It is not a talent pipeline problem. It is a system design problem — and it is time we named it.

How many corporate leaders with disability can you name? And no — I am not asking about scions, but those who climbed the ladder to reach the C-suite.

India’s disability rights conversation has matured considerably. We passed the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act in 2016. We ratified the UN CRPD. We have mandated 4% reservation in government employment and we have robust DEI mandates.

And yet, if you walk into the boardroom of any listed Indian company, or scan the CXO announcements on any given week, persons with disabilities (PwDs) are conspicuous by their absence from positions of leadership.

The question is not whether this is true. The question is why. And the answer is not what most organisations want to hear.

PwDs don’t face a glass ceiling. They face a concrete one — built not by individual prejudice alone, but by structural design.

The problem starts before day one

Most corporate leadership pipelines are constructed on invisible assumptions: that candidates followed uninterrupted educational paths, that they are mobile enough to relocate or travel extensively, that they will perform under speed-based productivity norms, and that they communicate in conventional, able-bodied ways.

Each assumption is an accessibility failure in disguise. Our premier educational institutions treat accessibility as an afterthought — a ramp here, a checklist there — rather than a design principle. The result is that many of the most talented PwDs never reach the starting line of formal hiring. Campus placements, internship pipelines, lateral hiring through informal networks — each stage narrows the funnel further.

The result is selection bias at entry that compounds into near-invisibility at the top. No pipeline means no promotion pool. No promotion pool means no leadership representation. It is arithmetic, not accident.

Performance frameworks are built for one body type

Ask any disabled professional in a mid-to-senior corporate role what they encounter, and you will hear a familiar set of phrases: stagnation, a quiet ceiling on client-facing roles, sidelining despite being the strongest performer at their level. These are not assessments of skill. They are assessments of conformity to an able-bodied norm.

Presenteeism — staying late, being physically visible, projecting stamina — is still rewarded as a proxy for commitment. Travel readiness is treated as a leadership prerequisite. Verbal assertiveness in large meetings is coded as confidence. A meeting that provides no written brief, no closed captioning, no accessible format automatically excludes. None of this correlates with strategic thinking, people leadership, or business acumen. But it systematically disadvantages professionals who require assistive technology, flexible timelines, or adapted communication modes.

What makes this especially corrosive is what it does to disabled professionals themselves. Many spend their careers over-compensating — chasing the physical and social standards of an able-bodied workplace — not because they believe in those standards, but because they know the cost of visibly not meeting them. The system extracts conformity and calls it performance.

Accomodation is being treated as charity, not infrastructure

The language around reasonable accommodation in most Indian corporates remains startlingly paternalistic. Screen readers, ergonomic workstations, flexible schedules, remote access — legally mandated under the RPwD Act — are routinely described internally as ‘exceptions,’ ‘special treatment,’ or ‘budget overheads.’

When accommodation is framed as a concession rather than a capability enabler, its consequences cascade. Managers become reluctant to assign critical projects to disabled team members. High-visibility assignments go elsewhere. Fast-track programmes quietly exclude. Over time, PwDs become concentrated in execution roles — reliable, valued, but never strategic. They are given work, not opportunity.

And the cruellest part? This systemic reluctance makes many disabled professionals afraid to ask. They would rather quietly absorb the disadvantage than risk being seen as needy, difficult, or a liability. The system punishes the ask and then penalises those who don’t make it.

The missing ingredient: Sponsorship

There is a well-documented distinction between mentorship and sponsorship in leadership literature. Mentorship gives you advice. Sponsorship gives you visibility, advocacy, and access — being named in a room you are not in, being put forward for stretch assignments, being included in succession discussions. Sponsorship is what actually drives career acceleration.

PwDs receive mentorship at reasonable rates in organisations that have invested in DEI. They receive sponsorship at a fraction of those rates. Why? Because sponsorship flows through informal networks — golf games, after-hours gatherings, high-travel offsites, corridor conversations.

These are precisely the spaces that are most inaccessible — not because disabled professionals don’t want to be there, but because no one thought to design them so they could be.

These spaces can be made accessible. It doesn’t require a huge cost. Just a little will.

When the primary mechanism of career advancement is structurally inaccessible, the outcome is not surprising. It is predictable.

We are imagining the wrong leader

At the heart of this problem is an archetype. The leadership prototype most organisations hold — often unconsciously — is of someone physically imposing, constantly available, oratorically commanding, and visibly mobile.

This prototype is not written in any HR policy. But it lives in every promotion decision, every succession plan, every ‘high potential’ designation.

We cannot imagine the power dresser, the great conversationalist, the mover and shaker — seated in a wheelchair, wearing hearing aids, or navigating with a white cane. That is not the image of a leader we have been handed for centuries. And so we keep reproducing the archetype.

The question decision-makers unconsciously ask is: ‘Can this person handle the pressure of a CXO role?’ The question they never ask is: ‘Can our systems be adapted to enable this leader?’ That shift — from fit-to-system to system-to-talent — is the entire reform agenda in one sentence.

The ceiling is not the same for everyone

For disabled professionals who are also women, or from Dalit and Bahujan communities, or from low-income or rural backgrounds, the ceiling is not glass or concrete.

It is layered stone. Consider a Dalit woman with a locomotor disability from a small town: her educational access is compromised, her language capital is limited, her professional network is thin, and her accommodation needs are least likely to be taken seriously. The barriers do not add — they multiply.

The disability workforce is not monolithic. A blind software engineer from an IIT and a deaf garment worker from rural Tamil Nadu are both PwDs — and their corporate trajectories could not be more different.

Any meaningful inclusion agenda must be honest about these gradations, or it will serve only the most privileged within an already marginalised group.

Reform doesn’t require innovation. It requires will.

The solutions are not waiting to be invented. Audit talent pipelines for accessibility at every stage — from campus outreach to succession planning. Redesign performance frameworks to measure outputs over presence, impact over availability. Treat accommodation as infrastructure, not indulgence. Build structured sponsorship programmes that compensate for inaccessible networks. Put PwD professionals deliberately into leadership cohorts, stretch assignments, and board-readiness tracks.

The RPwD Act gives us the legal foundation. The CRPD gives us the moral one. What we lack is not knowledge, not law, and not resources. What we lack is the organisational will to stop treating disability inclusion as a compliance checkbox and start treating it as a talent strategy — because that is precisely what it is.

We have spent decades asking PwDs to adapt to systems that were never designed for them. It is time to ask the systems to adapt instead.

The corporate ladder is not broken. It was never built for everyone. That is what we must fix.

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