Flora’s Kiss Blog
What ableism is, what it looks like in everyday life, and the very real toll it takes on people with disability.
Most of us would never describe ourselves as prejudiced. We hold the door, we offer a hand, we mean well. And yet one of the most widespread forms of discrimination in Australia often travels quietly inside exactly those good intentions. It has a name: ableism.
More than one in five Australians, around 5.5 million people, live with disability.1 That is our parents and partners, our neighbours and colleagues, and very often ourselves. Disability is not a small, separate community off to one side. It is one of the most ordinary parts of being human. Some people are born with it, many acquire it through illness or injury, and more than half of Australians aged 65 and over live with it.1
In this deep dive we look at what ableism actually is, the many shapes it takes (from the obvious to the almost invisible), and what the research tells us about its impact on the people who live with it every day. We finish with some gentle, practical ways each of us can do better.
At its simplest, ableism is discrimination and prejudice against disabled people. But the fuller picture goes deeper than individual rudeness.
Ableism rests on an assumption so common that it usually goes unnoticed: that there is one ‘normal’ way to have a body and a mind, and that the further a person sits from that norm, the less they are worth, the less they can contribute, or the more they need to be fixed. Disability justice advocate and lawyer Talila ‘TL’ Lewis describes ableism as “a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds”, built on society’s ideas about normality, productivity, intelligence, desirability and fitness.2 Lewis also makes a striking point: you do not have to be disabled to be harmed by ableism, because the same yardstick gets used against anyone judged too slow, too old, too different or too ‘difficult’.2
Researchers writing about the findings of Australia’s Disability Royal Commission, a more than four-year inquiry into violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disability, drew a helpful distinction. Ableism is when the needs and experiences of non-disabled people are treated as the default and put first. Disablism is when disabled people are actively seen or treated as inferior.3 In everyday conversation most people use ‘ableism’ to cover both, and we will do the same here.
For much of the twentieth century, disability was understood almost entirely through a medical lens. The ‘problem’ was located in the person’s body or brain, and the goal was to cure, correct or manage it. The disability rights movement challenged that view, arguing that much of what makes life hard for disabled people is not their impairment but the barriers built around them: the stairs with no ramp, the form with no plain-language version, the job interview that quietly screens out anyone who doesn’t make eye contact.
That shift is now written into international human rights law. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Australia has ratified, recognises that disability arises from the interaction between a person’s impairment and the attitudinal and environmental barriers that stop them taking part in society on an equal footing.4
Seen this way, ableism is the attitudinal barrier. It is also the reason so many physical barriers still exist: someone, somewhere, did not expect disabled people to be there, or did not think it mattered. A research report commissioned by the Royal Commission went further, concluding that ableism remains embedded in Australian law, policy and practice, and that separate, segregated systems for disabled people help create the conditions in which violence, abuse and neglect occur.5
The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ most recent Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers gives us a clear, if sobering, snapshot.
Measure (2022 unless noted) | What the data show |
Australians living with disability | 5.5 million people, or 21.4% of the population1 |
Disability among people aged 65 and over | 52.3%, compared with 15.0% of those under 651 |
People with disability (aged 15+) who experienced disability discrimination in the past year | 9.9% overall; 17.6% of those aged 15–34; 19.0% of those with a profound or severe limitation1 |
Most common sources of that discrimination | Service and hospitality staff (38.6%), strangers in the street (30.3%), employers (24.5%)1 |
People who avoided situations because of their disability | 34.7% overall; 65.9% of people with psychosocial disability1 |
Situations most often avoided | Visiting family and friends (45.9%), restaurants, cafés and bars (37.4%), shops and banks (35.8%)1 |
Unemployment rate (working age) | 7.5% for people with disability, compared with 3.1% for people without1 |
Share of discrimination complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission about disability | 46% in 2022–23, consistently the largest category6 |
It is worth remembering that these are self-reported figures. They capture only the discrimination people recognise, name and are willing to share with a survey interviewer. The subtler everyday forms described below are much harder to count.
Ableism runs along a spectrum. At one end are open acts of exclusion, harassment and cruelty. At the other are small, well-meaning moments that most people would never think twice about. It lives in our systems, in how we treat each other, and sometimes inside our own heads.
Structural ableism is the kind that exists whether or not anyone in the room holds a single unkind thought. It is baked into how places, services and institutions are designed.
