Christina Ryan: CEO and Founder of the Disability Leadership Institute
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Meet the gardener of leaders. Christina Ryan is the CEO and Founder of the Disability Leadership Institute.
She has been an active leader in the Australian disability community for over 20 years, working at an international, national and local level to change the diversity agenda, while mentoring and supporting numerous people with disabilities to their own leadership success.
Christina pioneered the use of mainstream forums by women with disabilities at the United Nations, and now mentors and teaches effective use of the UN for rights activists globally, while working as a leadership coach for people with disabilities. She recently developed Represent, an online course in how to be an effective representative.
After 20 years working in community sector management, Christina realized that the levels of violence and marginalization experienced by people with disabilities were the direct outcome of inequality, and that to address this we need a growth in disability leadership right across the public domain.
So, Christina established the Disability Leadership Institute in 2016 as a professional hub for leaders with disabilities to build & support our disability leaders. It is the first organization of its kind globally, run by and for disability leaders. The DLI aims to grow the presence and recognition of disability leaders across all sections of our community. Christina is also a regular keynote speaker and commentator.
In 2013 Christina was acknowledged as one of 100 women of the Canberra Centenary. She was a finalist in the 2014 ACT Telstra Businesswomen’s Awards, and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Inclusion at the 2015 ACT Chief Minister’s Inclusion Awards. Christina was a 2017 Westpac Social Change Fellow.
The Disability Leadership Institute was a finalist in the 2018 Telstra Business Awards emerging and energized category.
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S01E03 Christina Ryan.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe
Welcome to the Enable Disabled podcast. I'm your host, Gustavo Seraphine. I was born with a rare physical disability called PFG. My journey has been about self acceptance, persistence and adaptation. On the show, we'll explore how people experience disability. The stories we tell ourselves can both enable and disable our vulnerability is the foundation for strength and why people with disabilities can contribute more than we imagined. I hope that leaders, companies, clinicians, families and friends will better understand our capacity to contribute to the world and help enable us to improve it.
In today's episode, we spoke with Christina Ryan. Christina is the founder of the Disability Leadership Institute. As a lifelong advocate, Christina has fought to end violence against women and women with disabilities. Her dedication and experience has given her a wealth of insight at the local level and globally as part of the United Nations. Christina's current work is focused on training the new generation of leaders in the disability community. In our conversation, we didn't focus on Christina's disability experience.
We focus on her work and what it's taught her about how we can improve the world for people with disabilities. Christina's work is inspiring and impactful. I encourage you to listen and actively engage with her ideas. If you want to learn more about Christina or get involved with the Disability Leadership Institute. You can find her at disability leaders, Dotcom, or you can check out our website at w w w enable disabled dot com for more information, enjoy the episode.
I really appreciate you being here. I am honored that you took the time. Especially since we haven't we haven't known each other previously, so this is just it's a great honor for me and I want to let's just dove right in. So tell me tell me about your tell me about your work. Tell me how you started and let's start there. And so how did you start your work with disability rights and speaking out for women who have who have disabilities in the community?
Oh, well, I got disabled. I suppose I've got a long history of I've spent most of my life doing a women's movement, the feminist movement and gender equality work. And then when I became a disabled person, I kind of shifted that across into the disability space. So becoming a member of Women with Disabilities Australia was a natural first step for me. And that's the big national representative organization in Australia for disabled women. And I've been part of that organization now for twenty five years, which is almost all of its life, not quite, but almost all of its life, and it's been a wonderful thing.
It's given me contact with an amazing network of of other women. It's really helped me to understand my own experience of disability, but also to see what the barriers for disabled women are, what the big issues are. And because I've got a background in activism and in gender equality activism, I was able to support the work of Ouida, which is what we call a widow. So I was able to support the work of Ouida using my skills and expertize as a change making activist.
And so I spent probably about 20 years working on gender based violence through a disability lens. Pretty miserable work, I'd have to say. Violence is the single biggest issue for disabled women all over the planet. It is our single biggest issue. We experience incredibly high levels of violence and marginalization and not just the sort of gender based violence that all women experience, but an additional layer of violence which is peculiar to disabled women that's targeting our disabilities. So having our equipment removed or having our disability misunderstood or deliberately aggravated people giving us too many drugs or taking the drugs away, you know, so all sorts of things like that.
It's you know, they're just small examples, not small examples, but there's some examples. And so it's very difficult work. Violence is hard work. It's really unpleasant and challenging work. I've never worked at the front line particularly, but I have led teams in my paid work. I've led teams of people working with people who are living in residential care or experiencing violence in congregate living arrangements and things like that. So it's it's a pretty difficult space.
And what happened to me about five or so years ago about now, in fact, five years ago, I had one of those moments of clarity that was quite profound and realized that. We're doing a lot of work at the bottom of the cliff. We're being an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We're doing all of this work trying to change laws about violence, trying to find ways of making sure that women's services to support women escaping violence were actually appropriate for disabled women.
I did work at the United Nations for we talking about gender equality for women with disabilities and all of these things. And it's all kind of reacting. It's all reacting and. I realized about five years ago nothing was changing. We'd spent 20 years working on this, getting better and better at it, becoming more and more expert, having more and more women join us, having more and more politicians and government agency leaders understanding what we were doing and becoming allies.
