Disability and IT employment

There were 213,000 IT specialists in the UK with disabilities in 2021 representing 11% of all IT specialists working in the UK at that time. As such, representation in IT was lower than the norm for UK workers as a whole (15%) and if levelled up would have equated to an additional 63,000 IT specialists within the UK labour market.

Trends in workforce representation (2017-21)

Source: Analysis of ONS Quarterly Labour Force Survey by BCS

Representation across the UK

The proportion of IT specialists with disabilities varies across the UK – in 2021 from just 7% of IT specialists in Northern Ireland to 17% of those working in Scotland.

The difference in the level of representation of IT specialists with disabilities compared with that of workers as a whole also varied substantially. In this case, the largest difference was apparent in the North West of England where representation of disabled workers was 7 percentage points less than amongst the workforce as a whole (i.e. 9% versus 16%).

By contrast, in Scotland the level of representation for people with disabilities was actually higher amongst IT specialists than those within the workforce as a whole (17% versus 15%).

Workforce representation by nation / region (2021)

Source: Analysis of ONS Quarterly Labour Force Survey by BCS
* Five-year average