This is ableism in the day-to-day exchange between people. One example used in coverage of the Royal Commission’s findings is a waiter asking a carer what the person with disability wants, rather than asking the person directly.3 Other common examples include:
Microaggressions are brief, everyday comments or actions that send a message of ‘less than’, often without the speaker meaning any harm. Researchers Keller and Galgay, working with focus groups of people who had both visible and hidden disabilities, identified eight recurring themes that have since been confirmed across many other studies.10
Theme | What it can sound or look like |
Denial of identity | Seeing only the disability, as though the person isn’t also a parent, a professional, an artist or a friend |
Denial of privacy | Strangers asking about diagnoses, medications, bodies or ‘what happened’ |
Helplessness | Rushing in to help without asking, or taking over tasks the person is perfectly able to do |
Secondary gain | Helping mainly to feel good about oneself, or expecting praise and gratitude for it |
Spread effect | Assuming one impairment means others, such as raising your voice at a wheelchair user or speaking slowly to someone with a speech difference |
Patronisation | Praise for ordinary things (“Good on you for getting out today!”) or talking down |
Second-class citizenship | Treating access as a favour or an inconvenience rather than a right |
Desexualisation | Assuming disabled people don’t date, have relationships or become parents |
Each of these moments is small. Carried every single day, they are not small at all.
Not all ableism looks unkind. Pity, over-protection and lavish praise for ordinary achievements can be just as limiting, because they rest on the same belief that disability is a tragedy.
The late Australian comedian, journalist and disability advocate Stella Young brought this into the spotlight in her 2014 TEDxSydney talk, where she popularised the term ‘inspiration porn’.11 She described the images that circulate endlessly online, such as a child running on prosthetic legs or a little girl drawing with a pencil held in her mouth, shared so non-disabled viewers can feel better about their own lives. Young explained that she chose the word ‘porn’ deliberately, because these images objectify one group of people for the benefit of another.11 She also described how strangers regularly approached her to say she was brave or inspiring simply for going about an ordinary day.
Her point was never that disabled people can’t inspire anyone. It was that living with disability is not, in itself, an achievement, and treating it as one quietly confirms the belief that a disabled life must be a sad one.
Many disabilities cannot be seen: chronic pain and fatigue, autism, ADHD, mental illness, sensory processing differences, epilepsy, hearing loss, long-term skin conditions and many more. Nearly a quarter (24.7%) of Australians with disability report a mental or behavioural condition as the one that affects them most.1
For people with invisible disabilities, a common form of ableism is simply not being believed. A US focus-group study of 30 women with visible and invisible disabilities found recurring experiences of having a disability discounted because the person looked young or healthy, and of health professionals not believing their symptoms.12 It shows up as “But you don’t look sick”, as a confrontation in an accessible parking space, or as being told you are “overreacting” to noise, light, fragrance or the feel of a fabric on your skin.
Australian research using national survey data found that people with psychosocial disability were the most likely of all disability groups both to report discrimination and to avoid situations because of their disability, even after accounting for factors such as age, employment and education.13 The 2022 national survey shows the same pattern, with two-thirds (65.9%) of people with psychosocial disability avoiding situations, higher than any other group.1
When we grow up surrounded by messages that disability is shameful, burdensome or ‘less than’, some of those messages inevitably sink in. Internalised ableism is what happens when disabled people turn those beliefs on themselves. It can look like pushing through pain to avoid seeming ‘difficult’, refusing mobility aids or adjustments that would genuinely help, masking differences at great personal cost, or feeling that needing support is a personal failing. A 2024 study of disabled people’s experiences of microaggressions described internalised ableism as coming to believe the stereotypes and myths about disability, whether about one’s own disability or other people’s.14
This is especially relevant for adults who are diagnosed later in life or who acquire a disability in adulthood. They have often spent decades absorbing the same attitudes as everyone else, and then have to unlearn them while also adjusting to a new reality.
A great deal of ableism hides in phrases we use without thinking: “that’s so lame”, “crippled by debt”, “falls on deaf ears”, “I’m so OCD about my pantry”, “wheelchair-bound”, “suffers from”. None of these makes someone a bad person for having used them, but together they reinforce the idea that disability equals broken, pitiable or defective.
There is also no single ‘right’ way to talk about disability. Some people prefer person-first language (“a person with a disability”), while many Autistic and Deaf people, and others in the disability community, prefer identity-first language (“an Autistic woman”, “a disabled man”). The kindest approach is to listen to how someone describes themselves and follow their lead.
Healthcare is one of the places where ableism can do the most harm, because assumptions about a person’s life can shape the care they are offered.
