Disability and Neurodiversity In Engineering

In this second and final bonus episode of The Equity Edge we focus on disability and neurodiversity in Engineering. Hosts Professor Sue Black OBE and Jo Stansfield are joined by Martin Griffin, Geotechnical Engineer and award-winning EDI champion for advocacy for disability and neuro diversity inclusion, Chair of Ably Different, a member of the group of IOM3, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, Co-Chair of the EqualEngineers neurodiversity network, and Vice President of the Geological Society with responsibility for EDI.

The discussion begins with acknowledging that disability can sometimes be described as a forgotten dimension of diversity, and raises the issue of whether equity, diversity and inclusion programs are fully including disabled and neurodiverse people.

We look at what businesses need to be aware of for the inclusion and accessibility for their disabled and neurodiverse employees and consider the importance of reasonable adjustments. Martin recommends support for employers to adopt to ensure they become disability and neurodivergent inclusive, and how to adopt a more inclusive culture at work, whether in the process of change or just starting out.

Meet our guests

Episode Transcript

Sue Black

Welcome!  The Equity Edge is all about shaping tomorrow’s foundation industries, with a focus on EDI – that’s equity, diversity, and inclusion, and how it can help us achieve a sustainable and fairer future.

I’m Professor Sue Black. I’m Professor of computer science and technology evangelist at Durham University, leading pioneering initiatives like our award winning TechUPWomen programme championing diversity in STEM

Jo Stansfield

And I’m Jo Stansfield. I’m an engineer-turned-business-psychologist specialising in equity, diversity and inclusion in engineering fields. Welcome to The Equity Edge podcast.

Sue Black

Together we are working with TransFIRe, a programme investigating how the foundation industries can develop innovative solutions to reduce waste and energy use, and to accelerate the development of clean technologies.

Jo Stansfield

These are the industries that make 75% of the materials we see around us, and are fundamental to modern society – they are: cement, metals, ceramics, glass, paper and chemicals.

 

Sue Black 

Hi, everybody. In this bonus Equity Edge episode, we’re talking about disability and neuro diversity in Engineering. It’s topic we touched on in some of our other Equity Edge episodes. However, disability is sometimes described as a forgotten dimension of diversity. And we really wanted to properly dig in to understand it more deeply. Are equity, diversity and inclusion programs including people with disabilities? Who’s joining us today, Jo?

Jo Stansfield 

Thanks Sue. In today’s discussion, we’re joined by Martin Griffin. Martin is a geotechnical engineer and award winning EDI champion for his advocacy for disability and neuro diversity inclusion. Martin is chair of Ably Different, a members group of IOM3, the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, co-chair of the EqualEngineers neurodiversity network, and vice president of the Geological Society with responsibility for EDI. Welcome, Martin.

Sue Black 

All right, Martin, let’s start by learning a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your work as an engineer, and what makes disability and neuro diversity inclusion so important to you?

Martin Griffin 

Hi everybody.

Martin Griffin 

Okay, I’m a Geotechnical Engineer, as Jo said, which basically covers ground, rocks and soils and I talk about the properties and how they interact with structures like bridges. And so I talk about properties, how strong things are, how compressible things are and how they behave. So that’s what I do, generally, working with graduates working with clients to get the best solution for the client. And that’s what takes about 80% of my time for work, working for an international consultancy. The other interesting thing is I work for the People team for my company, which is working with EDI work, focusing on neurodiversity and disability, especially in our workplace and trying to make it more accessible for everybody.

Sue Black 

Okay, that’s great. Thank you. Disability and neurodiversity covers a huge range of things. Can you introduce us to some of the types of disabilities that we should be thinking about?