And yet nothing was changing. And we had a couple of big. Exposes on television national broadcaster did some investigations into violence in disability residential care. And I was sitting there with my team one day in my previous job, sitting there with my team and one of them, it was really upsetting. We'd watch this program and we all knew because that's what we were saying every day. And one of them just cried out and said, why won't anyone believe it?
This is what we've been telling them all this time and nobody will listen to what we're saying. And I said it's because we're not equal people. Disabled women are not women are not equal, but disabled women are not equal people, our voices don't matter. We're left behind. We're not in parliament, we're not running organizations. We're not the people in the media. We're actually quite invisible and we're not in positions of power and decision making. And so nothing will change until we change that.
And that's when I realized that we needed to do something about leadership, so I invented the Disability Leadership Institute, I'd known for some time we'd had long conversations in the disability community in Australia and globally about the fact that we didn't have any succession planning work. The movement was happening, but there was no real consistent, ongoing support for people to learn how to be activists like me. There was no real work being done to make sure that we had people coming in who would develop the skills.
And there was no real support, not just to learn the trade, but to actually take over over time. And so a very small group of us were doing a lot of the work. This is not unusual in movements. It's a thing. It happens. So I already knew that succession planning was an issue and that we needed some consistent training and development. But then when I put that together with this sudden moment of clarity, this understanding that it was about inequality and we actually need to be in decision making spaces.
It suddenly all fell into place, so I established the Disability Leadership Institute, we're heading for our fifth birthday in a couple of months time. It is global. We have members in over 20 countries. I stopped counting once we got to 20. I just thought, why bother counting anymore? It's lots and. We do development, we do leadership development, and we're here. So prior to this, what we you know, when I talk to some trusted colleagues in the disability community, in the disability movement, we were able to identify.
Six pilot projects in Australia over 20 years, so little projects a localized project here, a project which were called Something Around Disability Leadership. There was nothing on going, people might do a short course and that would be it. There was nothing after that, nothing. So people it didn't really make a difference. And over many, many decades, they hadn't really been a change. Nothing changed. So we still weren't in positions of leadership. We still weren't achieving any training that was suitable for us that was appropriate to our needs that understands disability.
Something needed to be done, so that's what we aim for, is to have that consistent presence, that consistent ongoing presence of training and development and also a community of people who are like a network. I mean, I like to model what we do on people like the the Women Lawyers Network or the company directors network with all these other organizations that have this kind of leadership focus and get together and recognize that marginalized communities need to understand the common experience.
So that's the sort of approach that I've taken with what we're doing. And it's it's still here. I thought, I'll give it a couple of years, see what happens still here five years later. It's growing all the time. Just signing some new members up this morning before I was talking to you, Gustavo. And, yeah, it's it's really exciting. I love what I'm doing. I can't believe this is what I'm doing. And I still support my colleagues who are working the front line dealing with violence every day.
I'm still an expert in violence against disabled women, which is a great thing to be an expert in. Not really. But, you know, I have expertize it's important work. I'm a Christian and I think that this. There's so much to unpack with what you said, so just can I can I start with a basic question? I have a legal background here. Does Australia have a law or a set of laws that mirrors the ADA out here in the United States?
Yes and no. Yes, I know we have. Australia is divided up into states like the US. So we have state level discrimination acts and there are disability discrimination acts in in all of the states and territories. We also have a National Disability Discrimination Act. But they're very reactive. It's up to an individual to make a complaint. And then that complaint is mediated. So it's not illegal as such, there's no one who's going to come in. And impose or insist on measures being taken.
It's quite interesting, so it doesn't have the same force of law as the idea that it is a discrimination act. So if I'm discriminated against in my employment or in service provision or in gaining access to something, if I want to go to the theater and I'm not allowed in or something, I can make a complaint to our Human Rights Commission and I will mediate my complaint. So usually that means getting the theater in the same room as me. And they say, oh, we're terribly sorry, Christina, this is really awful.
We'll do something to fix it. And of course, they either do or they don't. It's not enforceable. You can take it a step further and go to court. It's quite rare because it's really arduous and people have made some gains, a particular outcome there. That's probably worth noting. When we had the Olympics in 2000, the website was not an accessible website for blind and visually impaired people. And somebody took the Sydney Olympics Committee to court to say it must be an accessible website.
And they won. Of course they won, but it was not a leg to stand on my head that had to do it. And so that changed. And what that did is it meant that suddenly government and big companies understood that they had to make their websites accessible. Of course, a lot of the time they still don't. It's still it's still one of those. But it's so there are mechanisms in place. They're not as robust as what you have over there in the US with the idea and some of the associated mechanisms that that helps really give some more context to why you're saying that all of these.
Laws are we're just reactive, right, because here there's there's a more proactive and enforceable element to it where if you report it, usually something happens and something is enforceable. So that that really helps clear up that context, why everything was so reactive and you saw so little such little change.
