Introduction
The This Isn’t Working podcast should be compulsory listening to anyone concerned about Disability Inclusion in the workplace in 2026. The term ‘woke’ as a pejorative has gone mainstream to embrace DEI as a whole. This reflects a deep undercurrent of discontent coming from people in general, rather than just the ‘far right’ which initiated the adverse reaction as part of its political discourse.
The denigration of DEI into a form of wokeism runs the risk of dragging disability into the same sentimental and political morass that is engulfing other aspects of DEI.
I don’t want to take on the defense of DEI in general. It needs a makeover – maybe a total rethink – that can come only from advocates of each group that has asserted a need for, and right to, the considerations of DEI. Each ‘protected group’ must assess its own needs and interests.
I have previously argued for the ideas of kindness and fairness at work as a general ‘universal’ that could be the foundation of a workplace culture. Such a culture would eliminate the need for much of what is called DEI.
DEI has become a vague notion – part sentiment and part political commitment. Neither of these is helpful to people with disability. The ‘protected groups’ that were once the mainstay of DEI’s reason for being don’t have the same needs now. And those who have emergent claims need to argue their case with greater clarity. We live in different times now. This was brought home to me in an article by John Harris in The Guardian [2/11/26] – The term is becoming unrecognisable’: have the experts who believed in a single autism spectrum changed their minds? I was particularly struck by John/s remark that “yet another quintessentially 21st-century battle rumbles on.”
Earlier, he wrote, “Happé has a tentative solution to the overdiagnosis wars. “I would say there’s an argument for autism spectrum disorder as a medical diagnosis, and it must require support. If you don’t require support, then by all means you can say you have an autistic identity, but you don’t have autism spectrum disorder, because it’s not impairing you. What you need at the ground floor, before you get to the disorder level, is understanding: self-understanding, understanding from other people, reasonable accommodations. That’s level zero.” The underlining is mine.
This is a singularly 21st century battle because the theme of identity and inclusion is now more subtle and complex than were the demands of the 1960s and 1970s struggle for rights. We might think of it as Rights 2.0. And DEI isn’t intellectually or professionally fit for purpose now. As an old rights campaigner I am quite happy to have my assumptions and beliefs challenged. In fact I welcome any challenge to perceived moral complacency or political presumption.
Disability in general has been drawn into the atmosphere of wokeism partly because of the popularity of neurodiversity and the prevalence of self-diagnosis. We seem to be infected with the notion that difference is acknowledged only if it is framed as disability. There’s some logic to this because DEI was predicated on difference being equal to disadvantage – which was often the case. But the world is very different. Now it’s more like that difference is a disadvantage if you feel you can’t compete – so playing the ‘disability card’ can level the playing field. Here’s were Happé’s observation is so relevant. If you don’t need an adjustment or an accommodation, you don’t have a disability.
I am not about to argue that neurodiversity may not be expressed as a genuine disability – but I will argue that not all manifestations of neurodiversity are inherently indications of disability. As a member of a family rife with autism and neurodiversity I can well sympathize with any person who feels that they don’t ‘fit’ in sundry settings. As Simon Baron Cohen observes in The Pattern Makers, the inability to fit into a social, work or cultural setting might just be a sign you think and feel differently.
The tyranny of the normal isn’t what it used to be – but it can still be brutal in how it handles difference. This can include fear, ridicule, misunderstanding and exclusion. But difference is natural and okay – even necessary. That was the underpinning insight of the idea of neurodiversity. But the people who constitute the ‘normal’ aren’t markedly different from each other – and they are in the majority – and they don’t do ‘not normal’ very well at all. It was ever thus.
What has changed is that the spirit of diversity now informs our community. Its now okay to be different in ways it wasn’t back in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. I grew up as a tall, skinny, left-handed and nerdy kid. Mercifully I was straight, otherwise I have had a full house of ‘differences’ that would have triggered exclusion and often persecution.
DEI has given the contemporary ‘different’ minority the confidence to speak up. But the language, the logic and the arguments must be updated for this 21st-century struggle.
Disability is no longer a settled domain. The disability rights campaigned for in the 1960s didn’t include Neurodiversity. The kinds of care and adjustments that became accepted as ‘rights’ didn’t include the accommodations that people with Neurodiversity, who say they have a disability, want and believe they entitled to. This is a new sphere of negotiation that hasn’t yet matured into an agreement or shared understanding.
In 2014, when the NSW Disability Inclusion Act was enacted disability had a clear meaning. In 2026 it is no longer so clear. In the intervening 12 years a lot has changed. The phenomenon of Identity Politics has arrived with considerable energy. New forms of identity are arguing for equality with established identities – but without going through a similar process of assertion and acceptance.
This creates a mess in which ‘old’ and ‘emergent’ ideas of disability are confused. Below I want to disentangle the mess and offer some thoughts on gaining clarity.
A bit about me – to set the context for my remarks
I have a major mobility disability, because of contracting GBS (Guillain–Barré syndrome) in 2008. I require mobility aids to walk. I also have impaired manual dexterity and grip. In 2010 I became a founding member of my department’s Disability Employee Network, which I led for 3.25 years to March 2020.
