6 The Sunday Times April 10, 2022
BUSINESS
Disability is still the poor relation in the
diversity debate, but a few pioneers are
bringing the issue to the fore. By Oliver Shah
I turned my MS
into a boardroom
superpower
venue but the bus stop is too far away, so
how am I going to do that?’”
Disability has often been the poor rela-
tion to gender and ethnicity in the board-
room diversity debate. As recently as a
few years ago, “inclusion” rankings pro-
duced by well-known consultants failed
to mention it. A report last year by media
outlet Tortoise and the Valuable 500 cor-
porate disability coalition said that no
FTSE 100 executives or senior managers
had disclosed a disability, and only five
FTSE 100 companies had issued board
statements on disability, despite the fact
that about a fifth of the population have a
physical or mental disability: 14.6 million
people in the UK, according to the Office
for National Statistics.
The dearth of senior role models can
be a self-perpetuating problem in that it
dissuades junior staff from opening up
about their conditions. To break the
cycle, Valuable 500, whose members
include Microsoft and Shell, is launching
an initiative at the World Economic
Forum in Davos next month to identify
and nurture the next generation of disa-
bled talent with board potential. Valuable
500 is chaired by former Unilever boss
Paul Polman and run by Caroline Casey,
who is blind due to ocular albinism.
Casey, 50, a former Accenture consult-
ant, said the absence of openly disabled
people at the top of big companies “dem-
onstrates... why disability has been on
the sidelines of business for so long”. She
suggested that there were bosses in posts
who had not yet “come out” as disabled.
“There’s a lot of senior leaders starting
to speak, but what they will say is very simi-
lar to when Tim Cook [chief executive of
Apple, who is gay] uncovered his sexual-
ity: he said he’d hidden it because he
thought he wouldn’t get the same chances.
“The perception of disability tradition-
ally is ‘less than’. That’s why I tried to hide
mine [in her early career at Accenture]...
There are an awful lot of people in the
C-suite with serious autoimmune dis-
eases like MS or rheumatoid arthritis, but
they’re unwilling to disclose because it
would be considered ‘less than’.”S
teve Ingham, chief executive of
FTSE 250 recruiter PageGroup,
faced a life-changing crisis after a
skiing accident in 2019. The former
rugby flanker, who until then had
run to work every day, lost the use of both
legs and most of the hearing in his left ear.
Wheelchair-bound, he chose to stay in
the top job at PageGroup and has become
a champion for disability in business.
“There’s this image that all CEOs are
6ft 4in and bulletproof,” he said. “The
reality is, we’re not. I believe that show-
ing vulnerability also demonstrates your
authenticity. I happened to break my
back but I know one guy who, for a num-
ber of years at work, hid the fact he had
MS. He had to use intermittent catheteri-
sation whenever he went for a pee. He
chose to hide it rather than admit that he
had MS, because he was concerned about
his prospects if he did.”
Four-fifths of disabled people develop
their conditions after the age of 18. This
was the case for Weller, who felt the first
twinges of MS in 2007, when she was 46.
She had enjoyed a high-octane execu-
tive career. After a degree in chemistry,
she started at Mars and rose to European
franchise director, at which point she was
“travelling with my passport in my hand-
bag”. Struggling to juggle the job and two
young children, she moved to Abbey
National, then Sainsbury’s, then Argos.
Three years into her role running the
catalogue retailer, she returned from a
trip to India with swelling in her ankles
that would not go down. For two years, a
neurologist told her it was probably noth-
ing. But in 2009, while driving, she lost
the clarity of vision in one eye: “It was like
looking through a windscreen with dots
of rain on one side.” An MRI scan
revealed “a nervous system with lots of
little white blotches on it”. She decided toWhen you
have MS,
being perfect
isn’t possible
any more
body moves — but the message never got
to my foot, and then I’m on the floor
because my foot is still back there.”
When she was first diagnosed in 2009,
she felt “shock” and “a bit of resent-
ment”. Then, channelling her education
as a scientist, she asked herself: “What
am I going to do? What’s the solution?”
Now Weller is convinced that having
MS makes her more insightful as a non-
executive. As well as her role at BT, she
chairs the remuneration committee at
her alma mater, New College, Oxford,
and sat on the board of Lloyds Bank.
