Difference Is Not a Deficit
Rethinking DEI Through the Lens of Neurodiversity
Difference Is Not a Deficit: Rethinking DEI Through the Lens of Neurodiversity
This post is a follow-up to my earlier piece, When the Bubble Never Included You, which explored how exclusion can be woven into the very structures that claim to welcome us. In this continuation, I focus on how neurodivergent experiences often remain unseen in mainstream DEI efforts and why recognizing this matters. Next week, I’ll explore concrete steps organizations can take to design environments that foster true belonging, support mental health, and unlock overlooked insight.
The Limits of Inclusion
Inclusion is not the act of opening a door into a room still shaped for sameness. It is not about asking someone to contort themselves to fit. It is not about offering conditional welcome to those who can perform a version of normalcy well enough to slip by unnoticed.
Neurodivergent people, especially those whose diagnoses arrive in adulthood, often learn to survive by camouflage—by masking. We learn to mirror what’s around us, to soften our edges, to speak in tones rehearsed for comfort. We learn to modulate eye contact, track the rhythm of a conversation, take our cues from other bodies in the room. We learn to shrink, to become manageable, streamlined, agreeable, invisible. Many of us become skilled at it. Skilled enough to be permitted inside—but not enough to be truly seen.
This version of inclusion is not belonging. It is quiet assimilation, and it asks us to leave ourselves at the door.
The Invisible Toll
Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have often centered identities that are externally visible: race, gender, visible disability, age. These are essential focal points, and the work surrounding them remains both urgent and unfinished. Yet identities that are not always visible, including identities like neurodivergence, often remain unacknowledged in organizational inclusion efforts, even when the impacts of that omission are far-reaching and deeply felt (Bruyère & Colella, 2022).
When someone experiences the world in profoundly different ways—when they engage differently with language, with time, with sensation, with interaction, they are frequently misunderstood. Misunderstanding shows up as mislabeling. Someone who processes slowly might be seen as hesitant, unintelligent, or incompetent. Someone who expresses emotion intensely might be read as unstable. Someone who needs quiet or space may be perceived as disengaged. And so, we learn to edit ourselves until the misreading stops—but often, that self-editing comes at the expense of psychological safety and professional visibility.
The narrower our definitions of professionalism—how it looks, sounds, and feels—the more we reinforce the exclusion of those whose cognitive and sensory landscapes fall outside dominant norms. When we mistake charisma for competence, speed for skill, and polish for depth, we lose sight of other ways insight enters the room.
When Reflection Is Mistaken for Weakness
I am someone who thinks slowly and deeply. I write more easily than I speak. I often sense what I cannot yet name and carry the weight of it with me. I am nonlinear, attuned, perceptive. These are not traits that move cleanly through systems optimized for speed, clarity, and performance—systems that tend to reward the loudest, the fastest, the most self-assured.
In rooms calibrated for charisma and confidence, I often go unnoticed—or worse, misunderstood. What others call presence; I sometimes experience as overstimulation. What is read as silence may, for me, be active and intentional attending.
My attention is patterned—and patterned differently. I hear undercurrents. I sense subtexts. I notice timing, shifts, absences, affective rhythms. I miss things others think of as obvious, but I notice things they often overlook. This has long felt like a chasm I couldn’t cross, something I’ve tried again and again to explain to people who weren’t ready to understand.
Research by Rommens and colleagues (2023) helps explain this disconnect. Their work shows that many workplaces still rely on narrow ideas of what competence looks like—often valuing confidence, quick responses, and bold self-presentation. But those traits don’t always reflect deeper thinking or long-term potential. In fact, this kind of fast-paced evaluation can overlook people whose strengths show up more quietly, through insight, reflection, and sensitivity.
DEI’s Blind Spot
Most DEI frameworks today aren’t really built to support this kind of difference. They tend to miss the day-to-day realities of things like how someone processes information, handles sensory input, or experiences unconventional ways of thinking. Even when the intention is there, the conversation can feel superficial—reduced to checklists and appearances, especially from a neurodivergent perspective.
As Austin and Pisano (2017) point out, many organizations still treat inclusion as sameness, leaning on models that reward sociability and ease of communication rather than true cognitive diversity. Rommens et al. (2023) make a similar case: even as neurodiversity gets more attention, most efforts stay on the surface. They often don’t include the deeper changes, structural or cultural that would make a real difference. Without that, inclusion risks becoming more about appearance than substance, welcoming difference only when it stays within the bounds of what’s already familiar.
