Part 1 of 3: Neurodiversity at Work

TL;DR

• The scale: Up to 17-22% of the workforce is neurodivergent, yet unemployment and underemployment among this group remain persistently high.

• The gap: Neurodiversity is increasingly recognized as a dimension of workplace diversity, but the research bridging neurodiversity and organizational practice is still surprisingly thin.

• The complexity: Organizations that take neurodiversity seriously, as a genuine dimension of diversity, not a trend, are better positioned for inclusion, performance, and employee well being.

When we talk about diversity in the workplace, we have learned, slowly, imperfectly, and often only under pressure, to include race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and disability. These conversations are still evolving. But there is a dimension of human difference that remains largely missing from organizational diversity frameworks, despite affecting as many as one in five people in any given workforce.

That dimension is neurodiversity.

Neurodiversity refers to the natural variation in human neurological functioning. Neurodivergent individuals, those whose brains work in ways that fall outside what is typically expected, including ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Tourette syndrome, and related profiles. They are not a small or peripheral population. Estimates suggest that as much as 17% of the US workforce may be neurotypical (LeFevre-Levy et al., 2023), with other sources placing the figure even higher, approximately 22% of the general population (Weber et al., 2024).

And yet the research tells a consistent and uncomfortable story; neurodivergent people have a long history of under- and unemployment, and their inclusion in organizational life has not kept pace with either their numbers or their contributions.

This Is Not a Niche Issue

It is tempting to think of neurodiversity as a specialized concern, something relevant to organizations in certain sectors, or to managers whose teams happen to include someone who has disclosed a diagnosis. That framing misses the point entirely.

If roughly one in five people in your workforce is neurodivergent, neurodiversity is not an edge case. It is a core feature of the human workforce. And because many neurodivergent people do not disclose, for reasons of stigma, fear of discrimination, or simply never having received a formal diagnosis, the visible numbers significantly underrepresent the reality.

LeFevre-Levy and colleagues (2023) make the argument clearly; as work continues to evolve and roles become more specialized, neurodiversity is likely to become an increasingly relevant dimension of organizational diversity. It will shape individual wellbeing and performance outcomes, as well as broader organizational success. The question is not whether neurodiversity matters in your workplace. It is whether your organization is paying attention.

Why the Research is Playing Catch-Up

Despite the scale of the issue, the academic literature on neurodiversity in organizational contexts is, in the words of LeFevre-Levy et al. (2023), “surprisingly little” and “scattered across several different academic disciplines.” Research that does exist tends to sit outside industrial-organizational psychology, in clinical, educational, or disability studies frameworks, and rarely examines neurodivergent workers explicitly from a diversity perspective.

This matters because the way we frame a problem shapes the solutions we reach for. When neurodivergence is understood primarily as a clinical or disability issue, organizations respond with accommodation frameworks, adjustments made for individuals, typically after disclosure, typically reactive, typically invisible. When it is understood as a dimension of diversity, the response looks different; systemic, proactive, embedded in how organizations design work, environments, and culture.

Both frames have a role to play. But the diversity frame is significantly underdeveloped, and that gap has real consequences for the approximately one in five people who show up to work in a brain that the workplace was not designed for.

Neurodiversity Does Not Exist in Isolation

One of the most important contributions of recent scholarship is the recognition that neurodivergent identity does not exist on its own. It intersects with every other dimension of identity a person holds, and those intersections shape experience in profound ways.

Calvard, Gottardello, and Song (2024) conducted a comprehensive review of neurodiversity research through the lens of intersectionality, examining how neurodivergent identities combine with gender, race, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and parental status to produce distinct experiences of inequality, inclusion, and development. The findings challenge any assumption that neurodivergent employees are a homogenous group with uniform needs.

Consider what this means in practice. A white ADHD male software engineer with a late diagnosis navigates a fundamentally different set of workplace experiences than a Black, autistic woman who was never diagnosed, or a middle-aged, dyslexic, immigrant worker whose first language is not English. The neurodivergence is one thread; the other threads are inseparable from it.

Calvard et al. (2024) draw attention to the particular ways that intersecting identities give rise to what they describe as distinct experiences of inequality. Neurodivergent employees who also belong to racially marginalized groups, for example, face what research in adjacent fields has called a compound adverse impact; a convergence of multiple forms of marginalization that cannot be addressed by treating each dimension separately.