Well, yes and no. I will make make it clear that the situation for disabled women that I outlined around violence is the same everywhere in all countries. And so it hasn't changed. And we also have less access to services and supports. There's a gender disparity and that's a global issue as well. The other big global issue we have is disabled women is the lack of data collection. Really sexy issue data collection. Not so, but because data is isn't collected a lot of the time, there's no data collected about the disability experience for a start.
But then when it is collected, they don't break it down by gender or by cultural background, for example, or race. And so there's gaps in our understanding about the experience of disabled people. So that's also a global issue. And the work I've done at the United Nations data collection is often a very big topic of conversation for that reason. So there are some things about the Australian experience, of course, where a white westernized country in the mind.
We also have First Nations people who are quite marginalized and oppressed, of course, and their disability experience is is profound. A good half of indigenous Australians are disabled and many of them are in prison. But fundamentally, we're a western wealthy white country. And so our experience is not dissimilar to the US or the UK or a lot of Europe in that regard. Being disabled here is not as difficult, for example, as it might be for my sisters in African countries or even in South America.
So we need to acknowledge that. That said, we also recognize the commonality of our experience internationally, and that's where violence is our number one issue. There is a lot of gender based violence that is targeted at disabled women. So it's not often that I have seen in fact, I I'm struggling to remember any cases, any discrimination complaints that have been made. That are around violence, usually it's around access to education or employment, employment. The big one or other services, but there's not really a lot that's done around violence.
And, of course, the work that the government is doing around gender based violence. We also then have to fight for disabled women to be recognized within that space. So we've got this intersecting disadvantage going on. So it's quite a complicated task.
It's a huge task.
It is big. It is a lot of work. And we do it because we're a collective. You know, that's that's why we do it as organizations and why we do it as a movement. It's a long term thing. And, yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. So.
I have a lot of questions, but one one of them is I think it's so interesting when you at least over here, when you hear about leadership training, you think I'm going to be a leader in my business or I'm going to be in the corporate world or as a as a coach for a sporting organization. Right. You don't think of leadership training. Or activism, which I think is a genius connection that you made, and I am so happy that you're offering this leadership training in all over the world because I'm super interested.
How did you learn, like how did you learn to be an activist? What was that? What was that passion? You know, that's something that you have to be passionate about because most people don't do it just to do it. It's something that you strongly believed in and cared about. So what did that journey look like?
That's that's right. You do have to be passionate. It takes every ounce of energy. You have to change the world. It really does. And if you're not committed, don't even bother starting would be my suggestion. Um, well, I. I actually come from a long line of quite. Quite activist feminist women dating back generations. So am I in Australia. My family is well known because my grandmother was quite famous for the work she did around equal pay for women.
And and so I've I've been this year, in fact, my mother and I are celebrating 50 years of feminist activism together because she when she started her her journey of feminist activism, I also started yes, I was quite small at the time. So it's just been it's almost like the family business, to be honest, which sounds a bit a bit ridiculous and a bit weird. But it's it is actually. My family come from a long line of.
Labor activists, trade unionists, and when the women's movement started up in the late 60s and early 70s, women in my family became very involved and still are today in feminist activism. And so for me, it was just a natural thing to be an activist or a change maker. And I simply turned that towards using my expertize in the disability space once I became a member of the disability community. So, yeah, it's just what I do really as well.
Something that you can learn in school or graduate school that you do learn by doing correct. And that's right. And from other people that are teaching you.
That's right. And what I describe it as is I did the apprenticeship, so I literally learned from my grandmother, who was a master activist, extremely effective activist. And I I guess I do operate similarly to her. It's not something I do consciously, but, you know, the understanding I have of how to be effective, things that work, things that don't work, things you don't do, things that you do if you want to be really.
Effective as I use a lot of what I learned from her, but also from my aunts who are still both very active and indeed my mother and my parents, because both my parents were activists in the union movement as well. So the whole family, it's activists of one form or another. If something needs doing, you get out there and fix it. It's what you do anyway in our family. That's how it is. So that's what I've done.
That's remarkable. Most most families don't operate that way as know.
Now, I actually had a really I have to tell you, a very funny story. So most families would would be thrilled to have one person who is that really activist change making person. And we had an interesting situation at Christmas time when my mother was caught in Sydney, when Sydney went into lockdown for a short period of time and there was a cluster of the virus. And so there were a number of us doing different parts about getting her back to Canberra.
After the Christmas break. She had to go into quarantine. They had to be all sorts of liaison with the government agencies responsible for quarantine that exist in Australia, etc. And I suddenly realized most families would be happy with one activist person. We have a like everybody, so every single member of the family was doing a bit. And of course, periodically we all clashed because someone was doing this and someone else did it differently. And it became a bit chaotic.
And I thought, what a privilege. We're privileged to have such a wealth of expertize, even though it created chaos at that time. It was a very useful thing to have. But it it does make it interesting because it means that, you know, you can change a system. It means that, you know, that you don't have to accept that the way that this is happening is, is what needs to happen. And I think that's where it it creates a level of empowerment that.