“All through my early career I thought
that success looked like perfection,” she
said. “But when you have something like
MS, perfection is not an option any more,
so I’ve become more creative about find-
ing ways to the solution that aren’t a
straight line. I’ve become more under-
standing of areas of grey, more willing to
put the time and energy into finding a
workaround to problems, because you
do that in your private life all the time:
you’re always going, ‘I need to get to thatretire as an executive in 2011 and build a
more flexible non-executive portfolio.
Weller thinks her condition has given
her an unusual perspective on board-
room decisions affecting minorities. She
gave the example of BT’s push to migrate
all 29 million UK homes from copper
landlines to an internet-based system —
put on hold last month after a backlash
from customers. She and another non-ex-
ecutive spent months challenging BT’s
directors over whether they had a “credi-
ble argument” for the switch.
“Copper landlines have been there for
decades and 80 per cent of the calls on
them are scams, but we risk losing the
argument because if we fail to treat indi-
vidual customer concerns with the hon-
esty they deserve,” she said. “We’ve gone
for the 98 per cent solution and we’ve for-
gotten that 2 per cent is still a lot of peo-
ple, often the most vulnerable.”
Iain Conn, BT’s senior independent
director, said Weller brought a fresh way
of “thinking about people, attitudes,
organisations, health and safety”, add-
ing: “There are many dimensions where
she sees things through a different prism.
There’s huge value in having people with
disabilities around the boardroom table.”
MS is relatively well represented in the
business community. Weller and Conn
are on the board of the Stop MS fundrais-
ing campaign; chaired by the insurance
tycoon Mark Wood, it has raised £58 mil-
lion since 2017. On the whole, though,
disability remains a fringe issue.
Last year, America’s Nasdaq stock
exchange declined to include disability in
new diversity rules for boards. In the UK,
ministers have not yet introduced man-
datory pay-gap reporting as they have for
gender, despite calls from bosses includ-
ing Ingham. The Tory peer Lord (Kevin)
Shinkwin, former chairman of the Disa-
bility Commission, said: “There’s a philo-
sophical objection in No 10 Downing
Street to, in inverted commas, burdening
business. My counter-argument would
be that I have a philosophical objection to
losing elections — and if we can’t show we
are the party of opportunity, we’re going
to have a problem.”M
agic-circle law firms such as Cliff-
ord Chance and Freshfields have
started voluntarily reporting their
disability pay gaps. Members of
the Valuable 500 have pledged to
do more to hire and include disabled peo-
ple, and Casey said all boards should try
to find directors like Weller. She has no
patience for the argument that the pipe-
line is not there yet.
“I have listened to that for 22 years,”
she said. “We’ve heard that same story
around black lives. We’ve heard that
story about women. We can continuously
say that, but we can also fix this. We’ve
got to train the headhunters, first off, but
most importantly what you have to do is
change the culture of businesses,
because it is most likely right now that 15
to 20 per cent of every single employee
base has experience of disability.”
mssociety.org.uk/stop-MSSara Weller says her
condition has helped her
to think more creatively14.6m
People in the UK with a physical or
mental disability, according to the ONS5
FTSE companies
with statements on
disability, according
to Valuable 500FIONA HANSON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMESB
oard meetings at BT are not
usually dangerous affairs — at
least in a physical sense. But
the morning after a session
last month, Sara Weller, the
former Argos managing
director who serves as a non-
executive, came out of her
room at the Clayton hotel
opposite the telecoms giant’s
City of London HQ, stumbled and broke
her shoulder. “I grabbed onto something
to stop myself flying and I wrenched my
arm out of its socket,” she said.
Weller, 60, is unique on the BT board
in that she has multiple sclerosis, the
chronic condition in which the immune
system attacks the brain and the spinal
cord. She walks with the help of sticks —
short distances only — and sometimes
loses her balance. “Nerve impulses nor-
mally move at up to 268 miles an hour,”
Weller said. “In somebody with MS, they
can move as slowly as one mile an hour.
So my problem is, my brain wants to lift
my foot but the signal doesn’t make it. My