Martin Griffin 

First of all, we think about disability covering that 1 in 5, 1 in 6 of the population generally. So it’s a large amount of people. Neurodiversity can cover up to about 4% with autism, one to three to eight with autism, then dyslexia, about 15 to 20%. So we’re talking about a high lumps of people working in STEM and Foundation Industries that could be covered. A lot of disabilities are hidden, which I think I’ve read, about 80% of them are hidden disabilities. So lot of people are covered, or have disability or have neurodiversity within them. It’s one of those things that you think, oh, it’s not going to happen to me. But more often, maybe we have a hidden disability. And you’re protected under the Equality  Act and you don’t realize you are. But what sort of things should we consider? Things like visual impairment. I’m visually impaired myself, I should have said. I’m autistic, I’m dyslexic, visually impaired, and dyspraxic. So visual impairments, hearing difficulties, or things even like diabetes, that’s not a disability. But if it’s a lifelong condition, under the Equality Act in the UK, it’s still considered as a disability, because you have substantial disadvantage to do your day to day work. So things like that, or, you know…  it’s not just a wheelchair. When something you can obviously see, I say, these hidden things that people just don’t realize that. Even I’d say, to some extent, people wearing glasses is not a disability, but it’s something that glasses are a support thing to make you do your job better. What else can we consider? Things like, oh, maybe learning styles, and neurodiversity, were were talking about that. People have different learning styles, different ways of processing information. That’s something people have to be more considerate about. We have to consider just the range of disabilities. When you’ve met one person with a disability, you’ve only met one person, because there’s so much difference between people’s conditions . Like, if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve only met one autistic person. If one person is visually impaired, another person’s vision impaired, they will still say they’re visually impaired. But the way it manifests itself for that individual is very different. And it’s unique to them. So those sort of things I think we should consider.

Sue Black 

Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. So have you noticed over time, I’m just thinking because I’ve got four children and three are dyslexic. And so I’ve noticed from the difference in the way that that’s approached by society and by our education system over the last… well, so the oldest ones are 40, down to my youngest is 20. Even over that time span, from 40 years ago, or 35 years ago to 15 years ago. So it feels to me like we’re making some progress, but we’re obviously not there yet. How have you found it over the years, in terms of the change that you’ve seen, through your career to where we are now in terms of how people see disability?

Martin Griffin 

Yeah, I graduated in 1995, which covers that sort of timeframe. So I’ve seen a lot of awareness, people were talking a lot more about it, and talking about neurodiversity, particularly. Disability is still almost like the poor relative. I mean, they want to do adjustments, but things are very slow in business to take shape. And you’ll get a lot of support at university, potentially, if you’re in the right university and get those supports. But then you enter the brave new world of work, and then you’re having to fight for yourself. Because there’s no sort of coach that you have. Or you have to fight, know what adjustments you need before you enter the workplace. Or you get the adjustments in things like at university, you get 25% more time for exams. But that doesn’t help you if you’re a consultant or working at work, because everything is time based, and you have to do that within time pressures. So it’s that awareness. What needs to be done, and how workplace can be changed to adjust and be adjusted to suit disabled and neurodiverse people.

Jo Stansfield 

So Martin, what you were just saying leads on really well into a question that I wanted to ask you, which is about employers and what they need to be aware of for inclusion and accessibility for their disabled and neurodiverse colleagues. What should employers be aware of?

Martin Griffin 

I think, knowing that when they recruit, or when they interview candidates, knowing that one size does not fit everybody. We want to have a unique solution for that individual candidate. So the adjustments will be… like Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Office or Microsoft Windows, you could tweak it to bespoke to your individual settings. And I think employers have to realise that you have to get a unique solution for that individual person, and not just get something from the supermarket and hope that fixes it off the shelf. Yeah, off the shelf solution. Yeah, to get that just knowing that you have to work with that individual to get the best solutions. You can’t just expect… They will have some ideas what will work for them, but until they get to that workplace, or that industry, they won’t know exactly what works for them, so you have to work with them.

Martin Griffin 

So it’s like an (indistinct).

Martin Griffin 

And that will take time and trust. Because they have to feel safe to share their conditions and their traits with you. So it’s a bit of iterative process, and it may even take a year. It takes quite a long time. But once it works, it works really well.

Jo Stansfield 

Yeah, that’s really important. And just knowing that there’s going to be a process to go through. When people talk to me, they’ll quite often worry about employing somebody with a disability because they worry that it’s going to be really expensive, or the accommodations are going to be something that they can’t do without it costing a lot. What do you say to that? Is that something you’ve seen happen?

