This paper explores the additional influence of intersecting gender identities on the systems of support for students with disabilities. The literature shows that the institutional responsibilities for disability that have fallen on individual academics are in the context of insecure and sometimes unsafe working conditions. In the UK an average of over fifty percent of academics were reported to be working in ‘precarious’ employment conditions, such as short term, low paid contracts with an average of twenty-five percent of teaching staff being hourly paid (UCU, 2018). As academic work, including the support of an increasing number of students with disabilities, has become more precarious it has also become feminized where women are more likely to be in teaching and administrative work rather than in more prestigious research roles (Courtois and O’Keefe, 2019) and therefore more likely to find themselves as the first point of contact for students with disabilities. As teachers, women are more likely to be designing and delivering units (Courtois and O’Keefe, 2019) and are therefore also more likely to be responsible for delivering on the inclusive teaching policy and for providing reasonable adjustments to individual students. Women teachers are also “more likely to be on a fixed-term contract, zero hours contract and/or an hourly paid contract” (UCU, 2021 p.14). This precarity means they less likely to be given allocated time for training on supporting students with disabilities or receive support from senior staff. This paper raises important questions in relation to gender in recent changes in policy and of the gendered provision of support for students with disabilities.

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