Doesn't exist in the broader community, and I suppose understanding that is important, you know, as I get older and wiser, I realize that I have the privilege of knowing how to respond to situations in a way that many other people don't. And that's OK because other people are doing other things that I rely on them for that, you know, we don't have to accept the rules. Except when it's a pandemic, you know, there are times when the rules are important, when it's about about social good, and that's when we all think this is what we must accept.
We must do these things. And so we accept the lockdown. We accept that you get tested if you have symptoms, all of those things wear a mask, that stuff. But there's a lot that we don't need to accept. We should not be accepting. The absence of disabled people in decision making, that is just a sort of cultural development, it's not it's not a. You know, it's become a cultural rule, but it's not there for any purpose, except it's just grown.
It's just sort of turned up after sort of several hundred years of keeping us locked away in the shadows in institutions, that sort of thing. So we we're changing the rules around what disability looks like. We're changing the rules around where we're allowed to be and where we should be. We're changing the rules around what we accept as disabled people. And we're not accepting the sort of rubbish that we used to accept. I might have used a stronger word there, but I'm conscious of being polite.
We do a lot of swearing in Australia, so I have to be careful. So it's, you know, rules are there to be. Questioned. Rules are there to be adjusted as necessary. Rules are there to be. Used until they obviously aren't working, it's when they're not working that we need to really examine them. And I think, you know, there's a lot a lot we need to be changing in the disability community right across the planet, certainly both in the US and in Australia.
There are plenty of things we need to be fixing still.
I think it's interesting that. You said it takes so much energy and so much passion to be a change maker, and yet there's the underlying belief that change can happen, that things can improve, that we can make a difference. So did you did you did that belief come about in part from seeing your grandmother, seeing your seeing your mother, your parents and everybody actually effectuate that change? Or did the belief get stronger when you saw yourself making headway into those changes?
It's actually a good question, I think you need to have a general sense of optimism to be a change maker in the first place, otherwise you wouldn't do it. You know, I don't think pessimists are really change makers. They just don't think it's possible that I give up. So you need have a certain amount of hope, a certain amount of optimism that a different world is possible. You need to have a capacity to see what the change might be.
So a certain vision that that is required. I think you're right, though, Gustavo, I think there is an element of. Witnessing change, that helps you to entrench that belief. So, yes, I have seen change happen. I mean, you know, we have equal pay in Australia because my grandmother did a bunch of work and other women, of course, she didn't do it alone. And I've also done things that I've seen make a difference.
So I've made a change in in more ways than one over the years. So you do understand that it's possible because it's it's happened. It has been done. Yeah. I think if if you spent decades bashing your head against the wall, which is what change is about, and nothing changed if we were still in institutions, if we were still not expected to work, if we were still an embarrassment to society and, you know, there was still an expectation that disabled people were, you know, not seen and not heard that we were an embarrassment, then I think it would be a very different equation.
But we've seen such change in the last. Forty years that we know that there's movement, of course, that said, I will acknowledge that in some countries where my sisters are in the disability movement, they are still hidden away and they're an embarrassment. So. It's you know, we're not there yet. We've got a long way to go, but we have come a long way and we are starting to see some things, something that's really exciting to me.
Just in the five years that we've had the Disability Leadership Institute going, the language has shifted. And I I mean, when I first started the term disability leadership didn't exist, it was it was actually not a thing. And and now it is it's actually used by people and I getting that no more excited than when something comes at me on LinkedIn from someone I've never heard of and are using my language. And I think, oh, exciting. That's exciting.
But the other thing that's more exciting than that, that's a change in language and change language is to change people's biggest sense of subconscious thinking. So that's great. But the big change, of course, is is moving into positions of leadership and we are seeing a recognition. That disabled people should be in politics. We should be running for politics and positions of authority, we should be leading corporations and sitting on boards, we should be in the media as other media workers, not just because we are a disabled person.
We should be seen in films and on television. We should be seen in entertainment. We should be. And there's a huge movement in the US led by some terrific activists around visibility in this visibility. It's a hashtag. Look it up if you haven't seen it, hashtag this visibility and it's around making sure that disabled people are actually seen. Now, that said, we all know in the disability community that only a small proportion of us are obvious that that we are visible by looking at us.
Most of us are not visible by looking at us. But visibility is around the fact that it is OK to be openly identifying as a disabled person. That's visibility. The ability to get up as a lecturer, as a professor, the ability to get up as a judge or a lawyer, the ability to get up as a TV anchor or a journalist on the street and say, you know, to to talk from the experience of disability, to have that is part of who you are in the same way that we expect for people of color, for First Nations, people, for people of different genders.
We need to be comfortable in seeing disability in all parts of of society. And we're a long way short of seeing it in the numbers. We need to say it. But there's a shift on and that shift is really important. It is critical to go with that. We actually need to make sure that disabled people are supported to do that stuff. We're still marginalized. We still don't have the same access to education. We still don't have the same access to workplace training and development.
So those sorts of things need to step up as well. We can't just expect people to emerge fully formed and suddenly do something leadership if they've had no mentoring, no support, no backing. So all of those things have to happen in the way they've happened for other marginalized communities. There's a lot of work to do. Yeah, but I'm not sure I'll be finished anytime soon.
