview them for their first job outside of sport.
If they do apply for our vacancies, we will be excited that a Paralympian applied for a vacancy at our organisation. We are already familiar with them. We have a relationship with them- albeit through TV. We can relate to them. We can relate to their successes and we can even attain reflected glory by hiring them. We have reached the point where we are familiar with these heroes to the point, that we don’t see their disability as a negative. It would be easy to see why many of us would be more likely to be biased towards employing them.
The more we mix with people with a different background to ourselves, the more we become familiar with each other and as long as we get on with them, the less that we will see the differences between us. In the case of the Paralympians, we would see them as real people rather than the hero figures that we imagined they would be before we go to know them on a more inter-personal basis.
As long as we get on with them, the more time we spend with each other will make us more comfortable with each other.
So then why does society see other disabled people so differently to these heroes?
Sumner’s research revealed that we are much more sympathetic and empathetic towards people from the same ethnicity as us, or simply put – people who we perceive to be like us.
In too many cases society, unconsciously, has seen disabled people as different and “not like us”. Our brains scan for difference and see differences as a threat and something to keep away from. This goes some, obviously not all, of the way to explaining the employment gap.
The National Centre for Diversity has developed an amazing leadership programme called ‘Masters in Diversity’; which is launching in Scottish Parliament on the 4th October, which helps leaders to unpack the kinds of issues mentioned in this article.
One thing to take away from this article is: Under ordinary situations, the more that we become familiar with someone different to us, the less we think of them as different; offering both parties the opportunity to see each other as ‘one of our own’ and enabling us to gel together much more harmoniously and to work together much more productively.
For more information on how we can support your organisation’s work around Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, give us a call on 0800 288 4717 or email admin@iiduk.org.
