Research by the University of Southampton and Lancaster University has found that young neurodivergent graduates feel confident about their career skills and ability to transition well into the workplace— which is great! …And that they also experience a disproportionate amount of discrimination and prejudice from their co-workers. Which is less great, especially when we’re talking about recent graduates and Gen Z-ers who are some of the most vocal advocates for inclusion and change.
We’re currently in an age where businesses talk so much about how fast they’re making headway in creating work that’s accessible for all. But that’s just not happening for these graduates.
So what’s going wrong?
🧠 Many co-workers may have missed out on a vital part of neurodiversity education
People of any age can be the perpetrators of discrimination, but one of the most common ways we see it happen by accident is in generations who missed out on the neuroinclusivity movement.
Many people in their 40s and 50s experienced an education system and social world that didn’t talk much about dyslexia, ADHD and Autism, and far less about the strengths that neurodivergent people have. So it leads to discrimination in the form of over-checking work, making assumptions, or even passing you over for promotion because they weren’t sure how you’d cope.
🧓 Some older generations have negative attitudes towards Gen Z in general
If there’s one thing media loves it’s pitting different generations against each other. This has unfortunately seen the rise of a lot of toxic content aimed at earlier generations that presents the whole of Gen Z as a folk devil, and it’s led to some Gen X-ers and Baby Boomers feeling very negative about Gen Z’s social attitudes, beliefs, and work-readiness. So when a recent graduate comes into a workplace asking for very reasonable changes like a shift in processes or even just reasonable adjustments, there may be an element of the company population that sees it as ‘being over-sensitive’ or ‘attention-seeking’.
💰 Some businesses put cost before their legal responsibility to support
It’s still depressingly common that somebody who goes to their management asking for assistive tech provision as part of reasonable adjustments gets told to ‘see how it goes’. Some businesses, especially smaller ones, get anxious about the cost especially in times of economic downturn like in 2024. That’s discrimination too: you’ve got the right to be supported, and it’s a legal requirement for your employer to do that up to a reasonable standard.
🤯 Stress creates wobbly interpersonal foundations at work
When revenue is low and targets are high, there’s pressure on everyone… so sometimes, managers can externalise that towards what they perceive as ‘weak links’ in their team. Unfortunately, if they’re not very well-informed, they might well decide that this ‘weak link’ is the young, neurodivergent colleague because they tick two boxes: they’re working differently to other people, and they lack workplace experience.
It might be that they keep closer tabs on you than your co-workers, making you feel micromanaged, or it might not even get that far: it’s still distressingly common to have a stellar neurodivergent candidate turned down at the last point in the application process because a line manager somewhere assumes they won’t be able to keep up.
Are we making progress?
It’s a sad truth that many older neurodivergent workers have experienced a lot of workplace discrimination over the years, and so much of it went unreported and unsupported because there simply weren’t the legal protections, advocacy and support systems that there are today.
Thankfully, Gen Z’s recent graduates and school-leavers have grown up in a far more neuroinclusive era and are far better at recognising and reporting injustice— but the widespread existence of those injustices is still a huge problem that workplaces need to address, and quickly, through better training and education at all levels of the business.
Let’s do better as we go forward. 💙