Invisible Disabilities Week 16-22 October 2022

National Inclusion Week took place a couple of weeks ago and next week is Invisible Disabilities Week, which seeks too bring awareness, education and support to families, friends, co-workers, community and around the world. When considering the term ‘diversity and inclusion’ I’m struck by what Hidden Disabilities highlights, that organisations tend to be too narrow in their thinking, associating it with ethnicity and gender, arguably failing to capture the numerous definitions of diversity that exist in society. Moreover, the disability community are the largest minority group globally, with around 1 in 7 people having some form of disability, and of this 1 in 7, in the UK, 80% of those disabilities are not visible. That equates to over 10 million people in the UK and around 1.3 billion globally. Two years ago I wrote a blog post called ‘Who cares in a crisis: Academic caregivers and inclusion in HE’, where I shared my personal struggles as an academic and carer of my daughter with the hidden disability of autism, and how helpful the research of Professor Marie-Pierre Moreau was to me, but also to the academic community in calling for cultural change for a more inclusive HE sector. There is still so much to be done, and so much more we need to do, but having global spotlighting, like Invisible Disabilities Week, gives me hope that we are taking positive steps in the right direction.