For organizations, this means that a neurodiversity initiative that is not also thinking carefully about race, gender, and other intersecting identities is almost certainly not reaching the people who need it most.

The Under- and Unemployment Problem

Despite growing organizational interest in neurodiversity, autistic adults, to take one example where the data is clearest, continue to experience disproportionately high rates of unemployment and underemployment. This is not primarily a capability problem. It is a systems problem.

Wen, van Rensburg, O’Neill, and Attwood (2024) conducted a scoping review of the literature on autism and employment from the employer’s perspective, examining trends in employer attitudes, theoretical frameworks, and interventions across a 14-year span of research. Their findings are instructive; while the promotion of diversity in the workplace is an encouraging trend, this has not necessarily extended to the promotion of neurodiversity. Employer knowledge and attitudes, not just around hiring, but around supporting neurodivergent employees once they are hired, remain a significant gap.

The problem, in other words, is not simply that neurodivergent people struggle to get hired. It is that the environments into which they are hired are rarely designed to support them. The gap between getting a job and thriving in it can be enormous, and the research suggests that organizations have been much more focused on the former than the latter.

What “Inclusion” Actually Requires

The word “inclusion” gets used freely in organizational contexts, but what does it actually require when we are talking about neurodivergent employees?

It requires, first, that we recognize neurodiversity as a legitimate dimension of organizational diversity; not a clinical footnote, not a special interest, but a core feature of the workforce that deserves the same systemic attention we have (however imperfectly) begun to give to race and gender.

It requires that we move beyond reactive, disclosure-dependent accommodation models toward proactive, universal approaches to workplace design. This is a significant shift, and later posts in this series will examine what it looks like in practice.

It requires that we take intersectionality seriously; that we understand neurodivergent employees not as a monolithic group but as individuals whose experiences are shaped by the full complexity of their identities.

And it requires honesty about the limits of current practice. The research is clear that good intentions, even well-funded ones, do not automatically translate into meaningful inclusion. The gap between organizational rhetoric around neurodiversity and the lived experience of neurodivergent employees remains wide.

A Note on Language

A brief word on terminology, because language in this area is genuinely contested and evolving.

“Neurodiversity” refers to the full range of human neurological variation; it describes all of us. “Neurodivergent” is used to describe individuals whose neurological functioning differs significantly from what is considered typical. The academic literature uses both “neuroatypical” (as in LeFevre-Levy et al., 2023) and “neurodivergent” (preferred by many in the neurodivergent community itself) to describe this population. In this series, I use “neurodivergent” as the primary term, while reflecting the language of the research when citing specific studies.

This series uses identity-first language; “autistic person” rather than “person with autism,” consistent with the preferences of the autistic community and with neuroaffirming practice. While person-first language appears in some of the academic literature cited here, identity-first language reflects the position that neurological difference is not something separate from a person but an integral part of who they are. 

What Comes Next

This post has focused on the scale and framing of the issue; why neurodiversity matters in organizational contexts, why the research is still catching up, and why intersectionality is essential to any serious approach to neurodivergent inclusion.

The next post in this series examines the “business case” for neurodiversity; why it is appealing, where it goes wrong, and what a more robust and ethical framework looks like in its place.

If any of this resonates with what you are navigating, whether as a neurodivergent professional, a manager, or an HR leader, I would love to hear from you. You can reach me through the contact page or book a time directly through the schedule tab.

References

Calvard, T., Gottardello, D., & Song, J-W. (2024). Neurodiversity and intersectionality in the workplace: A narrative review and research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.70024 

LeFevre-Levy, R., Melso-Silimon, A., Harmata, R., Hulett, A. L., & Carter, N. T. (2023). Neurodiversity in the workplace: Considering neuroatypicality as a form of diversity. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 16(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2022.86

Weber, C., Krieger, B., Hӓne, E., Yarker, J., & McDowall, A. (2022). Physical workplace adjustments to support neurodivergent workers: A systematic review.  Applied Psychology, 73(3), 910–962. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12431

Wen, B., van Rensburg, H., O’Neill, S., & Attwood, T. (2024). Autism and neurodiversity in the workplace: A scoping review of key trends, employer roles, interventions and supports. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, 60(1), 121-140. https://doi.org/10.3233/JVR-230060