Promoted for Small Talk: Is There a Neurodivergent Glass Ceiling?

Earlier this week I sat on a panel at the Canadian Internet Governance Forum about digital participation and public voice. My argument was that a seat at the table only matters if the person sitting in it can actually move the outcome, and most institutions stop measuring the moment the seats are filled. (The full panel will land on YouTube eventually, so I won't rehash it here.) Afterward, I kept talking it over with an industry peer, and they told me about a colleague of theirs. By every account this person was one of the sharpest minds in the organization, and nobody ever questioned the quality of their work. They'd been passed over for promotion anyway, because they didn't fit anyone's picture of what a leader is supposed to look like. That colleague had a seat at the table, and it hadn't done them a bit of good. It raised a question I'd honestly never thought to ask: is there a neurodivergent glass ceiling?

What does the data actually say?

Unfortunately, the research says yes. The City & Guilds Neurodiversity Index 2025 surveyed 814 UK employees and 334 organisations, and found that 52% of neurodivergent employees had applied for promotion while 35% felt those opportunities weren't equally open to them. Read those two numbers together. Half of these people are actively trying to move up, and a third of them believe the ladder is missing a rung that only they can see. The 2026 edition of the index didn't get any cheerier, with only 32 to 38 percent of neurodivergent employees saying they feel psychologically safe at work.

There's a detail in the research of professors Almuth McDowall and Nancy Doyle that explains why this is so hard to spot. Their 2023 Neurodiversity in Business report found that most neurodivergent employees never disclose at all, for fear of stigma from colleagues or management. For those not familiar with why that matters, it means the bias rarely shows up as discrimination against a diagnosis. It shows up as a manager deciding someone is "a bit awkward" or "not quite leadership material," without ever knowing what they're actually reacting to. Nobody writes that down in a performance review, and nobody can appeal it.

Both of those studies are British, so what about Canada? Our numbers are, if anything, bleaker at the front door. Public Health Agency of Canada data found just 33 percent of autistic adults reported being employed, compared to 79 percent of adults without a disability. A Deloitte and Auticon survey of 454 Canadian adults ranked the job interview itself as the top barrier, cited by 40 percent of respondents, largely because interviews reward social competency and "social fit." Autism is only one slice of neurodivergence, which also includes ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and plenty more, but it's the slice Canada bothers to measure (which tells you something on its own). If the hiring interview filters for small talk, I find it hard to believe the promotion conversation, which leans even harder on "fit," is doing any better.

I should be upfront about my own seat at this table. I've never been formally assessed, but I'm fairly sure I sit somewhere on the spectrum. Small talk is genuinely hard work for me, I describe myself as an introverted extrovert, and I run on a limited social battery that loud rooms drain at an alarming rate. Put me on a panel and I'm fine. Put me in the networking reception afterward and I'm quietly calculating the shortest route to the exit. I've been lucky to work for leaders who cared more about whether the network stayed up than whether I lit up the holiday party, and plenty of people wired the same way haven't had that luck.

Where does the ceiling actually sit?

The first barrier is the decision that feels safest to the person making it. Picture a hiring manager choosing between someone outgoing and confident who ticks every familiar box, and someone quieter who solves problems in ways that don't look like anyone else's. The familiar candidate feels like less risk, because nobody has ever been fired for promoting the person everyone already likes. I've sat in that chair more times than I can count. I don't believe I've ever deliberately passed someone over this way, but after this week's conversations I'm a lot less confident I'd have noticed if I had.

The second barrier sits lower down than most people think to look. Strategic leadership roles often reward exactly the original, pattern-spotting thinking that neurodivergent people bring, but getting there usually means surviving first-line management, and that rung rewards the well-rounded generalist. Doyle has long described neurodivergent people as having a "spiky profile", with peaks and valleys far more pronounced than the typical employee's. Anyone who has worked in network engineering or security has met this person. They can read a packet capture like a paperback and find the asymmetric routing problem three other teams missed, and they would rather do almost anything than run the weekly status meeting. First-line management is mostly status meetings. We screen these people out at the exact rung where their weak spots are most visible, then wonder why the senior ranks all look and sound alike.

