"How's your PhD going?"

Last fortnight I passed my confirmation of candidature: the formal check-in, about a year into a PhD, where a panel of academic peers decides whether your project actually holds up and is worth the next few years of your life.

Thankfully, mine went well. Nobody is going to kick me out, and I have external validation that the project I’ve conceptualised isn’t completely unhinged or detached from reality!

I feel like I can now share, without jinxing the whole thing, what my thesis is going to be about. For my parents and all the others who have been making encouraging sounds for the last year without any real idea of what I’m working on: this one’s for you.

Australia has had some form of disability employment policy for decades, generally aimed at getting more people with disability into jobs. Instruments like Australia’s Disability Strategy, the Employ My Ability Strategy, and the various targeted action plans sit within this, all underpinned by our right under the CRPD to equitable employment, on equitable terms.

Despite that, the gap between disabled and non-disabled people’s experience of work is well documented and hasn’t shifted much. Lower employment rates, lower job satisfaction, and lower income levels have all been big issues for a long time.

Most people looking at this treat it as a problem with how policy, programs, and services are designed or delivered. I think it’s also a problem with how we evaluate these policies: how we define and measure success.

Let’s take the Australia’s Disability Strategy Outcomes Framework, which is meant to track whether disability employment is “improving”. It measures things like (un)employment rates, median income, how long people stay in a job after an employment services placement, and how many people with disability work in the Australian Public Service (APS). These are generally easy numbers to collect and easy for government to report on. But they all treat a “successful” employment outcome as essentially an economic one: more people working, earning more, staying longer. They are also generally interested in population-level metrics, and service outputs.

The trouble is what these measurement choices incentivise further down the chain. For example, if how long someone stays in a job is the measure that matters, employment providers get rewarded for keeping people in a job: any job, not necessarily the right one, or a suitable one, or one anyone actually wanted.

And it’s just as telling what these frameworks don’t measure. What about job satisfaction rates? Whether a job meets the expectations and requirements of an individual? If a person is staying in a job because they want to, or because they have to? What about all of those people with disability who don’t interface with the NDIS or employment services, for whom we don’t have good visibility of their outcomes and experiences in the same way as those who are entwined in service systems? Nothing on job quality. Nothing on whether the role suits the person. Nothing on workplace culture or whether employers actually have the capability to support disabled staff, despite those things being named as priorities elsewhere in the same policy documents.

I am sure you can think of many, many other gaps - I personally have a giant spreadsheet of them.

But, most importantly, there is no measure anywhere in these high-level policy evaluation frameworks of what the person whose job it is actually thinks about it, and whether they’ve met their own definition of success.

Disability advocacy organisations have been saying for years what makes work good for disabled people: suitable and flexible roles, accessible and respectful workplaces, meaningful work. But these insights haven’t really found their way into peer-reviewed research or into how we evaluate policy. Meanwhile, most academic research in this space relies on large existing datasets, using narrow, eligibility-based definitions of disability, and applying measures of job satisfaction or quality that have never been checked with disabled people to see if they mean the same thing to us as they do to the researchers using them.

To deal with this, my thesis is asking three things:

• How do people with disability actually interpret and prioritise the measures currently used to define a “successful” employment outcome?

• What does success at work actually look like to people with disability, both as individuals and as a community?

• What can disabled people’s perspectives on this tell us about how we should be evaluating disability employment policy, and researching disability employment more broadly?

There are two ideas underpinning this project.

The first is that evaluation is never a neutral, technical exercise. Deciding what to measure, and what counts as a good outcome, is itself a decision about whose priorities get to matter. Choosing to measure job tenure over job quality reflects an assumption about what employment is for: and specifically, what disability employment policy is about, according to those setting the agenda. Critical policy studies gives us language to unpack all that, but you don’t need the theory to recognise it in practice: every KPI is a small argument about what success means. The measures and metrics in this policy ecosystem represent the version of policy success that those who occupy positions of power prioritise, not the priorities of the disability community which has everything to gain (or lose) in the policy game.

The second is from critical disability theory, which treats disabled people’s own accounts of their experience as legitimate evidence in their own right, not as anecdotes to be validated by “harder” data. In practice, that means I’m not starting from an assumption that existing research measures of job satisfaction or job quality are correct and just need to be applied more consistently to disabled people. I’m asking whether those measures reflect what disabled people actually value in the first place. Critical disability scholarship also demands continued focus on research that will improve the experiences of people with disability in reality, with a staunch commitment to emancipation, human rights, and disability leadership. You can see why this is my jam.

I think this is the question most people are actually asking when they ask what your PhD is… My project has three parts designed to work together.

First, a survey of people with disability. I’ll present some concepts researchers already use to describe employment success alongside those I’ve outlined that come from the policy ecosystem, asking people to describe what each one actually means to them and how significant it is to their experience.

Second, interviews with a sample of respondents from that survey group, to dig into why they answered the way they did and what the survey (and existing measures) missed.

Third, six co-design workshops over six months with ten people with disability acting as design partners. They’ll take what’s come out of the survey and interviews and work through what a shared, community-defined version of employment success looks like, and what an evaluation approach based on that could actually look like in practice.

I’m motivated to share updates and insights from this research as they come, because I think it’s important to bring the community along on a journey like this. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be here doing this at this level without the support, guidance, and opportunities I’ve received from community members over the last few years: I owe you!

I also don’t want to hold all the lessons until the end: there are things we can fix, improve, and apply now to improve the experiences of the disability community in employment. For lots of the insights that will arise, there’s no logic in waiting until they’ve passed through the academic machine in full before we start talking about them (notwithstanding ethics and data validation etc…).

Ethics approval is the immediate job. Survey and interview data collection should run through the first half of next year, with results shared back before co-design workshops start in early 2028. Submission is slated for March 2029, all going to plan.

I will be grateful for any time or energy you might be able to offer when my recruitment calls go live. And, any resources you might like to share are greatly appreciated!

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