Unfortunately not, but so what is what is your vision, though, for the next year, for the next five or 10 years? What does the. How do we accelerate the journey? How do we make it more effective and how do we. You know, maybe maybe in the next 10 years, right, you can sit back and you can look at your look at the work that you've helped inspire and create and say we really have come a long way, like, yes, it's still a problem, but.
We've really done something here. What needs to happen in order for that to become a reality?
Oh, I'd love to think that I can sit back in 10 years, that would be fantastic. I'm not I'm not holding my breath on that one. One of the things that I'm pushing for right now is succession planning. There's this is this mob called Evaluable Five Hundred, run by a woman called Carolyn, who's comes out of the U.K. and she did some research. And what they've identified is that over 90 percent of companies say that disability diversity is important.
Less than four percent, less than four percent are actually doing something about it. So, you know, the gap is wide. So I've I've started talking about succession planning and when I meet with CEOs and chairs and people who are in positions of authority, politicians. I've started asking them who is coming after you? What we know from business and management research, people like Harvard Business and Stanford, those sorts of people, is that the average tenure for a CEO is about five to eight years.
Now, we've been battling away in the disability community for about four decades. How are we not seeing any change when the average tenure is five to eight years? So every single person in a position of a position of leadership and authority. Should be looking at who is coming after them. They don't all have power over who is appointed after them, but they can certainly influences and they can certainly mentor people in the old fashioned way that succession planning happens.
That's how all the white blokes do it. I mentor people into their positions of on the board to be chair moving up in the management team to be the CEO. That's how they do it. So we need to have a similar type of structure, I reckon, to have a more rapid change. We could see significant change inside Ford and certainly inside 10 years. If we move to a more succession planning model, if we recognize that mentoring, that taking, identifying high potential people and taking them under their wing and actually making it happen, if that is done, if there's a commitment to doing that, we will see significant change in that time.
We may not achieve the 15 per cent globally that we're aiming for. We are 15 per cent of the global population, folks, one point three billion people. We are the largest minority group on the planet. And we're almost entirely too busy to think about because they certainly don't think we have very small numbers of people in corners. No, we're not. We're the largest minority group on the planet. So 15 per cent now. We know that it's actually a low figure because many countries don't have good data collection in westernized countries.
The figure is about 20 per cent of the population. So we're not going to achieve that perhaps in that five to 10 years, but we can certainly see significant change in that time. In the same way. That we have seen a change in the numbers of women moving into leadership positions because somebody made the decision that it would happen. So it's about political will, it's about corporations, about CEOs and boards making a decision to make a difference. They've done it with women.
Well, let's get moving on disability.
Is it? And as part of that picture, obviously, it has to be educational opportunities, right? It has to be. Letting people with disabilities, actually, I had this conversation recently with somebody participate, not just not just as a participation trophy, but to really participate and learn how to get good at something and be allowed to develop their skills that they're actually good at. That's certainly a part of the equation. I'm also wondering how much of a part of the equation do you know people like me who I have a disability.
I've never been involved with the disability community until now. I've just I wanted to be a good person and live it and live a good life as a good citizen. And of the people that I come into contact with and I realized about a year ago, maybe two years ago, that that no longer felt good enough. So I think that there's I think that there's a huge opportunity for people who have disabilities, who have had some type of some type of career or some type of.
Success, let's say, to say, look, what what can we do, what can we do to to improve things that we haven't been that we've been shutting ourselves off from?
That's an excellent question, because one of the interesting things that governments have fallen short on as far as policy goes. And it seems to be the case globally is the push keeps happening around just getting a job. You know, we are underemployed, that disabled people are underemployed. We're not employed in nearly the sorts of numbers we should be. You know, in Australia, about half of us live on the pension. We're not actually in jobs. And the figure is not that different globally.
You know, in countries like the US, there's a similar picture. And so governments have literally focused on entry level employment. The assumption that goes with that is that disabled people are not educated. Have never worked. We need to be given a start. What we know is that that's actually not the case. Yes, there's a large cohort of people in that category, but there's also a very large chunk of people. Who are highly skilled. Have good qualifications.
Have employment expertize and experience. And board expertize and experience governance expertize. But they're not welcome. And, you know, I hear terrible stories all the time, people send me private messages on a regular basis, you know, there might be a partner in a global firm, one of the big global corporate firms, the minute their disability became open. Out the door, well, now that person has a wealth of expertize they've got to be a partner, you know that if they know this stuff and suddenly they're not valuable anymore.
What you know, so we actually have enough people in the disability community to die who could be moving into positions of management, of responsibility, who could be moving into positions of leadership and change by acting like CEOs, executive teams, board members, politicians. We have plenty of people who could be doing this. It's the same argument that used to be used for women back in the 80s know there are no women who are qualified and of course, there were plenty of women who are qualified.
They just weren't in the same networks as the men. So, you know, we're still dealing with that when we haven't quite got over that hurdle yet. But we're still a long way further along than we were back in the 80s. The position for disabled people is not dissimilar. So there are plenty of people, they just not being given the opportunities, they're not being appointed to boards, they're not being appointed to executive leadership teams. They're certainly not being chosen or selected to run for public office.