Martin Griffin 

I’ve seen that happen. I think what’s generally good for, for example, neurodiverse people, it’s generally good for everyone. If you’ve got a person who’s in a wheelchair, you need a ramp. But that might be good for somebody who’s got a  bicycle coming into the office. So if we can promote accessibility and adjustments, support mechanisms to support everybody, because everyone would need like, maybe different lighting in the office. And maybe it’s a question, “how can I support you to be the best you in the workplace?” rather than highlighting someone with a disability or neurodivergency condition. And how it is for them is different. It’s just a different way of expressing themselves, but it’s trying to bring the normality into it all. So that everyone get those adjustments that they need to support. Because as I say lighting may be different, the sounds. So everyone might need noise reduction headphones in an open plan office. So it’s just those small things and just tweaks. But you know, most of adjustments are very cheap. And it’s just working with people and then working with their colleagues to get the best solutions.

Sue Black 

What kind of support do you recommend that employers tend to adopt to make sure that they are disability and neurodivergent inclusive?

Martin Griffin 

It’s things like adjustments, like with a software. I have read write software for my workplace. Or you have things like meeting planning, better meeting plans, like having agendas in advance. Or you could do simple things like say, how you undertake meetings, how you do the lighting, how you do the sounds, interaction with others, making neuro inclusive language. And then just thinking about how you support them on a day to day basis, or on a week to week basis, like weekly check ins with that your staff. I mean, in my opinion, line managers should be doing that every week to see how their staff are going. And I think maybe since lockdown that’s become more and more evident to me, because we’re doing a lot more remote working. And I think we just need to be closer to our, not vulnerable employees, but those who have additional needs and requirements. And another way of supporting them is employee resource groups. If you set up an employee resource group and start talking to your neurodiverse staff, they can help implement your policies in the companies, because they know your company better. They know what they’re facing as challenges. So they can actually help change and adopt policy to make it more accessible to you, rather than me saying, “this is the best solution for you”. Because it’s got to be bespoke to your workplace and bespoke to your needs, if that makes any sense.

Jo Stansfield 

What you’re saying, Martin, resonates with what you were saying a bit earlier about needing to iterate with the individuals. But it sounds like actually, you can do that on a more organizational scale as well, by working with the employee groups, to look at the overall policies and actually use them to inform and give feedback about what’s working and what’s not working. Can you tell us a bit more about some of the work that you’ve been doing with that?

Martin Griffin 

When I first joined my company last September, I was asked to start up our employee resource group. So that’s just supporting and mentoring junior staff and the graduate engineers, and supporting them and helping get the adjustments they need. Working with the HR or People team to get policy revised and changed. And that’s taking a good bit of getting used to because I work for a big company and often it’s a very slow process. But I think I’m not wrong in saying a lot of companies are slow in this sort of process. We have to go through all the red tape. But I think sometimes we make it unnecessarily slow when it could just be a simple thing. We do awareness sessions. And outside of work, I do presentations, podcasts like this, I do mentoring outside of work. I work with EqualEngineers, leading their neurodiversity network. That’s supporting cross sector engineers to raise awareness for professional bodies or support one another and just encourage one another. So I do a lot of things like that. GeolSoc, I’m on the council for doing EDI work of trying to make the Geological Society of London more accessible for everyone to join, and things like that. And trying to relate psychological safety to disability, and neurodiversity. That’s why, at the moment, that’s my rabbit run, or that’s part of my 20% of my time looking into that. And I’m trying to delve into that and how we can make workplaces more safe for disabled people and neurodivergent people, to actually not feel uncomfortable at work and just feel accepted, not be underrepresented.

Sue Black 

Yeah. So that’s great. Thanks, Martin. So thinking about it from the employers point of view, what are some kind of easy wins, or low hanging fruit of what employers can do to create an inclusive culture within their workplaces? We were talking a little bit about it before we started recording. But it would be good to hear your thoughts on the culture within a workplace. And employers may be just starting to think properly about how to have an inclusive culture at work. Have you got any kind of tips of how to get started on that?

