Intersectional Disability and Race Biases of Health Care Professionals

Posted on July 10, 2025

By Carli Friedman, CQL Director of Research

Health care professionals can directly and indirectly impact the outcomes of disabled people. In fact, their biases can result in them providing lower quality care and also worse outcomes among disabled people. For these reasons, the aim of this study was to examine the intersecting disability and race attitudes of health care professionals. To do so, I had 784 health care professionals (e.g., doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, direct support professionals, etc.) take the Intersecting Disability and Race Attitudes Implicit Association Test (IDRA-IAT).

The findings revealed that health care professionals implicitly preferred nondisabled white people the most, then disabled white people, then nondisabled and disabled people of color tied for last. For example, when implicit attitudes towards disabled white people and disabled people of color were directly compared, health care professionals significantly preferred disabled white people (M = 0.15).

Implicit Attitudes of Health Care Professionals

In addition, there were large differences between health care professionals’ explicit and implicit attitudes, with many health care professionals significantly underestimating their biases, especially about people of color. In fact, explicitly health care professionals reported that they preferred disabled people of color the most. However, implicitly, they preferred nondisabled white people the most.

The Relationship Between Explicit and Implicit Attitudes

“Given the inequities disabled people, people of color, and, especially, disabled people of color, face, addressing ableism, racism, and their intersection in health care is critical. While these efforts should not be limited to the biases of health care professionals alone, it is an important part of doing so, especially given the role and power health care professionals have, both in terms of directly impacting outcomes, and institutionalizing knowledge that goes on to influence health systems and their functioning.^{15, 38} In this study, while taking an intersectional approach to implicit attitudes, we found health care professionals preferred nondisabled and disabled white people the most, and disabled and nondisabled people of color the least. Moreover, there was a significant gap between health care professionals’ explicit and implicit attitudes, suggesting health care professionals may be unaware of their implicit biases. Everyone deserves high quality healthcare; until we reduce health care professionals’ biases, health equity will not be possible” (Friedman, 2025).

This article is a summary of the following journal manuscript: Friedman, C. (2025). Intersecting disability and race implicit attitudes of health care professionals. Disability and Health Journal, 101924. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dhjo.2025.101924

This study was funded by a grant from the WITH Foundation.