Latest / The Diversity Career Podcast with Fexingo: Inclusion, Equity, and Underrepresented Professionals / How One Company Closed Its Disability Pay Gap
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this quiet data point that I think most of us in the diversity space have been ignoring. It's the disability pay gap. And I don't mean 'we should look at it someday' — I mean one Fortune 500 manufacturer actually published its number in 2022 and then spent three years closing it. Luna: Wait — a company voluntarily disclosed its disability pay gap? I feel like most organizations won't even report the gender or race gaps unless they're forced to. Lucas: Exactly right. And that's what makes this case worth talking about. The company is a global industrial manufacturer — let's call them 'ManuCorp' because the specifics of their products aren't the point. In 2021, they ran an internal audit and found that their disabled employees earned a median hourly wage that was 12 percent less than non-disabled employees in comparable roles. Luna: Twelve percent is significant. Is that after controlling for job level and tenure? Lucas: Yes, they controlled for job family, level, geography, and performance rating. The gap persisted. The culprit wasn't overt discrimination in pay setting — it was that disabled employees were disproportionately placed in lower-paying roles or tracks with fewer promotion opportunities. Think about it: if you're a warehouse worker who uses a wheelchair and the only roles you're steered toward are light assembly, while your able-bodied peers get rotated into supervisory tracks, that gap accumulates. Luna: So it's less about 'paying people less for the same job' and more about 'who gets which job in the first place.' That's a harder problem to fix than just adjusting salaries. Lucas: Much harder. And ManuCorp's approach was interesting. They didn't just throw money at it. They started with job redesign. They looked at every role in their three biggest plants and asked: 'What tasks are genuinely essential, and what tasks exist only because of outdated assumptions about how the work has to be done?' Luna: Can you give me a concrete example of what that meant on the floor? Lucas: Sure. One of their assembly stations required workers to stand for the full eight-hour shift. The company had always assumed standing was necessary because the conveyor belt was at a fixed height. But when they redesigned it, they added adjustable-height stations, sit-stand stools, and even voice-activated controls for workers with limited fine motor skills. Suddenly, that role was accessible to someone who uses a wheelchair or has a chronic pain condition. Luna: That sounds like universal design. You make the thing work for everyone, not just retrofit accommodations later. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the philosophical shift they made. Instead of treating accommodations as a case-by-case exception, they built flexibility into the baseline. By the end of 2023, they'd redesigned roughly 40 percent of their frontline roles in North America. The cost? About $2 million across three years — which sounds like a lot until you realize they were spending $1.8 million annually on accommodation requests and legal compliance for ADA stuff anyway. Luna: So it was roughly cost-neutral. But did the gap actually close? Lucas: It did. By the end of 2025, their median hourly pay gap between disabled and non-disabled employees had shrunk to 2 percent. That's within what they consider statistical noise. And they achieved it without lowering standards or quotas — the redesigns actually lifted productivity in those stations by about 6 percent because the adjustable-height features reduced fatigue for everyone. Luna: I want to talk about the transparency piece, because I think that's what made this credible. They published the number, they tracked it, they owned it. But most companies don't even collect that data. Why? Lucas: Two reasons. One: disability disclosure is voluntary and sensitive. Employees often don't self-identify, so the data is noisy. ManuCorp used an anonymous pulse survey with a 78 percent response rate to get their baseline. Two: there's no regulatory mandate in the US to report a disability pay gap the way there is for gender in the UK or for race in some jurisdictions. So most companies simply don't prioritize it. Luna: And yet one in four US adults has some kind of disability. That's a huge chunk of the workforce. Lucas: Right. The CDC says 27 percent of US adults have a disability that affects major life activities. That's over 60 million people. And the unemployment rate for disabled people is roughly double that of non-disabled people. So the talent pool is massive, and it's underutilized. Luna: Let me push back a little. Some critics say that focusing on pay gaps for disability can lead to companies hiring cheaper labor under the guise of inclusion. That disabled workers might be brought in at lower wages because they're seen as less productive. How do you guard against that? Lucas: That's a real risk, and ManuCorp explicitly addressed it by blind-auditing all new hire salaries against the pay bands for the role. They found that before the redesign, some managers were indeed offering disabled new hires two to three dollars less per hour than the band midpoint. They retrained every hiring manager on the 'no negotiation, set rate' policy. If you come in at a given level, you get the same starting pay regardless of your background. Luna: So they removed discretion. That's a strong move. Lucas: It is. And it's exactly the kind of structural fix that works. The broader lesson here isn't that every company should rush to publish a disability pay gap tomorrow. It's that if you don't know the number, you can't fix it. ManuCorp found that their problem wasn't malice — it was the accumulation of small structural biases: which roles disabled people were guided toward, which shifts they were assigned, which training programs they were offered. Luna: And once they redesigned the jobs, the gap started to close almost automatically. Lucas: Exactly. The job redesign was the real lever, not the pay adjustment. They only had to adjust about 200 salaries to fix the remaining gap after the roles were redesigned. Most of the gap closed because disabled employees naturally moved into higher-paying roles that were now accessible. Luna: I think a lot of listeners might be wondering: what can I do if I'm not in HR or leadership? If I'm an individual contributor, how do I push for this kind of change? Lucas: Great question. One thing: ask your company if they've ever measured their disability pay gap. Just the act of asking makes it a visible issue. Secondly, if you're in a position to influence job descriptions or work processes, start asking: 'Does this task really need to be done this way? Could we make this more accessible without losing quality?' That's the universal design mindset. Luna: And for companies listening: what's the first step? Should they do a pay audit or a job redesign first? Lucas: I'd say start with the audit. You need to know where you are. But don't stop there — because if you just adjust pay without changing how roles are structured, you're treating the symptom, not the disease. The real win is when you redesign the work itself so that more disabled employees can compete for the best roles. Luna: I also want to mention that ManuCorp's approach aligns with something called 'disability confidence' — it's a framework from the UK that rates employers on how inclusive they are for disabled workers. They got a gold rating in 2024. Lucas: Good point. And that certification has real business value. Companies that score well on disability confidence tend to have lower turnover and higher engagement scores across the board. It's not just a nice to have — it's a performance driver. Luna: So to sum up: one company closed its disability pay gap from 12 percent to 2 percent in about three years by redesigning jobs, not just by adjusting pay. The key was universal design and pay transparency. And the lesson is that what's measured gets managed. Lucas: That's the takeaway. I'd love to see more companies follow ManuCorp's lead. The data is there — we just have to be willing to look at it.