Judy Singer Gets Her Dues

Leadership has long been weighted towards those who mimic their inherited paradigm. We often say, “you can’t be what you can’t see” and so breakthrough leadership, bucking the trend of white machismo, is often a case of the chicken and the egg: what comes first? However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this trend does not result from the absence of leaders from the space, but an absence of their recognition. Dr Grunya Sukhareva, the Jewish doctor who outlined the same characteristics of Autism in her 1928 paper as we see today in the DSM-V, conceded her discovery to the better-known Drs Kanner and Asperger.

Similarly, Judy Singer, the Hungarian Jewish refugee to Australia, seemingly conceded the value of her seminal work defining “Neurodiversity” as a new minority rights movement in the late 1990s to the academic mainstream who have since continually misrepresented and poorly attributed her work.

Singer’s work sparked a new industry, a plethora of consultancies, speakers, conferences, podcasts, literature and documentaries. It is somewhat galling, therefore, that she lives in public housing, having to generate fund raisers to pay for medical treatment in her 70s. Judy’s life, as a single parent of a disabled daughter, did not afford her the cognitive space for developing her insights into an advanced degree or international consultancy.

Community Leadership

Singer dedicated herself to activism, as a Parents and Citizens Association for her local school, as the founder of support groups for parents of Autistic children and indeed children of Autistic parents. Singer founded and participated in many online Autistic Self-Advocacy communities, therein she developed her ideas which became her Bachelor’s thesis and eventually her book.

In community leadership, she developed a reflexive and stoical approach to her life’s work, in which she consistently argues against the superpower narrative. “Nature,” she says, “is red in tooth and claw, it is not benign.” While this may seem to undermine the current fashion of neurodiversity, it is instead a cornerstone of inclusion: acceptance should not be predicated on bringing something extra and marketable to the table, it should be a given in any civil society that we accept ourselves and each other as we are: beautiful, diverse, flawed and chaotic.

Academic Accolades

Since 2017, Singer’s work has seen something of a resurgence, an acknowledgement, as neurodivergent scholars have themselves sought to uncover the sources of the work through the lens of critical disability studies, which has propelled Singer back into the narrative just as neurodiversity becomes a marketplace of worth.

Fantastic timing then, that in 2023 Birkbeck College, University of London, choose to acknowledge her contribution to science and knowledge by awarding her Fellowship. This was followed by an event with the University of Cambridge where Professor Simon Baron Cohen provided an audience for her concepts at Trinity College. She has leapfrogged the traditional route to academic acknowledgement both in the enormity of her contribution, but also now in being recognized at this level.

Lessons For Leadership

What lesson does this teach us about leadership? In Singer’s story we see the dominance of US and UK academics in shaping the literature. We see magnified the experience of many women – forced to chose between ambition and caring roles, we are thwarted just at the life stage in which we should be gaining momentum. For so many of us, our ideas then wither on the vine. However, we also see a resurgence in women’s later years, when our children are grown, yet which can be hard to mobilise and may not lead to remuneration.

Singer is still expected to speak for free, or for rates below her market value. Let us hope that her latest accolade, “Fellow of the University of London,” brings her the international speaking fees she richly deserves and perhaps acknowledgement from her alma mater, the University of Technology, Sydney. If you work in this field, consider buying her book, contributing to her crowd-funded honorarium and make sure you reference her appropriately.

Ethical Leadership

Leadership is a dynamic conversation between those who lead and those who follow. Who we chose as our leaders is a reflection of the maturity of the community itself. Singer’s commitment to remaining engaged in dialogue, even with those whose views oppose her own, is one of the many reasons she deserves her unofficial role as the Grand Dame of Neurodiversity. Singer is a believer in dialectic exchange, that conflict is not abuse, and that by leaning into our differences we can create the impetus for change.

Though the value of her insights resembles the proverbial cream rising to the top, her acclaim is also the diligent work of an ethical community, who pass credit to where it is due, and do not seek to repackage ideas as their own. Neurodivergent people can be annoyingly wedded to justice, and whilst this is not always comfortable, it means we are more likely to uplift our actual leaders, than defer to those who wade in with the most power and resources after popularity is established. And this, is a lesson from which the whole business and academic communities could learn.