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The 38% We Never Saw

Why the most uncomfortable number in veterinary medicine might also be its most hopeful

When the 2023 AVA Workforce Survey was released, the headlines focused on the familiar: staff shortages, long hours, mental health, and retention.

Hidden inside was a single number that changed everything. Thirty-eight percent of Australian veterinarians live with disability, chronic illness, or neurodivergence.

It didn’t make the social media posts. It wasn’t highlighted in the commentary.

But it’s arguably the most important statistic in the report — because it quietly exposes how deeply misunderstood our workforce has been, and how much potential we’ve been losing because of it.

When you really stop and let it sink in, it changes the way you see the entire profession. That’s not a fringe group. That’s more than one in three of us.

And that’s just one dataset. Other groups — across gender identity, culture, language, socioeconomic background, and caring responsibilities — face their own forms of invisibility within the same systems. The 38% number is a starting point, not the whole map. It’s the first thread that, when pulled, reveals how much of our profession has been built without truly counting who’s inside it.

It means inclusion isn’t about “helping a few people fit in.” It’s about finally designing a profession that fits the people who already keep it running.

The Myth of the “Normal Vet”

Professions are built on archetypes. Medicine has its white coat; law its white-wigged courtroom warrior; education its patient guide.

Veterinary medicine built its identity around an idea of the “all-rounder”: stoic, high-functioning, able-bodied, neurotypical, endlessly resilient and always available.

That image became the invisible template for our systems: recruitment, scheduling, training, leadership.

Everything was designed around stamina, not variability — around sameness, not diversity. When 38% falls outside that template, the myth collapses.

The 38% aren’t the exception — they’re the evidence that our systems were designed around an illusion. And every time that illusion cracks, the profession treats it as an individual weakness rather than a structural mismatch.

Finally, it tells us that the story veterinary medicine tells about itself — its culture of endurance, its mythology of resilience, its ideal of the tireless clinician — is not truth. It’s mythology.

The Quiet Architecture of Exclusion

Exclusion in veterinary medicine rarely looks like malice.

It looks like meeting schedules designed around stamina rather than energy equity.

It looks like communication norms that reward extroversion and punish processing time.

It looks like policies that treat “flexibility” as generosity rather than legal compliance.

These are not accidents — they’re design features inherited from a time when bodies and brains that didn’t fit were quietly edited out. When people now struggle to stay in those systems, the system interprets it as individual deficit.

“Not resilient enough.”, “Can’t handle the hours.” “Needs too much accommodation.”

The 38% shows that it’s not the people who are outliers.

It’s the system that is.

The Cost of a System Built on Silence

When over one-third of your workforce hides part of who they are to stay safe at work, that silence becomes a form of institutional leakage. It drains energy, trust, and belonging.

Disclosure becomes a risk-benefit equation: Will I still be respected? Will my career stall? Will this change how my manager sees me?

So people mask, push, and adapt — until they burn out or leave.

And because they usually leave quietly, the system never sees the cost.

The 38% is not just a statistic; it hints at a measure of a profession’s unspoken attrition.

Every resignation letter that says “burnout” may, in truth, be a line item in an unacknowledged accessibility ledger.

When silence becomes the norm, institutions mistake it for evidence that everything’s fine. The absence of disclosure becomes the illusion of inclusion.

The 38% shatters that illusion. It tells us that inclusion isn’t about adding more empathy to the same structure — it’s about dismantling the architecture that made silence necessary.

Silence as Systemic Function

When so many people live with difference, why don’t we hear it?

Because silence isn’t just cultural — it’s functional. Silence preserves the myth of control.

It allows leaders to believe the system is fine, universities to believe their curricula are inclusive, and boards to believe their standards are objective.

It’s emotional labour — the cost of keeping others comfortable. Disabled and neurodivergent professionals learn to edit themselves for social ease.

And then we call them “burned out.” Burnout is simply what happens when moral injury meets chronic underaccommodation.

Exclusion as a Safety Hazard

Under Safe Work Australia’s psychosocial hazard framework, factors such as exclusion, discrimination, and poor management of interpersonal or organisational fairness are recognised as sources of harm. In practice, this means that how a workplace manages diversity, equity, and inclusion has direct implications for its compliance and duty of care.

That’s a seismic shift.

It means that exclusion is no longer just a social or ethical failure — it’s a risk management failure.

A clinic that doesn’t accommodate neurodivergent communication, that stigmatises mental health, or that designs rosters hostile to chronic illness isn’t simply “old-school.” It’s unsafe.

The 38% tells us this isn’t theoretical.

