Are you Neurotypical?
Let’s talk brain diversity and how it affects us at work.
This article is based on my learnings on Neurodiversity. It focuses on its strengths and positive aspects and how they can affect our work.
NOTE: I firstly shared this as a Campus Lightning Talk at my company SinnerSchrader in February 2021.
One of my colleagues found it so insightful, that they asked me to publish it as an article for International Women’s Day 2021 in our internal IWD Website, so I adapted it for the event.
A German version was published on fronta11y.org on Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), the same day it was meant to be published here.
So better late than never: here it is for the wider english speaking public, with the hope that it will help more people learning more about family, friends, colleagues and themselves.
Why talk about this here and now?
Neurodiversity is both widely understood as a disability and but has also for a long time been seen as a competitive advantage. However, it is a quite recent development that companies are acting on this and are creating programs specially focused on certain types of neurodiversity, like for example the Autism Hiring program at Microsoft.
The thing is that neurodiversity — as the term indicates — is very diverse, most of it still remains hidden, and some of it is even still taboo. It affects personal life and work, and it can have a special effect on women.
Studies confirm that some professions have a higher percentage of neurodiversity than others (like design or engineering). And ever since Covid, more and more people are talking about the benefits of working from home and how neurodiverse people are thriving where others are struggling.
On a personal level
My involvement in the accessibility community has led me to resources where I could educate myself in a way that I couldn’t have imagined before.
Thanks to these resources over the years I have learnt about the social model of disability, where no matter your ability, you can be disabled by your environment, your context, or the situation you are in at a certain moment in time. People are not disabled per se, we disable them when we don’t think of all possible uses and contexts of our products and services.
People are not per se disabled, we disabled them when we don’t consider all possible uses and contexts in our products and services.
This means: if we don’t proactively consider inclusive design, we are proactively excluding people.
On top, just think about this: why should we need to adapt ourselves to rigid structures when nowadays we have the means to adapt everything to whatever suit us and enables us to be the best version of ourselves?
We can think of inclusive design and accessibility, not as a burden, but a means to achieve better user experience, usability and personalization for our users which allows us to tap into a new pool of users and customers that we didn’t consider before.
Some of my best friends have been diagnosed with different types of neurodiversity as adults, some of them women in their +40s after having recognized many similarities between them and their children’s diagnosis.
Thanks to my colleagues in the Digital Products Accessibility Experts community, especially Mel, I am learning more and more about neurodiversity and specially neurodiversity in women.
What Imentioned before about specially affecting women is that when people talk about neurodiversity, they often picture a small boy. Not a small girl, not adults, and rarely women.
Reading about how women are forgotten in research, I learnt there are far more studies about neurodiversity in boys and men, mostly because the way girls are socialized doesn’t make neurodiverse behaviors as obvious or problematic at first sight as they might seem for boys. And on the other hand their… OUR hormones don’t lead to such homogeneous and nice looking results in the research papers: they make results messy. So the (mostly male) scientists of the past decided to either ignore a whole gender or to just create specific mental illnesses to explain things they couldn’t explain about women (feel free to google “hysteria”) .
If you’d like to know more about how women were left out scientific studies, I recommend you check out Caroline Criado’s “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”. It is available as (e-)book or audiobook, if you listen to the audio book, have some popcorn and find any means to take notes.
New laws introduced in countries like the UK are changing this, forcing scientist to do research across genders and just by adding such legal requirements, new amazing facts are already being brought to light.
The thing is: how people perceive and interpret behaviours is also tied to neurodiversity. Women generally have more issues being diagnosed at first, and then also after “coming out” as neurodiverse. This of course, also affects each person intersectionally. For example neurodiverse black women are marginalized in multiple ways.
Life is messy, luckily each day we have better tools and are better prepared people to learn how to cope with this messiness.
This text might sound a bit like a buzzword bingo at first and it does include too many acronyms for my own sake (NT, ND, DCD, RSD, ADHD, HSP, ASC, PTSD, ODD, OCD…) it may even sound like I’m rapping, but I’m really struggling with it: I am really, really bad at acronyms…
My main goal is that by sharing this with you today, you’ll find a place to start searching for more information and keep the spark of curiosity alive. Words are indeed important to get to know yourself better and I won’t have time to go through even half of it in this article.
This graph by Dr. Nancy Doyle shows the overlapping strengths of neurodiversity: creativity, innovative thinking, adaptability, empathy, concentration, visual thinking…
With this list, it is no surprise that creative professions have a higher incidence of neurodiversity, even if most of it was never diagnosed. If you want to learn more about the details of each condition there is enough to read online, and I am neither a doctor nor a therapist, so like mentioned before I am going to focus on the positive sides and how this can affect our work.
These days we all need more positive stuff, don’t we?