Martin Griffin 

I did a lot of research on this years ago, because I do a lot of research behind the scenes. And I think what a lot of people lack is emotional intelligence. And we talk a lot of professional activities and how the project is going and how we solve all these problems as STEM people. But then we forget that we’re working with people. And we bring our baggage into our meetings. And I think we have to grow in psychological safety and emotional intelligence and how we work with each other better. Because we’ve got so many complex problems going around us. We’ve got climate change, we’ve got cost of living crisis. And the only way we’re going to work together better is if we’re closer together and collaborate better, but we’re not. I don’t think as people, and as engineers and scientists, we’re not working. We’re always competing against each other and trying to grab things off each other and say “this is what works for us”. And we’re holding this technology and this best practice from one another. And we’re not sharing that. It disappoints me. Because ultimately we’re losing talent. There’s a graduate shortage of suitable people. People are struggling with a staff retention slew, we’re losing staff. So how do we keep those people interested in their jobs and keep doing what they want to do? It’s just something I’m working on at the moment. And I just think how we can get all staff involved with the process, not just those who have that power, position of privilege and power, they know how the system works. It’s empowerment. Thankfully grassroots, because the graduates come in with enthusiasm. A director may come with the experience, and it’s just marrying those two extremes together with perhaps proper line manager training to be that bridge. And how you gel those together. But as I say it’s a work in progress. It’s what I’m trying to work out at the moment.

Sue Black 

Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I think collaboration and communication are two things that have come up quite a bit really across the podcast series. And yeah, if we don’t work together and talk to each other, how are we going to solve any problems? So I think it’s kind of basic, but at the same time, we a lot of the time seem to be very siloed within organisations. So yeah, I think that there’s some really good points there. I think we can finish up now with some quickfire questions. If you’re ready, Martin, what’s your favorite thing about the foundation industries, and why?

Martin Griffin 

You’re asking a silly question as a geologist, because I trained as a geologist. Now I still do geology, but I think because it underpins everything we do as a society, and societies. Pardon the pun, and I think someone must have made this pun. They’re the building blocks of materials, how we grow as a society. We need them. And we use them. But it’s how we reuse them. We should recycled them because they’re so vital for our human existence. And in the past, we’ve probably taken them for granted. And we’re now living with the consequences of that. It’s just how we do use them. And reuse them.

Sue Black 

Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. Yeah, the foundation industry is a foundational and the building blocks of society. That’s great. Thank you. Next question. Which foundational material would you find it hardest to live without?

Martin Griffin 

Long think. I’ve been thinking about this. And I think paper because… You can’t see my bookcase behind me or my notes just spread across the floor. I just write things, scrawl notes on bits of paper. I read too many books I’m told. I don’t think I would survive in the rainforest. Because I’d be a very hypocritical person, because I probably chuck out too many books, or churn out books to read. And I think until I get an electronic tablet, then I think I’m going to be stuck with paper books. But then I do like retreating to a toilet and reading a book because there’s something nice about reading a book, or reading in bed. It’s just so nice to read.

Sue Black 

Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. And I find it hard, even I’ve got various electronic devices, to give up my pen and paper. I just have to have that. So I don’t know if that’s a generational thing. And maybe younger people don’t need that. But I definitely do. I find it very hard to, you know… how do I create my To Do lists if I don’t have a pen and paper to hand and stuff like that? So yeah, I agree with you there, definitely. Right. Last question. Which material is most like your personality and why?

Martin Griffin 

Another really difficult question, because I love all materials in different ways. What I thought about was probably a metal like iron. Because I think being autistic, that’s a stereotypical “Oh, you’ve got a rigid pattern”, like iron’s got a set lattice structure. But then ultimately, if I was was iron and I’m then mixed with another element, I’m made into steel. And that’s to me an anology with neurodiversity in working. With me being neurodivergent working a neurotypical person, we are made stronger by working together to come up with a better solution for a client, or tackling a problem like an EDI problem. I can’t solve all those problems on my own. So it just needs diverse minds, and a steel is ultimately stronger than an iron by itself. So that’s why I think iron.

Sue Black 

Great answer. Thank you very much. And yeah, absolutely. It’s all about working together, today, which is great. Well, Martin, thanks very much for joining us today. It’s been a fascinating discussion. And yeah, that’s the end of our episode with you. So thanks very much, Martin.

Sue Black 

Thank you very much.

Sue Black

Thank you for joining us for this Equity Edge episode.

Jo Stansfield

This Podcast can be found on our website www.transfire-hub.org/podcast and is also available on all good podcast channels.

Sue Black

And Please don’t forget to follow TransFIRe Hub on X and LinkedIN.  See you next time!