And they're not being appointed as judges. It's it's you know, the people are there, but they're not getting the appointments. And a lot of that is prejudice. A lot of that is around the path that people take. They may not have the same career path as the the white blokes who get the jobs, the nondisabled white blokes who get the jobs. And so a lot of it is around our assumptions around what a career path should look like, what a CV should look like.
And in fact, people have diversity. It doesn't matter what diversity, it is going to have a different CV. We're going to have a different path because we've actually had to work through different barriers and we've probably come through a different educational path as well. Of course, that only applies to the people who. We're disabled before their education hit. There are people whose disabilities don't turn up until, you know, they might be in their 30s or 40s.
Well. You know, they got their education, they could be doing stuff. They're overcoming other barriers and we don't overcome disabilities. We just address barriers. I'll make that very clear before I get into the ablest bullshit. So there's some you know, there's some real prejudice in the broader community around what disabled people look like. Around what we what we do as far as having a background that might be useful, I actually am a governance expert. I get a thrill from boards.
I used to do a lot of training in how to be on a board for mainstream people, not for disabled people, for for non-profits. And, you know, I know all sorts of stuff. But when it comes to being appointed to a government board or some of the boards that get paid. You know, I always think of. She's just not quite it will appoint this other person. You know, there's this prejudice that exists and after a while you just give up applying for positions because, you know, you never get one.
So, you know, there's still a lot of that going on. And we need to be mindful of. Assuming that there aren't enough people out there, there are plenty of people, we are 15 percent of the global population. We're talking about probably less than one percent that might end up doing what leadership type work? Not all of us want to do this stuff, but for those of us that do, there are plenty who are qualified and plenty who are able to get out there and do it.
So it is about systemic barriers, some of this stuff.
You think some of that? You think some of that prejudice comes from. Just that there's a there's a certain level of human awkwardness that we all shy away from, that maybe it's not so, you know, there's not so much bad intention, but it's just there's an awkwardness there. I don't want to deal with it. I'd rather just kind of brushed aside as opposed to if I only if you know, if you can shift the mindset just a little bit and say, look, the awkwardness is, OK, let's get over it, let's let's be out in the open about it and then connect as human beings that some of that would improve.
Do you think that's that's a fair statement?
I reckon that's exactly it. You know, sometimes we're just a bit confronting for people. Most people haven't been around people like you and stuff. You know, we both come with a bit of hard. As long as I call it. And the first time we turn up in a room, people go, Oh. And and it's that a huge chunk of communication is that first one percent of first impressions and so first impressions, particularly for those of us who are visibly disabled, we are very confronting.
If we have a communication barrier or we are deaf or hard of hearing or blind or vision impaired people have to adjust to to actually work with us and why people don't like change. So we're confronting. People have to do things differently, but, hey, guess what, we have to do things differently if we want to actually be inclusive of marginalized people generally. If we want to work with First Nations, peoples or people of color or people of diverse genders or LGBTQ people, we adjust how we operate.
Let's just do it with disabled people as well. It is it is about the fact that we are still so rare, so unusual in some of these forums. These decision making rooms, these places of power. But when we do turn up, we are very confronting. We we throw people out. We make them feel very awkward and and very uncomfortable. So. They don't automatically think about including us. They don't automatically look around the room when they're sitting there and say, who's missing?
Oh, we don't have any disabled people. It's easier to forget about us than it is to include us. Yeah, it is about being awkward.
And so what do you think we can do as far as people who identify as disabled to. To help you, basically. Look. Get people to get past that awkwardness, what are what what are some of the most effective strategies that you found in those in those places of power? I know there's still a lot of work. We're still not there yet. But what has been effective for you?
The first thing I do is I it's not my job to make other people comfortable. It's actually their problem, not mine, so I don't what I do is, you know, I'm a nice girl, so I'll be polite. I do all of that sort of stuff, but I'm not going to hide my disability account anyway. But I'm not going to hide my disability. I'm not going to pretend it's not there. I'm certainly not going to stop talking about it because I'm there to talk about it, not about me, but about disability generally.
What I do is I think we all need to do is just get in the room. It's it's the one big answer that I've come up with. It's it's how to be a good activist, but it's also how to how to make the change in the disability space. We need to be in the room. And we can just have the one token person we need to be that 15 to 20 percent of the room that we are in the population when we're there in numbers.
Nobody will notice as much, we won't be so confronting, we will be more a regular part of what the community looks like. So it is about getting out there and getting in the room and making sure we are there. That said, we need to do it in a way. Well, actually, we can't prescribe how people are going to get in the room, just getting the room. You know, I have had people say to me all we need to make sure the right people get elected.
Christina, I said, well, what's your version of right? And is it the same as my version of right. So, you know, there will be people from all parts of the political spectrum. There will be people who are you know, and I've had this where I've turned up with another another colleague from the disability community, only to discover that they're appallingly racist. And I'm thinking cringe. And, hey, you know, we are the largest minority on the planet.