The third barrier is visibility, and in Canada it's getting worse in real time. Promotion has always depended partly on being seen, which is precisely the thing many neurodivergent people find hardest, and it's a little absurd that physical presence still stands in for performance in an era of digital and AI-enabled work. Rather than question that habit, Canada's largest employers have doubled down on it. Ottawa moved most federal public servants to four days a week in the office on July 6, with executives on site five days a week since May. The Ontario Public Service brought more than 60,000 workers back full time in January, Rogers went to five days in February, and most of the big banks are at four.

Follow that chain one link at a time. Presence becomes the stand-in for commitment, so the mandate makes presence compulsory. The mandated environment is an open-plan floor full of noise and interruptions, which burns through a neurodivergent employee's social battery well before lunch. By mid-afternoon that person looks tired and checked out, which gets read as a lack of "executive presence," and they're quietly passed over for the next opening. Notice, too, that the federal rules ask more office time of executives than of anyone else. The higher you climb, the more the job gets designed around the very thing these employees find hardest. I'll grant that in-person work has real value (some of my best whiteboard sessions have happened in a room together), but I've yet to see a badge-swipe report that measures any of it.

Haven't I made this argument before?

The fourth barrier is one I've written about already, though I didn't frame it this way at the time. A few years ago I argued that professional sports figured out compensation long before corporate Canada did. Jordan Love signed one of the richest contracts in the NFL without anyone needing to make him Senior VP of Quarterbacking, and nobody in Los Angeles thought Shohei Ohtani had to be named Director of Two-Way Baseball before handing him $700 million (a sore subject for Jays fans, I know). Both out-earn the coaches and executives who technically sit above them, and nobody in either sport finds that strange. Corporate Canada, meanwhile, still treats a specialist out-earning their manager as something close to a clerical error. Now think back to the colleague my peer described. In most organizations, the only road to more pay and more influence runs straight through people management. That leaves a brilliant specialist at an ugly fork, where they can take a job they'd be miserable in (and probably worse at), or they can plateau. Many neurodivergent professionals would add far more value by moving left or right, deepening their specialty instead of trading it for a calendar full of one-on-ones. When the only way is up, and up runs through small talk, the ceiling more or less builds itself.

Isn't managing people a real skill?

It absolutely is, and I'd be doing this argument a disservice if I pretended otherwise. Running a team well means reading people and having hard conversations at the right moment, and someone who finds that work draining may genuinely be a poor fit for the job. The trouble is that most organizations quietly bundle two different jobs into every leadership title. One is setting direction, the technical and strategic thinking about where the work should go. The other is developing and supporting the humans doing that work. We expect one person to excel at both, and we act surprised when the brilliant architect turns out to be a mediocre coach, or the beloved coach can't tell a good design from a bad one. Split them. Give organizations thought leaders who own architecture and strategy, and people leaders who own careers and team health, with equal standing and comparable pay. Big tech worked this out decades ago with fellow-level technical tracks at companies like IBM and Microsoft, where a distinguished engineer can carry more weight than most of the management chain without ever writing a performance review.

So what can we do about this?

Start with an audit, and start with your own promotion criteria. Pull up the last few promotion decisions you made or signed off on, and ask honestly which criteria measured output and which ones measured presence or polish. "Executive presence" and "culture fit" are the usual suspects. If a criterion can't be tied to something the role actually has to deliver, it's measuring comfort, and odds are it's measuring yours. I'm putting this exercise on my own list before our next promotion cycle, because checking my bias is something I clearly need to do on purpose rather than by accident.

Then look harder at structure. If your career framework has exactly one ladder, and every rung above senior requires direct reports, you've built the ceiling into the org chart, and no amount of inclusion training will ever reach it. Build the second ladder, fund it properly, and make sure the people on it get invited into the rooms where decisions are made.

Somewhere in my peer's organization, the sharpest person on the floor will spend next week answering questions in meetings they were invited to for their expertise, while the conversation about their own future happens down the hall without them. I said on stage this week that diverse voices in the room don't guarantee those voices shape the outcome. Inside our own companies, we control the guest list for both rooms.