A positive duty on systems, and the data case for neurodivergent founders

Late in the entrepreneurship session at the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Melbourne, a participant asked a question that became an argument about where responsibility for inclusion should lie. Much of the discussion, they said, had been about how to make room for neurodivergent people. Their concern was that “it’s almost still like the burden and the responsibility of getting things right rests with the people that shouldn’t be”. The trouble, they said, lay in how their autism was understood and responded to by structures, systems and a society that did not make room for that voice.

They reached for gender equality as a comparison. Where countries had made real progress, they said, there had been countrywide legislation. Australia had very recently imposed a positive duty on employers to show how they were progressing towards closing the gender gap. Their question was whether that idea needed to be applied more broadly, so that it was no longer the individual’s job to point out that they were being excluded. They asked where the positive duty sat on employers, and in civic, social and political life, and where the duty was imposed on systems and structures. They described it as close to a fundamental human rights approach, built on a right to equality and a recognition that differences are equal.