A journalist, broadcaster and activist, Ryan was named one of the UK's most influential disabled people by the Shaw Trust in 2018. Her work has taken her to conference rooms, the Women's Festival of the World, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and The World Tonight, BBC Radio 2's Jeremy Vine Show, BBC Sunday Politics and Channel 4 News, among other media. Ryan has appeared in Can We All Be Feminists? (2018) and has been part of the exhibition on modern women organized by The National Trust. His weekly column in The Guardian, "Hardworking Britain", has been at the forefront of coverage of austerity policies for the past decade. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Nottingham, specialising in educational inequality. Ryan was highly praised as Specialist Journalist of the Year at the 2019 National Press Awards for her work on disability. She was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Ills in 2019, and also for the 2020 Paul Foot Prize for Investigative Journalism. Her work often looks at how different inequalities intersect, from disability, class, and race to sex. For Ryan, these inequalities can steal the life chances of a person or an entire group at all levels, a serious problem that he tries to denounce through his work.