Facilitators and Barriers to Employment of Neurodivergent Individuals: A Systematic Literature Review of Employee and Employer Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: While employment rates amongst neurodivergent adults are notoriously low, little is known about their experiences in the workplace and their contribution to innovation and productivity in the labor market. At the same time, the views of colleagues and employers with regard to the inclusion of neurodivergent adults in the workforce are important. The purpose of the systematic literature review presented here was to explore what is known about the experiences of neurodivergent employees, their colleagues, and employers in terms of facilitators and barriers to inclusive best practice in the workplace. METHODS: We conducted a systematic review of the literature. Our analysis and synthesis are based on 56 studies from 12 different countries that met inclusion criteria. RESULTS: Eligible studies included 4909 neurodivergent employees, 2041 non-neurodivergent participants (mostly coworkers), and nearly 300 supervisors, managers, and employers. Identified barriers included a lack of awareness and education of supervisors, especially when they attributed social challenges to personal factors, at times resulting in disciplinary actions or exclusion. Key facilitators included supportive managers, flexible and tailored work arrangements, and the availability of assistive technologies. Benefits of inclusive approaches included improved employee retention, increased commitment, and an enhanced organizational image. CONCLUSIONS: Our review findings confirm that neurodivergent employees experience a number of impactful barriers at work. They also experience some important facilitators that can make their working life easier. We propose that future mainstream employment research should ensure that neurodivergent voices are heard and suggest that future work also includes employee, managerial, and organizational perspectives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".