To honor International Women’s Day, we partnered with SIC to bring five neurodivergent women together for a discussion about inclusion in the workplace.
It was an honest, thought-provoking, and empowering peek into the many versions of success that neurodivergent women can achieve when we have access to the resources and support we need.
This year’s IWD theme, #InspireInclusion, struck a chord for our panel. Here are some key highlights from our discussion about what it means to move past merely inspiring inclusion, and taking the necessary steps to make inclusive workplace practices the norm.
Lydia Wilkins, journalist, author and editor-in-chief of Disability Review Magazine pointed out that Inspiring Inclusion can’t be where the conversation begins and ends. Lydia said: “I would argue that we should be past the point of inspiring, we should be doing the doing. If you actually look at the statistics for example, it was that the National Autistic Society put out, 93.5% of the British public are in fact aware of autism, they just don’t accept it. Make it make sense. So when we talk about inclusion, we should be doing the doing and going past the point of having conversations about kind of what is awareness and what it looks like.”
Sara Kedge, DEI Design Thinking Strategist, Coach and Trainer shared her thoughts on how inclusion is rooted in identifying and meeting needs so that everyone is empowered to do their best work: “For me, Inspiring Inclusion isn’t necessarily about doing sort of sheep dip training, or tokenistic gestures. To inspire inclusion, we can almost shift the conversation into creating a needs economy in businesses. If we empower people in businesses to accept that every human has a need, and in order to perform well we need to have those needs met. Line managers should be asking employees: ‘What is it that you need to perform at your best?’ It’s about moving beyond the tokenism to actually make workplaces work for more people.”
Nikki Adebiyi, Founder and Director of Bounce Black reflected on her own experiences, and many stories she’s been told, about experiencing toxic working environments at the hands of employers who claimed to champion inclusivity. She urged organisations to stop trying to tick boxes and instead confront their practices with honesty. Nikki said: “I think it’s really important to take intersectionality into account because all of these different identities impact us in one way, shape or form. It’s really important for conversations like these to be had more openly, where people with different experiences, different lived experiences, different perspectives and views of the world to come together and share openly and honestly and learn from one another.
That honesty and self-awareness is a starting point, but we have to move forward and start treating people with dignity.”
Alice Hargreaves, SIC founder and CEO illustrated why it’s important that employers are proactive with their inclusion policies, so that they’re prepared to provide support, even if none of their employees have disclosed support needs at any given time. She shared a story about an organasition that made sunflower lanyards (a method of signaling hidden disabilities) available to their team, despite the fact that no employees had actively disclosed support needs. Alice recounted: “Within 24 hours, all of those lanyards had gone and people were asking for more. So suddenly, they recognise that actually more than 50% of their team were experiencing challenges in the workplace. So the question becomes: How can you as an employer be as aware as possible of who’s within your organization? I’m not talking about surveys and EDI forms that everybody fills in on their first day, or when they sign their contract, because people change. Their experiences change. And employers need to be aware and prepared to support their workforce.”
Our co-founder, Lillie Jamieson, advocated for individuals and employers to view neuro-inclusivity as a shared ambition: “The first thing that needs to shift is how we how we understand and work with neurodiversity. It’s still a new concept to many, and no one has all the answers: we can’t expect neurodivergent individuals to immediately know what they need without getting any help to identify their challenges, and we can’t expect organisations to know how to be inclusive without support in building their knowledge and practices. So we need to collaborate, share knowledge, and empower everyone to celebrate difference and act from an inclusive ethos. It’s great that this conversation is alive, and we’re doing more, but we need to do better, and the way that we’re gonna be able to do that is by working together.”
Thanks once again to our panelists for their sharing insights and lived experiences at the intersection of womanhood and neurodivergence.