We're going to cover everything. So we need to be in the room. Sometimes will be the incredibly right wing people, sometimes will be the incredibly left wing people. Sometimes will be the person with the most knowledge, sometimes will be there with someone with experience, personal experience. It doesn't matter. What we actually need is numbers in the room because that changes the conversation. And one of the things I discovered at the United Nations when I was working there, when I was the only evidently disabled person in the room because my work at the UN has been around gender, not around disability.
People can't ignore you when you're there. The minute you've got someone in the room, they have to change their language. They have to actually start remembering that you exist. And I've I've witnessed this when I've been working into sectionally with them with people of color and First Nations peoples, is, you know, and I'm not suggesting it doesn't happen. It does still happen. But there's less openly racist language. People are a bit more mindful of how they talk.
So we need to be in the room. If you have two people on a board to disabled people on a board. That's going to change the conversation. And it's not just about ablest language and not Iblis language, it's actually about. The experiences, the perspectives, the way people think it's going to shift the ground in the same way that we know that it has four other minority groups and women being in the room. So and when I use the term women, I might point out I include non binary and feminine identifying folk in that room.
So it's you know, we we shift the ground by being there. When we're not there, the conversation becomes more. Well, Marrawah.
Because we're such a minority right now in those faces and you've been in some of those spaces, do you feel any additional sense of responsibility to be that much more excellent, that much more that much more knowledgeable, that much more impressive? Because I know that I would have that tendency if I was in that if I was in that situation.
Probably not. I guess. I guess some of that is because I trust in my own skill base, so I you know, I come with a a fairly big toolbox full of, you know, it's not just something I carry. It's probably a thing on wheels that comes behind me. But, you know, because I carry a fairly large tool kit with me that has a lot of skill set, a lot of expertize I am skilled up to be in the spaces that I'm in.
I wasn't always that way, you know, you're going to get by practice, so stop practicing, stop practicing. Know I do this with media training. You don't you don't go straight for national television. You start by talking to local community and local newspapers, local community radio and local newspapers and and build your way up, get better at it, practice. You don't start on a, you know, a Fortune 500 board to start with. You actually start on the local community board.
The nonprofit, it's old school, you do it that way, so it's the same thing, work your way up, but trust in the skills that you've got. We all have them and we're often really big on the fact that, you know, just because we're disabled doesn't mean we're not able to follow a conversation and ask a decent question. And that's a big chunk of what governance is about is hello, why are we talking like this? Should we be caring about that?
You know, decision making is often in that faux. Yeah, you don't you don't start at the top, you stop and work your way, and so I haven't ever felt I mean, the first time you go into a bigger forum, there's a certain amount of room. Here I am. But you have to trust in your store base, you have to trust that you've been trained and that you know what you're doing a a confident and and speak for yourself.
Something we have at the Disability Leadership Institute, it's a little game that we all play in our member groups and our networking groups is the sorry job. And every time someone says, sorry, I have to put five cents in the job. Now, I'll just point out it's all virtual, so there's no actual money going anywhere, although I understand some people have their own jobs on their own shelves at home, but. We apologize a lot before we open our mouths in the disability community.
And we need to stop doing that. We're just as experienced and just as skilled up as anyone else in the population. They're all meeting to start at the bottom and work their way up as well. You know, some of them, let me tell you, they never achieve anything. But some of them a lot of them never, never get beyond a certain level because they don't have what it takes. You know, that's like, hey, it's only a very small proportion of the population, less than 10 percent, probably less than five percent that end up in very senior leadership positions.
So, you know, give yourself a break and take your time and remember that. You wouldn't be doing this, you wouldn't have been sent into that forum, you wouldn't have been asked to be there. If you actually weren't up to being there, if you didn't have what it takes to.
I think I think that's terrific advice and that you're completely right about the sorry I my my experience and I know it comes from. I think we should we should do another episode as well. And I want to be respectful of your time. But there's there's so much to. Talk about is there's for me, in my experience, there was always that sense of overcoming. There was always that sense of, you know, I have to be I have to be so good that they can ignore me.
I have to be I have to go above and beyond what most people do in order to prove that I belong. And even though that's gone away for me professionally now. Those experiences still linger inside of me and they pop up here and there, you bet.
And we all we all encounter that. You know, it's something I've really grown to love about the disability community that I'm part of is how we embrace our disabilities. You know, sure, acquiring a disability isn't something that you would go out and ask for. The opportunities, the people that I've met, I wouldn't have had any of that if if I wasn't part of this community and I love it to be, one of the things we know is we don't you know, we don't overcome our disabilities.
They're they're not going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly it's gone. So one of the things that we talk about as well at the Danieli is how we use our disabilities as part of our leadership work, how we embrace it as an asset, because it is it gives you a perspective. It gives you an angle on life. It gives you experiences. And it certainly gives you a layer of not all of us, but many of us, a layer of empathy, of ability that we would not otherwise have.
And for many of us, I sometimes lie there in bed in the morning and thank goodness me, what more would I do, like if I can do all of this while I'm disabled and living on all the drugs and in a lot of pain? What would I be like if I wasn't, you know, what I'd be like if I wasn't on all the drugs, do it in it all the time? My goodness. And, you know, if you think you're a scary person at the moment, it's it's even more scary to even scare myself sometimes and thinking, what would I be like if I wasn't like that?