But real inclusion cannot be performative. It cannot stop at presence. It must be structural and systemic. It must be cognitive. It must be cultural. It requires that we question our assumptions about what value looks like. We must ask: do our systems recognize intelligence only when it looks like confidence, sociability, fluency? Do we reward presence only when it is packaged in ease?
Maya Richard-Craven (2025) emphasizes that “stigma plays a major role in why neurodiversity is under attack,” highlighting how misunderstandings and societal biases contribute to the marginalization of neurodivergent individuals in professional settings.
If we fail to expand our frameworks to include neurodiversity, we risk embedding bias not through overt exclusion, but through habitual oversight.
Beyond Surface Metrics
I know what it is to sense more than I can say in spaces that prize fast talk and clean conclusions. I have seen some organizations reward the performance of certainty while overlooking those whose truths arrive slowly, softly, through a different rhythm. I have watched inclusion work unfold with no acknowledgment of how neurodivergence shapes a person’s entire way of being—their pace, their interface with sound and light and dialogue, their way of metabolizing the world.
There are days I feel like I live in the wrong tempo. That I move just behind or just ahead of the beat everyone else is following, and yet, this dissonant rhythm is often where my clearest insights emerge. It’s where I connect emotion to atmosphere, story to structure, pattern to pattern. It’s where I read between what’s said and what isn’t. It’s where truth emerges from just beyond the horizon and new ideas are born.
And I know I’m not the only one.
Thankfully, there are places and people who do see us. There are some who make room at the table for those who bring insight in a different key. Especially in educational settings, I’ve witnessed doors open not despite difference, but because of it. In environments where knowledge is truly valued, so too are new ideas and the variety of minds that carry them. Where curiosity, care, and effort are recognized, difference can be not just tolerated but honored. When that happens, something shifts. The rhythm of inclusion begins to widen.
These moments are real. I’ve lived them, and they offer proof that other ways of knowing can be met with recognition instead of resistance.
What Inclusion Should Mean
True inclusion must mean that no one has to put on a mask just to enter the room.
It must mean that our ways of thinking, sensing, communicating, and processing are not treated as obstacles to overcome, but as capacities to recognize and respect. That leadership is not measured by how well someone emulates a narrow archetype of confidence, but by the depth and integrity of their presence in their own form.
Inclusion, when it is real, does not just make space for more people. It makes space for more ways of being human.
When we fail to do this, we lose more than just people. We lose complexity. We lose emotional intelligence. We lose the potential for insight that emerges only from deep sensitivity, from nonlinear thought, from embodied understanding.
What Becomes Possible
What becomes possible when we make space for deep listeners?
When we slow down our expectations of fluency, what truths might we finally hear?
When we stop seeing difference as deviation and start recognizing it as dimension, what kind of wisdom could we welcome?
What becomes possible when people no longer have to choose between authenticity and acceptance?
What might emerge if the most sensitive minds in the room were understood not as problems to solve—but as signals to heed?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are design questions.
And if DEI is to remain a vital force in shaping the future, it must learn to ask them—not only in policy, but in practice and presence.
Explore the Series:
· Part 1: When the Bubble Never Included You
· Part 2: Difference Is Not a Deficit
· Part 3: Inclusion is Innovation
· Main Page: Michelle Ried on Substack
Works Cited
Austin, Robert D., and Gary P. Pisano. "Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage." Harvard Business Review, May–June 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/05/neurodiversity-as-a-competitive-advantage.
Bruyère, Susanne M., and Adrienne Colella. Neurodiversity in the Workplace: An Overview of Interests, Issues and Opportunities. Taylor & Francis, 2022. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/d77b6b1d-9111-4004-a35d-b2f3257139a9/9781003023616_1043249781003023616-2.pdf
Richard-Craven, Maya. “Is Neurodiversity Under Attack? Yes. Here's Why.” Forbes, 1 Apr. 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayarichard-craven/2025/04/01/is-neurodiversity-under-attack-yes-heres-why/.
Rommens, Thijs, et al. “Advantages and Challenges of Neurodiversity Employment in Organizations.” Journal of Management & Organization, vol. 29, no. 3, 2023, pp. 546–565. Cambridge University Press, https://doi.org/10.1017/jmo.2022.51.
[Free PDF access via Cambridge Open Access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E00D823A30F04CA4EA502014329C1CE9/S1833367222000510a.pdf]
I appreciate this article because I was a sped teacher for a few years before I retired and people think DEI is one thing and it’s really not what you think it is…. It is that & so much more.