In June 2021 I quit full-time paid employment after 19.5 years of working in roles related to disability in various ways. Before that I had held 4 roles involved delivering care or support services to people with disabilities – or monitoring service delivery standards. Way back in the early 1970s I worked in psychiatric hospitals where, among other things, I provided personal care to patients with profound levels of disability.
Since July 2021 I have been a member of my local council’s Access Reference Group. From June 2023 to June 2025, I was a part-time consultant tasked with mentoring my former employer’s ERG leads.
I also have Masters and Masters Honours degrees with majors in Social Ecology.
Adjustments and accommodations
For a long time, a person with a disability was someone who required an adjustment or an accommodation so that they had equal access to life experiences in their community, employment or education.
In the main this meant moving toward universal design principles so that no physical, sensory, policy or system environment excluded a person with a disability by design, intent, oversight or malice.
Because we have come from an historically exclusionary culture which championed the unimpaired and unblemished universal inclusion has been a steady aspirational objective. Even after the end of World War 2, despite sincere celebration of veterans, there was no effort to make our shared spaces more accessible to veterans who had disabilities. We just didn’t think of it.
Now it is a work in progress. Australia has strong legislation and policies in place to ensure that objective is being worked toward in a steady way.
Making our physical environment more accessible is a huge commitment at considerable cost. My time on my council’s Access Reference Group has been an eye-opener. The transition from a culture dominated by ableism to one that is framed by universal principles of access and inclusion is necessarily long – because of the costs involved. Its not just the costs of directly implementing the changes needed, but the costs of assessing, planning, designing and consulting.
There’s a fundamental difference between adapting external elements like physical, system and process environments to be more inclusive and changing beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of individuals. The former can be mandated. The latter cannot – and efforts to do so fall foul of complex psychological mechanisms. We all have a distinction between ‘outer’ shared obligations and ‘inner’ personal ones. When the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’ match we make changes quickly and readily. When they do not, which is way more common, changes are slower to design and implement.
This reality creates a major problem for those who assert their Neurodiversity is a disability. How might an accommodation or an adjustment in the workplace be negotiated? And if the Neurodiversity is self-diagnosed, how is the claim to be validated?
In late 2019 I initiated an effort to ‘Change the Conversation’ about ‘mental illness’. I had spoken with several Disability ERG members with diagnosed mental health conditions. What they told me was alarming. They reported managers who exhibited deeply prejudicial attitudes. The term ‘mental illness’ triggered distorted and demeaning inferences and presumptions of cognitive dysfunction, disordered behaviour and intellectual incompetence.
Anxiety and depression are the two most diagnosed ‘mental health’ conditions in Australia. To me they are emotional rather than mental states. But the prejudice of the ‘mental health’ field makes such a distinction unpopular. So, the prejudice persists.
I have worked in psychiatric hospitals and have worked with community-based accommodation providers for people with long term psychiatric conditions, coordinating care and support services. I had also prepared complex medical reports, including psychiatric assessments. I was consequently far more comfortable with the idea of mental illness than most other people.
But stigma associated with mental illness surprised me. There was so little confidence in discussing the theme one person I spoke with described having a close relative who “suffered with mental health”. Language matters to a huge degree because it exposes depths of misunderstanding and low confidence in talking about the subject. My efforts to ‘change the conversation’ didn’t go far. My successor had no passion for the cause – and it needed a dedicated long-term strategy.
It is difficult enough to encourage sustained awareness of the needs of people with disabilities among those who are highly motivated. Dealing with sensory or mobility disabilities takes cognitive effort. Dealing with psychological disabilities takes more effort, especially when the myths, distortions and stigmas of mental illness are added. A person in a wheelchair is often seen as a hero, whereas a person identified as having a mental illness might be seen as an unpredictable risk, or even a threat.
Neurodiversity is a complex matter. Research is routinely reframing how we understand it. There isn’t an agreed perspective that can be confidently widely shared. This may be because it is also an area prone to idealism and political passion. It has certainly become a theme of Identity Politics – which allows a person to ‘self-diagnose’ or self-identify. This isn’t to say that this is necessarily a misrepresentation, only that the risk is there when it matters.
When there’s self-identification of Neurodiversity as a disability the question of what kind of adjustment or accommodation is sought can become problematic. This is especially the case if what is sought concerns attitudes or behaviors exhibited by other people or matters concerning work performance.
What I found with my attempt to ‘Change the Conversation’ on mental health was that there was a huge distinction between perceptions of disability that required adjustments to physical environments to meet the needs of people with physical or sensory disabilities and notions of disability that require changes to behaviors and attitudes from managers and colleagues. Understanding this distinction is crucial if our goal is to change behaviour.
We have yet to negotiate this more evolved form of inclusion. It’s the next step I believe we should take. It might be that Neurodiversity and mental health are the themes that will drive this development.
