Reid Jewett Smith, Ph.D. is the Vice President of Research & Policy at Disability:IN. Her research lies at the nexus of corporate sustainability, human capital management, and disability inclusion. Recent projects include a policy analysis of European Union legislative directives that impact corporate practices and reporting on disability and accessibility, a qualitative study of neurodivergence in the workplace that led the development of a neuroinclusive human capital management framework, and an analysis of voluntary Fortune 500 annual disability disclosures. Reid’s research on disability inclusion and value creation is fueled by her experience living, surviving, and working with Cystic Fibrosis, a rare genetic and degenerative respiratory disease that has impacted – and fueled – all aspects of her working life. She is member of the Board of Directors at Invest Ahead, a forum of institutional investors, state treasurers, and private equity firms dedicated to competent corporate board diversity, and a member of the Americas Regional Council for the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures (TISFD). Reid holds advanced degrees from Boston College (Ph.D., 2022) and Brown University (M.A., 2009). She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two spirited nature girls, Foster (7) and Hope (5).
Project Description: My research proposal is linked to the development of the world’s first universal business benchmark for disability inclusion. Disability:IN, the leading nonprofit resource for business disability inclusion worldwide, first developed a private sector benchmark in 2014 to measure corporate disability inclusion in the U.S. Over the past two years, we have been making conceptual and methodological updates to the Index to universalize it for global use by private sector organizations with over 500 employees. In the coming year, I will study the findings from the universal Disability Index beta phase, which will run in the second half of 2025, to develop a conceptual reporting framework for presenting the findings. This will involve probing other global benchmarking methods and analytic frameworks plus analysis of the initial findings to develop standards for future reporting conventions that are aligned with global sustainability reporting schema and economic inclusion metrics.