70% of neurodiverse adults say they're facing increased stigma at work, and the ongoing corporate rollback of DEI programs could make the situation worse
Neurodiverse individuals, including people who have ADHD or dyslexia, often face multiple barriers in the workplace. And despite an increased awareness about these conditions over the past few years, the majority of neurodiverse workers say discrimination against them is only getting worse.
Around 70% of people who identify as neurodivergent say they face stigma at work, up from 60% in 2024, according to a new survey from Understood.org, a nonprofit that's dedicated to supporting individuals with learning and thinking differences. Around 77% of this group feels pressure to mask their behaviors for fear of retaliation, and another 64% worry that disclosing their condition will negatively impact how others perceive their abilities at work.
'There's an awareness around neurodivergency that has increased over the last few years, especially amongst young people, but there are still many myths and misperceptions out there,' Nathan Friedman, co-president and chief marketing officer at Understood.org, tells Fortune. 'So there's still a lot of work to be done, not only to continue to drive awareness, but for organizations to understand better what a learning difference is and how it manifests at work.'
The fear among neurodiverse employees about potential repercussions for disclosing their conditions could hold these employees back from asking for the kind of accommodation that could make their work lives easier. Around 64% of this group says they feel comfortable asking their employer for an accommodation, but around 76% of neurodiverse employees still say that there is stigma attached to doing so.
The current political climate around DEI is also causing workers to worry about what kind of options they will have in the future—inclusion for people with disabilities is considered an important part of many diversity policies. Around 64% of all workers—including both neurodiverse and neurotypical—believe that getting any kind of workplace accommodation moving forward will be more challenging because of how companies are rolling back DEI programs.
'The macro, political environment is not necessarily one that prioritizes inclusivity, and that's stemming from what the government has done regarding DEI,' says Friedman.
Ultimately, it comes down to each individual workplace to figure out how they can embrace neurodivergent workers and make them feel that they belong, no matter what's happening in the world at large.
'The best way to work on reducing stigmas is by driving awareness, both overt and implicit,' says Friedman. 'When you have advocacy, our data shows it comes with bottom-line growth for the organization.'
Brit Morsebrit.morse@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Boston Globe
03-08-2025
- Boston Globe
‘Great news but a weird twist.' After the NIH moved to restore hundreds of grants, researchers remain in limbo.
Advertisement In New England, 63 of those grants, worth $126 million, are set to be restored, according to a Globe analysis based on the The grants were restored as the result of a lawsuit filed by the American Public Health Association and 16 state attorneys general arguing that the NIH improperly ended funding tied to topics like gender identity, health disparities, vaccine hesitancy, and DEI efforts. The judge in the case ruled in June that the terminations were 'illegal and void' and ordered the government to immediately make the funds available. The Trump administration has appealed the decision. Advertisement The grants are a fraction of the more than $3.1 billion in funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Health and Human Services that the Trump administration has canceled across New England. At a status hearing on the case Monday, attorneys representing the public health association said that more than 50 of its roughly 300 affected research grants across the country have not been reinstated, and that the NIH has not provided a timeline for when all grants will be restored. Researchers face other obstacles as well. At Harvard, virtually all federal funding remains frozen as part of the administration's broader assault on the university. Others face reduced staffing, due to layoffs, and shortened deadlines to complete their research. And funding at the federal level remains subject to sudden reversals, as shown Tuesday night when the White House In a statement Thursday, the NIH told the Globe it 'has been working to reinstate grants to comply with the court's order.' Scott Delaney, a Harvard scientist and co-creator of Grant Watch, said many researchers remain wary despite the win because of further appeals and reviews. 'Every indication is that NIH will continue to cut research on trans health and on DEI. They still remain hostile to broad bodies of research, and they continue to ask researchers to rewrite their grants to avoid certain topics,' said Delaney, who lost his own NIH funding and received a But many are pressing ahead despite the obstacles and hoping for the best. Advertisement Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, learned this month that her funding would be restored. She said that despite feeling vindicated by US District Court Judge William G. Young's ruling, she cannot access the funds due to the federal freeze on funds to Harvard. Since 2019, Krieger and her team have been working to measure the impact of six types of discrimination — including racism, sexism, and ageism — on health. The researchers enrolled 699 patients who completed two study questionnaires online and at three Boston community health centers — including Fenway Health, Mattapan Community Health Center, and Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center in Dorchester — to test how discrimination contributes to psychological distress and sleep disorders. 'We can resume the work because we had completed all data collection and we were in the phase of data analysis and manuscript preparation,' Krieger said. 'Whether or not the funding ever truly gets reinstated for my grant — and I would like that it is — it's important, given the complexities, to make sure these things go from a court order to reality.' At Tufts, the school lost and then suddenly regained a pipeline for young talent, though several young scientists lost out in the process. The university hosts one of just 22 NIH-sponsored programs in the country that trains a diverse group of postdoctoral scholars in both research and teaching. The program, called the Institutional Research Career and Academic Development Award, or IRACDA, focuses on underrepresented groups. 