The critical point here is that there are two stages in Disability Inclusion here – one settled and the other a long way from being so.
Some concluding thoughts
My primary interest is Disability Inclusion in workplaces. I have seen the environment change significantly over the past 16 years.
In late 2025 Iris Bohnet & Siri Chilazi published Make Work Fair. The book was written in response to the growing politicisation of DEI as being ‘woke’. The response to the book seemed to me to be disappointingly weak. Part of the reason seemed to be that DEI practitioners, instead of sensing this was a lifeline, just ignored it. Organisational leaders tend not to be great readers, so they didn’t read the book. ERG leads also tend not to be readers, so neither did they. This was my experience as I tried to engage in conversations about the book. I do hope my perspective is unjustly pessimistic.
From June 2023 to June 2025, I was engaged by my former employer to mentor ERG leads. I was highly effective as an ERG lead over 3.25 years. That mentoring experience was remarkable because the actual problem wasn’t what it seemed to be at first. I had to do an intense crash course on why I was as successful as I was. That crash course took me into evolutionary and organisational psychology, leadership, persuasion, influencing, communications strategies and relationship building. These were skills and insights that I had developed over the preceding 2.5 decades – but never at the level of being conscious of them. It took being expected to transfer them to others for me to understand just how hard it is to be good at something as complex as this.
I also had extraordinarily good fortune on my side. I was blessed with having at least 4 of the best senior executives I have ever worked with, along with 2 DEI managers who really ‘got it’. As well, I had a remarkable group of ERG members I called the Guidance and Action Team [GAT]. I wasn’t a lone heroic ERG lead. I had a prominent role in a team of committed and very capable allies.
And even so, we didn’t see what was coming. Back then the notion that we were ‘woke’ in its current sense would have been incomprehensible. We weren’t. I saw my mission was to end the suffering of staff with disability. I use the word ‘suffering’ intentionally because I listened to accounts of ERG members experiencing physical and psychological pain no normal person would think okay. How could we do that? How could we imagine that was okay?
It wasn’t a moral argument. It wasn’t a political argument. It came down to a clear legal responsibility. Of course, the reality was way more complex than that, but it provided a shared and agreed basis for collaborative action. We got results.
The present contention over Identity Politics is very 21st century – the way the rights movements of the 60s and 70s were very 20th century. Things were very different. Back in the 60s and 70s moral and philosophical arguments were all we had. Now we have a breathtaking amount of data and scholarship to guide how we assess challenges and opportunities, interpret the motives and needs of others and how to act to deliver a common good. My simple focus on ending the suffering of my ERG members is validated by the neuroscience on exclusion.
So, not only is Identity Politics driving the need for new conversations about inclusion that render a lot of DEI thinking out of date, we are also failing to inform our capacity to have these conversations with current insights from a very substantial body of scholarship.
There is a fundamental distinction to be made between being motivated by a sense of moral purpose informed solely by sense of empathy and being motivated by a moral purposed informed by empathy plus evidence, insight and skill.
We are at risk of trapping ourselves in a state of mind that defaults back to sentimental and moralistic interpretations – because they are less cognitively demanding and more emotionally satisfying. And we can’t blame the ‘younger generation’ for being impatient and contentious. That’s their job. That’s how it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Those who blocked the inevitable progress back then were the ones in power, and who didn’t read the signs. It’s very easy to become like the people you opposed.
When I stepped down as Disability ERG lead in March 2020, I was gifted a t-shirt. I still have it. On the front it says, “Solve for one, extend to many”. That was our ERG motto, drawn from universal design principles. While our focus was on ending suffering for colleagues with disabilities, we aimed to make changes that made our workplaces kinder and fairer for everyone. Sure, back then we didn’t use that language, but I can avow that this was the intent. You can’t demand inclusion if you exclude others, intentionally or unintentionally.
That’s why I particularly resonated with a few lines from John Harris’s article – which I will intentionally now edit to emphasise my point, “What you need at the ground floor is understanding: self-understanding, understanding from other people, That’s level zero.”
How we get there will take a lot of effort – and that will not be popular with many. But, and here’s my final point, this is precisely what distinguishes a 20th-century struggle from a 21st-century one. We now have data and scholarship to back up our moral intuitions and insights. To employ these, however, we need to be willing to develop our self-awareness by engaging in self-reflection, seeking feedback from others (especially if we disagree with them) and use the data available to us. This is the 21st-century challenge.
There’s a book that’s really on point here. Its ‘Head and Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership’ (2023) by Kirstin Ferguson. This is a 21st- century approach to leadership that makes the distinction between 20th- century leadership painfully clear. This shows two different states of personal and cultural awareness and affirms to me the old wisdom of not putting new wine in old wineskins.
The new demand for inclusion isn’t the same as the old one. We need contemporary insights and sentiments articulated in contemporary language. That almost certainly assures us that what is said will offend those in power now. This is normal. Both sides will go too far to defend their position – normal in a political or moral conflict.
We need Ferguson’s ‘Head and Heart’ balance – empathy, plus data, plus self-awareness.