I don't think like that very often. I actually don't need to because I'm I've got a good enough life the way I am. I'm very privileged, you know, for a start, I'm, you know, a white person. So that brings enormous privilege. But I live in a country that has privilege. I, I have employment. I have created a life for myself. And, you know, all of that privilege is something that that makes my life incredibly enjoyable, even though there's some really big challenges sitting there, I, I would not be without this community.
I don't need to push my disability to one side. I don't need to pretend it's not there. I can actually use it and. I want others to be in the same position. I'm not going to decide on that. I'm not going to tell people how to be disabled. It's your disability. You do it for yourself. But I certainly know for me, it's it's something that I've come to value enormously is the opportunities that I've been given as a result of this and the people that I've met and the change that I've been able to make, you know, I really value it.
And I think it's it's interesting that, you know, there are people who would say, oh, I couldn't imagine anything worse. I'd rather die. And I think well. You're the kind of person I don't want to be, you know, you you think that life is about this and that any any other version of life is is not worth living. I'm actually someone who I've I've been very fortunate to work in the community sector, the nonprofit sector, with an incredible diversity of people.
And then I'm part of the disability community, which means we also have we're the most intersectional community there is. We've got this huge range of people in all sorts of places. I would not want to be without it. I just can't imagine living without that. It's it's so rich. And the diversity is is is just the most wonderful thing, the different experiences, the different perspectives, even the different types of disabilities we've got and what that means about how we approach things.
That's fantastic. You know, every day is a challenge. Every day is about listening and about learning and about about coming across something in a way that you never would have expected to come across it. And it's just incredibly valuable, which is why we need to be in leadership, because actually we've got all of that, you know.
So, you know, I would venture to add that some some of the other skills that we bring to the table. Problem solving.
Oh, that one. Yes, right.
I think I think adaptability. We talk we hear all the time about evolution and how the human race, if we're to survive and thrive, we have to be able to adapt. We have to be able to evolve. Who's done it better than us, exactly where we are, some of the most resilient people I've ever met. Problem solving, lateral thinking. Flexibility, there's a lot you can do with cable ties and wire. Yes, and apparently and this is an actual article that I read in Harvard Business, we are 10 percent more innovative in the workplace than other workers.
You want innovation and agility in your workforce. Why would you want us in there? And look who's actually was ready for the pandemic and ready for lockdown. Who were the people who are experts in working remotely? You know, we are the people who who are innovators and we are incredibly flexible, we know how to come around a problem and come at it from a different angle. It's it's amazing stuff. I love all of that. And one of the things I most enjoy in life is, is, is discussion with other disabled people when we're working through something, you know, that collaborative design discussion type.
It's just so invigorating. I, I just get a real buzz out of that stuff. And I think, wow, who would want a piece of this?
I agree wholeheartedly. But my last question for you, Christine, is what did I miss that we didn't talk about that you feel is important?
Oh, look, this was plenty, Gustavo, and, you know, yes. Let's let's acknowledge this could be the first of many conversations. I think something that I've really loved about moving into the leadership space has been the recognition. That we do leadership differently, we certainly do it the same, but we do it differently. That sounds a bit, you know, a bit like a conflict of, you know, an oxymoron. But it's actually not.
What I mean by that is. We are coming from a different perspective with skills, and one of the things that I have most enjoyed about the last five years has been developing leadership development programs. That aren't just about leadership, they're actually also about how do we work? About embracing our disability, about using our disabilities and putting those two together, and I mean, I know that this is the. Kind of first time it's happened globally that that work's been done, others are certainly looking at it and I'm starting to be asked to write more papers and speak at conferences and things that.
The ability to put those things together into to actually see what it's producing, to watch the people who have been around the Disability Leadership Institute over the last five years and there are many, many hundreds of them. And to say what they're now achieving, it just makes my heart sing and I feel like I can I can sit back a bit and observe now I'm still obviously actively engaged and I do a lot of coaching and leadership work and run the programs.
But I don't have to be the person on the front line anymore. I can watch people that I've that I've supported, that I've known and loved for years now getting out there and changing the world and being incredibly effective people. And it's fantastic. It's brilliant. So I love that aspect of leadership, that that element of building others, of supporting others to do the work. Well, there's so much joy in what we do that has to be enormously satisfying.
I can't I can't imagine that. But I would like to I think that's and it's show that it shows in the way you speak and the way you communicate it because you're not doing this. For your own benefit, for your own glory, you can see that it's a it's a it's a selfless, selfless act that brings you joy.
If it was about me, I'd still be out there and I'm very happy not to be, though I love this community and this is for all of you guys. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's what I've got to give. I've got skills in this area. I come from a background in adult leadership development. What can I give you?
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Christina. So where can people find you? Where can people get in touch? Where can people sign up to become leaders?
And there is a free membership available so you can sign up for free. Just by the way you are on the planet. Go to disability leaders, dot com, dot iue and you'll find everything about us there.
Interesting. Thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. This is a fantastic conversation.
It's an absolute pleasure, Gustavo. And I look forward to our next one. Absolutely.