'We were ramping up for another five years after earning highly competitive funding last fall,' said Mitch McVey, program director and professor of biology at Tufts. 'Then the new administration came in, and everything changed.' Advertisement When the NIH terminated funding, four incoming applicants had their offers rescinded just one day after receiving them. Marissa Maroni, 28, celebrated the news with her husband and prepared to move back to her home state. 'It felt like the right next step, personally and professionally,' said Maroni, who is finishing her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. 'But just a day later, I got an email saying the program was canceled. It was incredibly disheartening.' The loss also affects Bunker Hill Community College, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Suffolk University, where IRACDA scholars like Maroni were slated to teach next year. McVey said Tufts might extend the offers again to the four applicants but, 'We're trying to balance the risk involved here, which would be that if the government wins the appeal, the funding will likely be terminated again. We don't want to put the scholars in a position where their job security is always in jeopardy, so we're trying to figure out how to best navigate this situation. It's not easy.' At Yale, nine NIH grants that were terminated are in the process of reinstatement. Four of those belong to John Pachankis, a Yale School of Public Health professor who has spent the past 20 years investigating why people in the LGBTQ+ community are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, and suicide. The sudden March terminations not only disrupted years of research but also halted the rollout of promising mental health interventions. One of Pachankis's halted trials aimed to train front-line mental health providers working at 90 LGBTQ+ community centers across 35 states in cognitive-behavioral therapy to treat depression, anxiety, and substance use. Advertisement 'Right before the funding termination, we learned that our trained mental health providers had started delivering our cognitive-behavioral therapy to over 4,000 LGBT people in just four months,' he said. The funding cut prevented them from studying the longer-term impact of the therapy and ways to sustain it in local communities. Restarting the work has been slow and resource-intensive, he said. It requires updating ethics approvals, reconvening data safety review boards, updating clinical trials registries, drafting now-overdue progress reports, and restarting trials enrollment while no longer having sufficient staff to do this work. 'The research infrastructure took years to build, was collapsed in a day, and will take months if not longer to rebuild,' Pachankis said. 'My confidence in future federal funding for this research remains shaken, but my team's commitment to asking and answering important scientific questions isn't going away.' Meanwhile, at Brown, Moitra is figuring out how to move forward with his research. Between 2022 and early 2024, he and his team recruited 240 LGBTQ+ participants, offering two counseling sessions to study the mental health impacts from the pandemic. After funding was pulled, Moitra said, they lost 40 participants' worth of data that had timed out after those participants received just one counseling session. Now that the grant has been reinstated, Moitra's team is left racing against the clock as the deadline for the funding to be used remains Aug. 31. The researchers are applying for a no-cost extension to allow them to complete the work without requesting additional funds. 'After five-plus months of uncertainty, we were moving on,' Moitra said. 'It's hard to scramble it all back together.' Advertisement Sarah Rahal can be reached at
Yahoo
01-08-2025
- Yahoo
Trump's anti-DEI order sparks new federal funding guidance in Washington County
PORTLAND, Ore. () — Washington County has approved guidelines aimed at helping officials maintain critical funding amid President Donald Trump's anti-diversity, equity and inclusion policies. One of several established that entities with DEI practices would no longer be eligible for funding from the U.S. government. After several months of talks centered on how to preserve federal grants and other financial support, the Washington County Board of Commissioners voted to approve guiding principles during a meeting on Tuesday. CDC delves into bubonic plague case detected in Oregon in early 2024 The new guidance states that leaders will continue to operate 'in a transparent and open manner' while complying with federal, state and local regulations, among . Earlier in June, the its February 2020 commitment to DEI practices in response to the executive order. following pushback from several residents who argued leaders of the diverse county shouldn't adhere to the Trump administration's demands. However, County Administrator Tanya Ange noted that officials rely on $135 million in federal funding annually — and July through August is typically the period in which grants and contracts are renewed. Senior Medicare services administered through the Oregon Department of Human Services and overdose prevention programs managed by the Oregon Health Authority are among the resources that are currently 'at risk' as local officials wait to learn whether funding has been secured, according to Ange's . Despite uncertainty surrounding which resources will remain accessible in the county, some community members are arguing the new guidelines are too vague to ensure the protection of all residents. 'Simply changing the wording may not be enough to get the federal funds that we need, or maybe the wording is enough, but the resolution you pass is ambiguous enough to open the door for these funds to be made available for purposes they were not intended for — for not serving the under-resourced members of our community,' one testifier said. Ritz-Carlton in Portland sold back to lender to 'strengthen' struggling property District 1 Commissioner Nafisa Fai proposed an amendment that would have changed the guidelines to include language about Oregon's sanctuary state status, and to affirm that all Washington County residents would still have the right to access resources despite discrimination. When no other leaders voted to second the proposal, a decision that was met with 'boos' from attendees of the public hearing, District 4 Commissioner Jason Willey said legal counsel had already advised the county against changing the resolution. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Boston Globe
