Embracing Identity, Disability, and Sexuality in the Workplace

Emily Brady, HR Business Partner at Morningstar, spoke to myGwork about her personal journey of embracing her hearing impairment and sexuality. Emily opens up about the challenges she faced growing up and struggling to accept her disability, as well as the fear of being rejected due to her hearing aids. However, after joining Morningstar, Emily became an advocate for disability inclusion in the workplace.

My name is Emily Brady, I’m a HR Business Partner at Morningstar based in London. I’m also hearing impaired and bisexual. I moved to London from Dublin, Ireland in February last year after securing the role at Morningstar. In the last year I’ve become open about my disability and sexuality, and this, coupled with acclimatising to a new city, has been quite a journey.

In terms of my disability, I’m a twin and was born eight weeks premature and I’ve always had hearing difficulties. When growing up as a child I went through two rounds of grommets, but it was clear that the issue extended beyond this. As I went through school, I learned to mask my hearing difficulties, sitting at the front of the class, reading the topics ahead and looking at other people’s notes to decipher what I needed to do. I had a hearing test when I was a teenager and told that I was moderately to severely deaf and would require hearing aids. This devasted me. Trying to fit in in school, struggling with my sexuality and then the fear of being laughed at or ostracized by my peers was a lot to handle. As a typical teenager, I rebelled against the doctor’s and parent’s advice and declined to proceed with the hearing aid fitting, stating I’d be fine and manage. I got through my final year of exams, by some miracle, one of the subjects was music and the listening exam was pure guess work, relying on my memorization of the scores of each work and guessing based on the exam paper what section of the work I was being tested on. I passed, thankfully!

When I entered university, in my first year it really became apparent that I was struggling. Being in large lecture halls and straining to hear the professors was exhausting. I eventually relented and got tested again and this time, accepted that I needed hearing aids for both ears, I was in my early 20s at this stage. I was still struggling with my sexuality and refused to acknowledge, or even accept it. Getting comfortable with my hearing aids and disclosing to people about my hearing impairment was and at times today, still is really difficult. When I got the hearing aids, my confidence was shattered, I felt ugly and was petrified of entering into a serious relationship for fear of rejection. Also coming to terms that my hearing impairment qualified as a disability was difficult, I had received a grant from the Government to partly cover the cost of my hearing aids. At the time, the word disability to me had such a negative connotation I found it difficult to accept.

In the workplace, I never disclosed about my hearing impairment because I didn’t want to be treated differently or miss out on opportunities. To mask any accommodation I needed, I would book a meeting room and work from there to take phone calls or zoom meetings as I would generally struggle to hear with background noise. Due to my previous coping mechanisms, I didn’t require any official reasonable adjustments or accommodations in the workplace. In the places I worked, disability was never a topic of discussion or indeed a priority for the organization and because I wasn’t comfortable disclosing, I never brought it up. Over the course of the next few years and with a lot of therapy, I became a little more comfortable with my hearing impairment and would disclose to close friends and colleagues, but I still struggled with confidence, anxiety and was still struggling with accepting my sexuality.