Exploring the lived experiences of workplace discrimination faced by black women with physical disabilities in the Eastern Cape Province

Abstract

Despite South Africa’s expansive constitutional and labour-rights framework, Black women with physical disabilities continue to encounter entrenched forms of exclusion in hiring, day-to-day work participation, access to reasonable accommodation, performance assessment and promotion. Existing monitoring systems capture representation unevenly, but they reveal less about how discrimination is lived, interpreted and negotiated within workplaces. This study explored the lived experiences of workplace discrimination faced by Black women with physical disabilities in the Eastern Cape Province and developed participant-grounded recommendations for more accountable inclusion. Guided by an interpretivist qualitative design with a phenomenological orientation, the study purposively recruited twelve Black women with current or prior workplace experience. Semi-structured interviews were conducted remotely, transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis supported by memo writing, iterative coding and theme refinement. The inquiry was interpreted through intersectionality, Critical Race Theory and the social and rights-based model of disability. Five interrelated themes were generated: structural and environmental barriers; organisational culture and everyday ableism; careers constrained; coping, boundaries and agency; and policy, governance and accountability. The findings show that discrimination was rarely an isolated event. Instead, it was reproduced through linked material, cultural and procedural mechanisms that shaped dignity, belonging, productivity and progression. Participants also described the hidden labour of self-advocacy, overperformance and emotional management required to remain employable in settings that were formally inclusive but practically exclusionary. Meaningful workplace inclusion requires barrier-free environments, auditable reasonable-accommodation systems, gender-responsive and anti-ableist management practice, participatory disability governance and clear lines of accountability. The dissertation contributes empirically to South African disability-and-work scholarship by centring Black women with physical disabilities in a province marked by rurality, poverty and uneven infrastructure, and it offers applied recommendations for employers, regulators, unions and disability-rights actors.