A landmark 2021 survey of 714 practising doctors in the United States found that 82.4% believed people with significant disability have a worse quality of life than non-disabled people. Only 40.7% felt very confident they could provide the same quality of care to disabled patients, and just 56.5% strongly agreed that they welcomed patients with disability into their practice.15 The lead researcher, Professor Lisa Iezzoni, has noted that studies of disabled people themselves show most do not view their lives as tragic, and rate their quality of life as good.15
Closer to home, medical facilities are among the most common places Australians with disability report difficulty getting access.1 Another well-recognised problem is ‘diagnostic overshadowing’, where new symptoms are put down to an existing disability or mental health condition rather than properly investigated.
The World Health Organization’s 2022 global report on health equity found that some people with disability die up to 20 years earlier than people without disability, and face up to double the risk of conditions such as asthma, depression, diabetes, obesity, oral disease and stroke. Crucially, the WHO concluded that many of these differences cannot be explained by the disability itself, but by avoidable and unfair factors, including negative attitudes and discriminatory practices among health workers, and health facilities and information that aren’t accessible.16
The research here is consistent. A study of working-age Australians with disability found that those who had experienced disability-based discrimination had around two and a half times the odds of high psychological distress, and higher odds of rating their overall health as poor.17 A separate national study of Australians with disability aged 15 and over found a similarly strong link between discrimination and psychological distress.18
Part of the harm is cumulative. Living with ableism often means constant low-level vigilance: planning around barriers before leaving the house, bracing for questions, preparing to justify your needs, wondering whether you will be believed this time. That ongoing load is exhausting, and it adds to whatever the disability itself already asks of a person.
One of the quietest impacts of ableism is avoidance. More than a third (34.7%) of Australians with disability avoided situations because of their disability in the past year, rising to more than half (51.1%) of those aged 15–34. The most commonly avoided situation was visiting family and friends.1
Avoidance can protect people from harm in the moment, but over time it costs them connection, belonging and joy. When the café is too loud, the venue has no ramp, or the last visit ended in an awkward comment, it can feel easier to simply stay home. Multiply that by months and years, and a person’s world can become much smaller than it needs to be.
Beyond higher unemployment, the median personal income of working-age people with disability is only a little over half that of people without disability.1 Discrimination itself appears to make things worse: national data from 2018 showed that only about one in three working-age people with disability who had experienced discrimination in the previous year were employed, compared with about one in two of those who had not.6
Researchers writing about the Royal Commission’s findings explain how ‘othering’, seeing disabled people as less valuable or even less than human, lays the groundwork for violence. When daily indignities become normal, violence itself becomes more likely to be tolerated and less likely to be noticed or punished.3
In 2022, for the first time, the national disability survey asked about abuse and neglect. Of adults with disability who answered for themselves, 11.4% reported at least one form of abuse or neglect in the previous 12 months, rising to 17.6% among those aged 18–44.1 These questions were voluntary and up to a third of people chose not to answer some or all of them, so the true figures may be higher.1
Conversations about disability often focus on children, but disability, and the ableism that comes with it, is very much a lifelong and adult experience. About one in seven Australians under 65 has disability, and more than half of those aged 65 and over.1 Many people meet disability for the first time as adults, through chronic illness, injury, a late diagnosis of autism or ADHD, or simply the changes that come with age. For some, that is also the first time they meet ableism from the other side.
Interestingly, younger adults with disability report discrimination far more often than older adults: 17.6% of those aged 15–34, compared with 3.9% of those aged 65 and over.1 The reasons aren’t fully understood. It is worth remembering, though, that ableism and ageism often travel together, and that being dismissed, talked over or assumed incapable is no less harmful because it is put down to ‘just getting older’.
Unlearning ableism is not about getting everything perfect. It is about noticing, listening, and making small changes that add up. Here are some places to start.
Our Flora’s Kiss community includes many people living with sensitive skin, sensory differences and conditions that others can’t see. You deserve to be believed, accommodated and welcomed exactly as you are.
Support is available If anything in this article has brought up difficult feelings or experiences, please reach out. ● Disability Gateway (information and referrals for people with disability, families and carers): 1800 643 787, weekdays, or disabilitygateway.gov.au ● National Disability Abuse and Neglect Hotline: 1800 880 052 ● 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 ● Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14 ● Australian Human Rights Commission (information about disability discrimination complaints): humanrights.gov.au This article is for education, not advice. It is intended for general information and awareness only and is not legal, medical or psychological advice. If you need support with a particular situation, please speak with a qualified professional or a disability advocacy service. |
.