31-07-2025
- Boston Globe
Canceled HIV research in R.I. is reinstated, but fears persist about DEI crackdown
The order from US District Judge William Young in Massachusetts was narrow, reinstating nearly 900 grants awarded to the plaintiffs, not all of the thousands of grants canceled by NIH so far this year. Young called DEI an 'undefined enemy‚" and said the Trump administration's 'blacklisting' of certain topics 'has absolutely nothing to do with the promotion of science or research.' Get Rhode Island News Alerts Sign up to get breaking news and interesting stories from Rhode Island in your inbox each weekday. Enter Email Sign Up The Trump administration is appealing the ruling, and Advertisement 'We feel like we're tippy-toeing around,' said Nunn, who leads the Rhode Island Public Health Institute. 'The backbone of the field is steadfast pursuit of the truth. People are trying to find workarounds where they don't have to compromise the integrity of their science.' Advertisement Nunn said she renewed her membership to the American Public Health Association in order to ensure she'd be included in the lawsuit. Despite DEI concerns, she plans to continue enrolling gay Black and Hispanic men in her study, which will include 300 patients in Rhode Island, Mississippi, and Washington, D.C. Black and Hispanic men who have sex with other men contract HIV at The study was just getting underway, with 20 patients enrolled, when the work was shut down by the NIH in March. While Nunn's clinic in Providence did not do any layoffs, the clinic in Mississippi — Express Personal Health — shut down, and the D.C. clinic laid off staff. The four-month funding flip-flop could delay the results of the study by two years, Nunn said, depending on how quickly the researchers can rehire and train new staff. The researchers will also need to find a new clinic in Mississippi. The patients — 100 each in Rhode Island, Mississippi, and D.C. — will then be followed for a year as they take Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP, to The protocol that's being studied is the use of a patient navigator for 'aggressive case management.' That person will help the patient navigate costs, insurance, transportation to the clinic, dealing with homophobia and other barriers to staying on PrEP, which can be taken as a pill or a shot. The study's delay means 'the science is aging on the vine,' Nunn said, as new HIV prevention drugs are rolled out. 'The very thing that we're studying might very well be obsolete by the time we're able to reenroll all of this.' Advertisement Dr. Amy Nunn, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Health Institute, in a patient room at Open Door Health, an HIV clinic in Providence, R.I. Patients will be seen here for her HIV study that has been reinstated following a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff The hundreds of reinstated grants include titles that reference race and gender, such as a study of cervical cancer screening rates in Latina women, alcohol use among transgender youth, aggressive breast cancer rates in Black and Latina women, and multiple HIV/AIDs studies involving LGBTQ patients. 'Many of these grants got swept up almost incidentally by the particular language that they used,' said Peter Lurie, the president of the Center of Science in the Public Interest, which joined the lawsuit. 'There was an arbitrary quality to the whole thing.' Lurie said blocking scientists from studying racial disparities in public health outcomes will hurt all Americans, not just the people in the affected groups. 'A very high question for American public health is why these racial disparities continue to exist,' Lurie said. 'We all lose in terms of questions not asked, answers not generated, and opportunities for saving lives not implemented.' The Trump administration is not backing down from its stance on DEI, even as it restores the funding. The reinstatement letters from the NIH sent to scientists this month include a condition that they must comply with Trump's executive order on 'biological truth,' which rescinded federal recognition of transgender identity, along with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color and national origin. Kenneth Parreno, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said he was told by Trump administration lawyers that new letters would be sent out without those terms. But Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Wednesday the administration 'stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas over scientific rigor and meaningful outcomes for the American people.' Advertisement 'HHS is committed to ensuring that taxpayer dollars support programs rooted in evidence-based practices and gold standard science — not driven by divisive DEI mandates or gender ideology," Nixon said in any email to the Globe. The Trump administration's appeal is pending before the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston. A motion for a stay of Young's decision was denied, and the Trump administration is appealing that ruling to the US Supreme Court. The ongoing push to remove DEI from science has created fear in the scientific community, which relies on federal funding to conduct its research and make payroll. 'Scientific morale has taken a big hit,' Nunn said. 'People are apprehensive.' Indeed, major research institutions have faced mass funding cuts from the federal government since Trump took office. Brown University, the largest research institution in Rhode Island, had more than $500 million frozen until it In exchange for the research dollars to be released, Brown agreed not to engage in racial discrimination in admissions or university programming, and will provide access to admissions data to the federal government so it can assess compliance. The university also agreed not to perform any gender-affirming surgeries and to adopt Trump's definitions of a male and female in the 'biological truth' executive order. While some have avoided speaking out, fearing further funding cuts, Nunn said she felt a 'moral and ethical duty' to do so. Advertisement 'We have to dissent,' Nunn said. 'Scientific discovery around the world hangs in the balance.' Steph Machado can be reached at
