Neurodiversity – there is no average person!
On Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) 2021 let us consider why we need to stop designing for the mythical average man.
I have been reading some interesting articles about the basis of everyday design and how our cities have been built for 6 feet men. Designing for the average seemed to make sense at one level but in reality, means it works for almost nobody.
The world’s average person described by National Geographic nearly 10 years ago talked about being a male, Han Chinese, speaking Mandarin, and right-handed. As a 5-foot 2 inch Welsh, English-speaking, the right-handed woman I am not average, and will never be or want to be. As a consequence of this, I have spent my life standing on tiptoes to get to reach the top of cupboards and needing to use a cushion to raise myself to the height of an average table leaving my feet dangling like a 3-year old. My family is certainly not average either we have left-handers, right-handers, and ambidextrous people, short, tall, and everywhere in between.
Bailey’s experiment from 1982 took 4063 males selected at random and measured to see how well they conformed to the known averages for the population. The first measurement was of standing height. Out of the original sample, only 26% were found to be close to the average. All those who were not average were sent home and the experiment continued through 10 measures. Next was the chest circumference and it was found that only 302 or 7% of this group were of both average height and chest measurement. By the time the experimenters got to the tenth set of measurements only 2 subjects were left in the sample and after the tenth measurement, there were none left! In other words, the average person was a myth.
I have just become a grandma again (I hear you saying to yourself she is too young(!!) (just to let you know – he is a beautiful grandson). It made me think of how we consider developmental milestones. We accept that two children one walking at 9 months and one at 15 months are both developing within a range considered typical despite a 6 months differential.
But we understand there is variation in child development. We accept that some children will crawl and some will move commando style and some not at all. We respect deviation. However, once we move to school, we suddenly forget this variation and deviation in our cognitive, motor, language, and processing skills and expect children of varying ages to all learn the same content and at the same pace despite potentially being 11 months difference between one child and another. A number of research papers over the years have concluded that children all starting at school at the same time despite has an impact on educational performance. Teaching to the average child doesn’t seem to be a great idea.
What does the mean really mean?
It depends on sampling and often we have created biases in our conclusions. We know from Caroline Criado Perez’s excellent book that the design and delivery of products and services have often been skewed for gender. Why do we keep considering one bell curve to be representative of us all when often we clearly have missing information constructing it. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life published in 1995 was heavily criticized at the time for some of its sweeping conclusions relating to using IQ as a predictive measure. ‘Intelligence’ cannot and should not be reduced to a single number.
In the workplace, we have typical ways of recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding that suits a particular shape of a person. This person usually benefits most if they are a good oral communicator, with good short-term working memory (you need to be able to remember the questions being asked and are often frowned upon if you are taking notes in an interview) and with good literacy and digital skills (to write your CV). Alternatively, you need to be able to have someone else doing this for you).
This approach may exclude those at the margins of society wanting to apply for jobs with low literacy levels such as the 1 in 2 people leaving prison thought to be functionally illiterate.
It can exclude the 9% of households in the UK that do not have home access to a laptop, desktop PC, or tablet and so may find it harder to write a CV on their smartphone.
It also may exclude 7.5% of people who may have a developmental language disorder where understanding and speaking may be more challenging.
Neurodiversity- the rationale for taking a person-centered approach
This is despite some of these people may ironically be a perfect fit for the job!
When we use terms like neurotypical and neurodivergent, we need to ask what are we diverging from? ‘Typical’ is a social construct and dependent on the place and people you are with.
We expect people to conform to a mythical ‘mean’ because we think this is the most efficient. But how accessible is this in reality?
Neurodiversity language I believe should be about inclusion but often ends up talking about deviation and divergence from others’ expectations.
We even use terms such as marginalized and mainstream!
Because we don’t embrace universal and inclusive design in society the result is that many of us are forced to shrink, squeeze or pretend to change our shape as much as we can to fit in.
We learn to camouflage how we feel and pretend to be like the others around us who sit in the hallowed middle ground. We don’t ask for clarification or repetition when we don’t understand what someone has said. We laugh at jokes we don’t quite get (a little late and for a little too long); we accept that it will take us a little longer to do a task and take the work home with us to compensate for this; we don’t reveal we are different, that we feel different, and we think differently because the average person may not want to hear they may need to adapt or adjust what they do.
Globally we are wonderfully different and what is neurotypical ( for height) in Ukraine will be neurodivergent in the Philippines for example.
On this day let us stand up, sit down, or lie down, shout out, sing or write it down how we need to ensure accessibility is for all.
Let us stop the need for retrofitting and having to put adjustments in place as an afterthought and consider universal design principles as the starting point.
As Maya Angelou said: “If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”
Amanda is a passionate campaigner for neurodiversity who wants to make the world a fairer place to ensure her neurodivergent children and grandchildren along with others can all show their talents and skills and be the best they can be.
She is also the CEO for Do-IT Solutions– a tech-for-good company that has developed person-centered screening tools that help each person to describe themselves and gain the support they require in education and employment.
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