This post was originally published by William Harkness on April 29, 2025 LinkedIn and he thanks David Dame for inspiring this article.
There’s a saying in disability circles that professionals with disabilities pay a disability tax. At first, it sounds metaphorical, but in practice, it’s very real. It’s the unpaid, unacknowledged, and unrelenting cost of participating in systems not designed for us. It’s not just the work we do. We must do additional work because the system wasn’t built with us in mind.
This tax is not a single burden; it is layered. It includes the emotional tax of managing others’ discomfort and biases. It consists of the cognitive tax of code-switching between personal experience and corporate expectations. It includes the visibility tax of representing an entire community while simply trying to do our jobs. It consists of the performance tax of continually outperforming peers to be considered equal.
Often, it’s said that professionals with disabilities have two jobs: the one we’re paid to do, and the unpaid one of educating others. But in truth, it’s never just two jobs. It’s eight, ten, sometimes more : a hidden labor stack that few recognize, but every disabled professional knows too well.
The Layers of the Disability Tax
The disability tax isn’t a simple surcharge on our work. It’s a structure built from overlapping, reinforcing burdens that affect every aspect of our professional lives. Understanding these layers is critical to understanding the true cost of so-called “inclusion.”
Systemic/Infrastructure Tax
At the foundation lies the systemic tax. This reflects the structural inaccessibility built into workplaces, tools, policies, and workflows. Disabled professionals spend enormous energy navigating or repairing systems that assume only one kind of user, worker, or leader. Every workaround we create is a tax we should never have had to pay.
Operational/Logistical Tax
Layered above the systemic flaws is the operational tax, the daily burden of personally managing accessibility logistics. This means sourcing interpreters, arranging captioning, securing accommodation approvals, or handling travel challenges that nondisabled peers never have to consider. Leaders often informally manage these logistics for entire groups, absorbing hidden responsibilities far beyond their formal roles.
Emotional Labor Tax
Above operations is the emotional labor tax. Disabled professionals are often expected to make others comfortable with our presence, to absorb awkwardness, pity, or defensiveness while staying professional and composed. The emotional toll of regulating others’ reactions while navigating our barriers is profound, and it is labor, even if it’s not recognized as such.
Cognitive Labor Tax
The cognitive labor tax is the mental strain of constantly anticipating barriers, scripting advocacy, and repackaging lived experience into business-friendly language. It’s the energy spent solving problems others don’t see, often before the workday begins.
Visibility / Representation Tax
Being the only visibly disabled person in a room or on a leadership team comes with the weight of symbolic representation. Failures risk confirming stereotypes, while successes are treated as exceptions. We are expected to speak for ourselves and an entire community we never volunteered to represent.
Self-Advocacy Tax
While self-advocacy is often praised, it is rarely supported structurally. Disabled professionals must continuously request access, justify needs, and navigate inconsistent policies. The time, energy, and courage this requires are ongoing costs that systems, not individuals, should absorb.
Performance Tax
Lastly, there is the performance tax. Because of pervasive bias, many of us must constantly outperform our peers to be seen as equally competent. The pressure to be perfect, never show weakness, and deliver flawlessly at all times is its own kind of tax, which is exhausting.
Leadership and the Compounded Disability Tax
The disability tax doesn’t disappear at higher levels of leadership; it multiplies. For Deaf professionals like myself, stepping into a leadership role often means taking on an entirely different category of hidden labor , not because it’s part of the job description, but because no one else is positioned to do it.
In my case, I’ve taken on the responsibility of coordinating interpreter services — not only for myself, but for Deaf employees across the country. That includes managing contracts, requesting funding, handling badging and access for non-employee interpreters, and ensuring continuity across time zones and teams. These professionals don’t report to me. This responsibility doesn’t appear on my org chart. But I take it on because I know the cost of it not being done. I’ve helped operationalize access, not just for myself, but for dozens of colleagues, allowing them to contribute to their roles and teams fully.
In doing this work, I’ve enabled equitable participation, helped the organization avoid legal and reputational risk, reduced friction across departments, and quietly built a scalable access model that can grow with the company. That’s what executive leadership looks like: seeing a gap in the system and building a bridge that others can walk across.
But my leadership responsibilities extend beyond logistics. As the company’s accessibility engineering leader, I’ve become a trusted point of contact for professionals with disabilities across the organization. When barriers arise, they come to me, not to HR, not to the accommodations team, because they know I understand their pain. They trust I will advocate for them. I’ve become a kind of internal representative, not because I was assigned, but because I earned that trust through lived experience, consistent action, and visible leadership. It’s an informal role, but it holds immense weight. I represent the belief that accessibility is not a back-office compliance issue , it’s a front-line leadership priority.
This kind of leadership, relational, systemic, and strategic, demands clarity, emotional intelligence, and enterprise thinking. It’s built not just on performance but also on trust.
Even more paradoxically, succeeding in this space can stall career growth. Advocacy can be framed as being “too focused on disability.” System redesign can be seen as a disruption. While nondisabled leaders are celebrated for driving change, disabled leaders are often expected to keep things quiet and self-contained.
Yet the impact remains. When disabled professionals trust leadership, access is thoughtfully operationalized, and systemic issues are addressed proactively, the organization becomes stronger, more resilient, and better prepared for the future.
Moving Beyond the Tax
Professionals with disabilities are not asking for special recognition. We are asking for accuracy. We are asking for the full scope of our work, seen and unseen, to be recognized and valued. We want organizations to stop relying on unpaid, invisible labor and start designing systems that don’t require us to constantly course-correct.
The disability tax is not a personal failing. It is a system failure; like any flawed system, it can and must be redesigned.
As a leader, I don’t just advocate for inclusion. I architect, operationalize, and integrate accessibility into the systems, processes, and decisions that shape organizations’ functions. Accessibility is not a feature; it tests whether your system is built to last.
I lead through systems thinking, strategic clarity, and human-centered design. The companies that invest in this kind of leadership today will define the future, not just for people with disabilities, but for everyone.
William Harkness is Head of Accessibility Engineering and Inclusive Systems Engineering Leader at Boeing Commercial Airplanes, where he drives initiatives to embed accessibility into products, tools, and the workforce. He previously led Boeing’s global Engineering Career Foundation Program, reducing attrition to under 1.5% across five countries, and has guided enterprise strategies spanning systems engineering and sustainability.
Boeing’s first Systems Engineering Research Council fellow, Harkness holds more than a dozen patents and is pursuing a PhD in Strategy & Innovation with a focus on aircraft cabin accessibility. His contributions have been recognized with the M. Atkins Ability and Achievement Award and multiple Boeing Change Agent Awards. He also co-founded employee resource groups supporting disability inclusion.
Beyond Boeing, he serves as President of the Board for the Hearing Speech & Deaf Center and has advised Washington State on accessibility. A devoted husband and father, he values exploration, diverse perspectives, and learning through constructive failure.
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