When paired with recent RCVS findings that one in four veterinarians and veterinary nurses in the UK are considering leaving the profession within five years due to inadequate accommodations for mental health, disability, chronic illness, or neurodivergence, the picture becomes devastating. Together, these data reveal a missing plank in our understanding of workforce retention — not just who’s in the profession, but who feels there’s space to stay.

When two separate national datasets — in Australia and the UK — point to the same fault line, it’s no longer anecdote. It’s evidence of a system failing by design.

The Architecture of Avoidance

The profession often responds to discomfort with more wellness workshops or resilience programs.

But resilience doesn’t repair faulty design.

Yet when it comes to inclusion, we rely on goodwill and improvisation — without the checklists, metrics, or accountability we take for granted in clinical risk.

The 38% exposes that imbalance. It shows us that what we call “culture” is often just architecture left unexamined. If a system predictably produces burnout, disengagement, or attrition among a defined group, then that’s not personality mismatch — that’s a design fault.

We would never accept a 38% complication rate in surgery, yet we tolerate it in wellbeing.

The same precision that governs clinical risk now needs to govern psychological and social risk — because the data demands it.

You can’t retrofit safety into a structure that was never designed for it. You have to redraw the blueprint.

Beyond Representation — Towards Redistribution

Inclusion work often stalls at the level of visibility: photos, panels, awareness weeks.

We’ve thought inclusion was about seeing more diverse faces in marketing campaigns, or celebrating awareness days.

But that’s only optics.

Redesign means embedding access as a design logic, not a retrofit.

It means building procedural fairness into every layer of policy — recruitment, supervision, decision-making, conflict management. It means writing accessibility into the profession’s DNA the way we once wrote asepsis into surgery.

The 38% aren’t waiting to be included — they’re waiting to stop having to translate themselves to survive. Inclusion can’t be performative or episodic. It has to be structural, measurable, and enforceable. Otherwise, it simply re-centres the same people who wrote the rules in the first place.

What Happens When the System Doesn’t See You

When almost four in ten professionals live with difference but feel unable to say so, that’s not individual silence — that’s structural.

People learn to mask and overcompensate, passing as “fine” while institutions mistake silence for success — at the cost of exhaustion, attrition, and lost innovation.

That 38% is a measure of all the brilliance the system never learned how to hold.

If 38% of the workforce needs something different to thrive, then our current systems are built on a form of invisible labour taxation.

People spend cognitive and emotional energy translating themselves to fit a narrow professional norm — energy that could have gone into medicine, teaching, leadership, or innovation. That’s the productivity gap of exclusion. What they put into advocating for themselves or dealing with increased cognitive load due to more friction from not having their needs met - is lost energy that could have been put back into the profession.

Building equitable systems doesn’t just restore fairness. It returns capacity to the workforce that’s already here.

The 38% Is a Mirror — and a Map

The mirror part is confronting: it reflects every silence, every policy gap, every well-intentioned leader who “didn’t know.” But it’s also a map.

If we treat the 38% not as a problem but as a dataset, it becomes a compass.

It points to where reform must begin:

• Workforce design that recognises energy variability as normal.

• Leadership frameworks built on psychological safety and co-design.

• Policy that moves beyond equality to equity and structural access.

A profession where disclosure is safe, accessibility is assumed, and leadership is measured not by empathy alone, but by the infrastructure of belonging it builds.

Vetquity’s work sits here — in the messy, measurable middle between compassion and compliance. Professions don’t change through slogans. They change when data becomes design.

The Questions That Change Everything

That’s the power of data like this: it doesn’t just tell us who we are — it shows us what we’ve missed. It asks better questions.

If 38% of us are living with disability, chronic illness, or neurodivergence,

• what does that mean for how we teach?

• how we roster?

• how we define “fit for work”?

• how we design psychological safety?

And then the bigger one: What else could we uncover if we actually started asking different questions?

Because this statistic only exists because someone, finally, asked. It was the first time the survey included the question at all.

Imagine what else we might discover — what truths about belonging, sustainability, and safety might come to light — if we stopped asking how to make people cope, and started asking how to make systems fit.

The Hope Beneath the Statistic

The 38% is confronting — but it’s also hopeful. It means we no longer need to justify inclusion as charity or exception. It means that the critical mass for change already exists.

And it means that the future of the profession is not about inviting a few people in — it’s about redesigning the space we all share.

If we can finally design for truth instead of myth, for variation instead of uniformity, then maybe — for the first time — veterinary medicine can become a profession that actually fits the people who keep it alive.