Disabled scientists excluded from the lab

If I ask you to think of a disabled scientist, who’s the first person that comes to mind? I would guess that for the majority of people, the answer is Stephen Hawking. But it should come as no surprise that he wasn’t the only disabled person who has ever made a contribution to science. For example, Dorothy Hodgkin, who was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for determining the chemical structures of penicillin and vitamin B12. Likewise, disabled scientists were responsible for discovering at least 22 elements of the periodic table, including helium, oxygen, sodium, radium and hafnium.

The contributions that marginalised people make to research are rarely acknowledged and we struggle to thrive within the scientific workforce. However, while issues surrounding systemic racism, sexism and transphobia are regularly discussed, ableism–or the discrimination of people with disabilities–is almost always left out of the conversation. And that’s a problem. Because, while there’s no doubt that laws such as the Equality Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act have made great strides in increasing the participation of students with disabilities in Stem, we’re still vastly underrepresented in science and our numbers decrease alarmingly as we move through the pipeline. For example in 2013, disabled chemists made up only 2.3% of researchers and 5.4% of doctoral students in the UK, despite representing 8.6% of undergraduates. These sharp drops can be attributed to the physical and attitudinal barriers that come about because of ableism which can deter even the most passionate of students from becoming a scientist.