Let’s start with NT: Neurotypicals
Neurotypicals are the contraposition of Neurodiverse.
In a world where everyone is unique, there is no normal.
“Think about small talk, social niceties, herd mentality, compliance, and other unpleasant or taxing behaviours that are deemed ‘normal’…”
This is how some neurodiverse people might think of neurotypicals.
Neurotypicals are better at social situations, have a somewhat higher emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility. Among their needs they tend to uniformity, are easily distractible, flushed with emotion, obsessively social, and tend to suffer from deficit of attention to detail.
ASC- Autism Spectrum Condition
The main thing you need to remember about autism spectrum condition is this:
”It’s complicated”. And this is NOT an understatement.
It is extremely diverse, so if you know one autistic person you, know ONE autistic person.
That being said, generally they are loyal, honest, fair and just, they won’t judge, have deep interests, and pay great attention to detail.
Some people represent the autism spectrum on a colorful line, but it is not a knob or a switch you can adjust. It might affect different areas at different levels, so maybe a wheel serves as better representation. Here I’m showing you two for the price of one. The one on the right takes language, motor skills, perception, executive function, and sensory matters into account. The wheel on the right gets into more detail, listing depression, fixations, abnormal or flat speech, noise sensitivity, social difficulty, anxiety, abnormal posture, poor eye contact, tics and fidgets, and aggression
How can ASC affect our work?
Some colleagues could constantly interrupt while people are speaking, or not speak at all because they are afraid of interrupting.
Some colleagues are specially good at creating mental images, have deep concentration capabilities on a task or topic that makes them loose track of other things, or they might prefer solo rather than team work…
ADHD
Among the strengths of ADHD: drive for activity, task switching, openness to change, playfulness, and spontaneity: great for gamification.
How can ADHD affect our work?
Difficulty in wrapping up details, problems in remembering appointments, procrastinating and postponing a task that requires a lot of thought, making careless mistakes while doing boring tasks…
Dyslexia
People with dyslexia are highly creative, are great with holistic perception, and visual-spatial skills, they can think outside the box, are authentic, resilient and good with music, and they can make use of hyperfocus.
How can Dyslexia affect our work?
Left? Right?
Ever read a message and missed some important information even though was in front of your eyes?
Did you get lost or arrived late to a meeting?
Do you think about creative solutions to problems?
What I am learning so far
There are lots of people with different traits. I don’t believe any 2 brains work the same way.
When we talk about diversity, we normally don’t think about brain diversity.
We might think about gender, race, LGTBQi+, maybe even about disability and chronic illness, but nobody thinks about brain diversity because we don’t really directly observe how brains work. It is already difficult to think about intersectionality, or for example cross-cultural, multi-cultural, and different lived experiences if you only travelled for holidays and only have friends who share your background.
Therefore we don’t show a great level of understanding for things like socially awkward behaviour. Sometimes we even think it is rude and disrespectful and people should know better. Even if we say nothing about it and keep it to ourselves.
We need empathy and understanding, and we need to show our own vulnerability, this is what makes us well: US.
It is in our hands to end the stigma and be there for our colleagues and friends, so that they can be there for us.
If we don’t understand something, we can just ask, maybe there is a logical explanation we didn’t think about… and maybe the person who offended us, didn’t even realize it. This goes both ways: if you feel you are treated unfairly and you are strong enough to have an open conversation about it, go ahead and ask about it.
We can learn and grow a lot just by being there and listening to others who are different.
Further learning
These are some books that I listened to recently and that I can highly recommend.
- The “Divergent Mind — Thriving in a World That Wasn’t Designed for You” talks about different types of brains and presents more information about ADHD, autism, synesthesia, high sensitivity, and sensory processing disorder. It has a special focus on women.
- “Radical inclusion” made me laugh a lot. It is full of candor, trust, and hope, and you can learn a thing or two about risk taking, humility, and kindness.
- “Neurotribes — The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity” will help you learn more about the dark history of autism and deconstruct a stereotype or two.
You can dig even deeper with the following resources, some of them with special focus on women in different formats:
Events
Podcasts
- ADHD for smart ass women with Tracy Otsuka
- Neurodivergent as hell
- The driven woman
- Spectrumly Speaking
- Faster than normal (AHDH)
- Distraction (ADHD)
Video
- Autism Symptoms in girls
- Tedx Talk “Neurodiversity — the key that unlocked my world”
- Texd Talk “The Creative Brilliance of Dyslexia”
- How to ADHD on YouTube
Comic / visual art
- The Umbrella Gang
- ADHD Alien — also in twitter
- ADHD_couple
- The ADHD Mini Coach
- The Art of Autism (also has Spanish, French and German versions)
Do you know more great resources? Please do let me know in the comments!
