Why Bother? The Message Young Neurodivergent People Are Hearing About Work

Author Bio

Dr Nancy Doyle is a Dr of Occupational Psychology and the Founder and CEO of Genius Within CIC. As a contributor to Forbes Magazine she originally published this article there last week. She is also the founding member of a British Psychological Society Working Group, providing guidance to other Psychologists in the field. Nancy wrote a definitive guide to neurodiversity at work for the BPS and has contributed to many other publications and expert reference groups with organisations such as ACAS, ERSA and the DWP.

When ambition meets structural barriers, employers cannot repair the damage with resilience training alone. Something bleak is happening to career ambition.

It is easy to call Gen Z lazy, entitled or unprepared for work. It is harder to ask whether disengagement might be a rational response to the world young people can see. For young neurodivergent people (especially those who are also Black, trans, disabled or living with chronic illness) the risk calculation is becoming brutal.

Graduate recruitment at the UK’s leading employers has fallen by 24.5% since 2022 and is expected to fall again. Channel 4 has announced yet another controversial documentary asking whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental condition or a social construct, prompting an open letter from ADHD UK. Employment tribunal cases involving neurodivergent conditions rose by 95% between 2020 and 2025, including a 19% rise in the final year.

Meanwhile, we announce more mental health support for young people whose distress we continue to treat as an individual problem. Each headline reports something different. Together, they tell a story: work is scarce, your account of your own mind is debatable, conflict is rising and support may arrive only after you are struggling.

This is not a motivational problem. It is a problem of perceived control. Psychologists use the term learned helplessness to describe what can happen when repeated experience teaches people that effort does not change the outcome. Withdrawal conserves emotional energy. We stop trying because trying no longer appears to work.

There is also an epistemic injustice at play: some people are treated as unreliable witnesses to their own lives. The message is not simply, “work harder.” It is, “first prove that your experience is real, then prove that you deserve help, and perhaps we will let you compete.”

The public anger around Professor Jason Arday’s treatment was about race before it was about neurodivergence. It lands in a wider climate in which NHS staff report a noticeable rise in racist abuse, including patients refusing treatment from non-white professionals.

The controversy surrounding Professor Jason Arday is especially volatile. Liverpool John Moores University previously investigated allegations concerning his PhD and cleared him of plagiarism. Cambridge has since opened a fresh investigation following new information, and Arday has resigned while denying dishonesty and acknowledging mistakes. The detailed nuances are not explained in the news articles, which report alarm on behalf of authors whose texts are widely referenced by Professor Arday. This could happen to any academic. But it doesn’t. The supervisors and examiners have a duty. But we haven’t heard about them. Academic rigor is never one person, the peer review process is designed to create community safety, but it hasn’t. Those facts deserve due process. Accountability matters, but so does the way accountability is framed.

The reporting has been gratuitous and inhumane, no one deserves this hounding. Successful and aspiring Black professionals in many businesses will feel rightfully anxious, be expending critical cognitive efforts in reviewing their every turn. Did I make a mistake? All humans make errors, there will be mistakes. Employers should be considering the impact on Black colleagues and employees of constantly looking over one’s professional shoulder, the burden of perfectionism not as a personality defect but as survival, and act protectively. This is exactly what we mean by psychological safety, a current buzzword – safety to make mistakes.

Headlines describing Arday as a “DEI darling” or “diversity poster boy” turn questions about one academic into a referendum on Black advancement. As Guardian columnist Jason Okundaye has argued, Arday was too often presented as a symbol rather than engaged with as a scholar. Symbolic elevation is precarious: when the symbol is challenged, an entire community is invited into the dock. The issue is not whether Black academics should be exempt from scrutiny. The issue is whether scrutiny is proportionate, process-led and free from racialised spectacle.

For a young Black and Autistic person watching this unfold, the inferred instruction is not “aspire.” It is “be flawless, or stay small.”

Research Assistant at Newcastle University, Tumi Sotire confirmed: ”Calling a successful Black professional a ‘DEI hire’ sends a damaging message: that no matter how high we climb, there will always be people who question whether we got there on merit. It creates an alternative explanation for Black excellence, where achievement is attributed to the colour of our skin rather than our competence. The message becomes: you may reach the highest levels of your profession, but we still reserve the right to question whether you ever deserved to be there.”

Transgender and gender-diverse people are more likely to be autistic than cisgender people. They are now navigating a public and legal argument about spaces, safety and belonging.

The Supreme Court ruled that “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 refers to sex recorded at birth. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has advised organisations to take specialist legal advice while the implications are translated into practice. For employers and employees, intensely practical questions remain.

A trans employee should not have to discover their employer’s answer only when they are challenged at a bathroom door. For an Autistic trans person, uncertainty, confrontation, additional sensory overload and communication pressure can turn ordinary office attendance into sustained threat-monitoring. In the context of return-to-office mandates, it borders on traumatic.

This is not an abstract culture war to the person deciding whether it is safe to leave the house, enter a workplace or ask a manager for clarity. Safe employers have already prepared for this nuance and made appropriate policy, spoken to transgender employees specifically. The best time to take this action was when the ruling came out, the second best time is today.

At the same time, the UK is making one of its largest investments in disability employment support for a generation. The Department for Work and Pensions’ £1 billion Connect to Work programme is intended to support around 300,000 disabled people, people with health conditions and others facing complex barriers to employment by the end of the decade.

That investment is welcome. But coaching cannot compensate for a labour market or a public culture that keeps rehearsing exclusion. Gunjan Odedra, a case manager supporting people into sustained work, captures the tension:

“At times, I have colluded with the fiction that individual psychological support can compensate for structural abandonment. It cannot. Cognitive re-framing cannot remove discrimination from recruitment and career progression. Behavioural activation cannot repair a labour market that offers insecurity as opportunity. Therapy cannot be used as a mop for policy failure.

“But neither is individual coaching support meaningless. To focus only on systems can leave the person waiting for a revolution before they are allowed to move. To focus only on the individual can turn injustice into homework. The humane position lives between these errors.”

That humane position is where employers sit.

The UK needs a full range of minds working on engineering, health, food security, water management, defence and economic renewal. Black and /or trans neurodivergent minds are not an optional subcategory of that talent.

Yet before a young person can adapt to a workplace, they must reach it. Many are navigating inequitable education and skills systems, delayed or inaccessible health care, racism, misogyny, transphobia and poverty. Neurodivergent young people can miss early mental health support, with barriers intensified for some ethnic minority young people. The newsfeed arrives before breakfast; threat can enter the room before the working day begins.

Employers cannot control every headline. They can control whether those headlines are echoed inside their recruitment, progression and performance systems.

They can make routes into work transparent. They can apply standards consistently while making effective adjustments. They can respond decisively to racist, transphobic and disability-related harassment. They can create credible routes to redress before a disagreement becomes a tribunal claim. Above all, they can allow role models to be human rather than flawless symbols.

The employers still building psychological safety in this climate deserve recognition. The next generation is depending on them. But hope cannot be a well-being slogan. It has to be evidence: evidence that effort can change an outcome, that mistakes do not erase belonging, and that asking for support will not end a career.

Young people are not asking to be told that everything will be fine. They are asking for proof that trying can work.

If Britain wants neurodivergent talent to help solve its hardest problems, it must make ambition a rational bet. Otherwise, why should they bother?

To read more of Dr Doyle’s articles in Forbes Magazine click here.