By Reid Jewett Smith, Carr-Ryan Fellow (2025-26)
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Something is shifting in the youngest generation's relationship to work, disability status, and self-disclosure. The question is whether the institutions they are entering are prepared to meet that momentum.
Article 27 of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is unambiguous: the right to work encompasses not merely access to employment, but career advancement on an equal basis with others. Member states are obligated to promote economic opportunities for people with disabilities, and most have enacted domestic legislation in that spirit: the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Accessible Canada Act, Brazil's Lei de Inclusão. And yet, according to new research I conducted last fall with LinkedIn examining employment trends from 2023 to 2025, the advancement obligation is emerging as an unfulfilled dimension of the right to work.
The findings are striking in their consistency. Across the United States (which has not ratified the CRPD), Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, and Brazil (which have), professionals with disabilities advance their careers primarily by leaving their employers, not by rising within ranks. In the US, workers with disabilities are nearly four times more likely to reach a higher-seniority position by changing firms than by being promoted internally. In Germany, the highest firm-change rate of the countries examined, more than 40 percent of LinkedIn members with disabilities switched employers in a single year. The pattern holds everywhere. For workers with disabilities, internal promotion is the exception, not the rule.
The good news is that this is not a story of workforce withdrawal. People with disabilities are staying employed, building careers, and entering the workforce at higher rates than peers without disabilities in a majority of the countries studied. Among Gen Z workers in the US, the employment gap between people with and without disabilities has narrowed to less than one percentage point. In Canada and the UK, it has reversed entirely. Something is shifting in the youngest generation's relationship to work, disability status, and self-disclosure. The question is whether the institutions they are entering are prepared to meet that momentum. An employer that hires people with disabilities but withholds opportunity for advancement, a trend we see across all seven countries and nearly ten million workers, is a both inefficient and incompatible with international human rights law.
The cost of that inefficiency is not abstract; voluntary turnover costs US businesses an estimated one trillion dollars a year. Depending on seniority, replacing a single employee can cost up to twice their salary. Most workplace accommodations, by contrast, cost employers nothing at all. What is missing is not resources — it is internal pathways, knowledgeable managers, inclusive leaders, and accessible technologies that allow workers with disabilities to advance on an equal basis with others. The question for employers, and for the policymakers who shape the disability inclusive frameworks within which employers operate, is whether they are willing to treat it as an opportunity to close a gap where human rights obligations and business interests reinforce one another.
Reid Jewett Smith, Ph.D., is a 2025-26 human rights policy fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, Harvard Kennedy School & Vice President of Research & Policy, Disability:IN.
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