Women Who Have Contributed to the Neurodiverse Community

In honor of Women’s History Month, we wanted to highlight just a few of the trailblazing women from history who have had an impact on the neurodiverse community.

Judy Singer
Judy Singer is an Australian sociologist who is commonly credited with coining the term neurodiversity. She is quoted defining neurodiversity in 2020 as “a state of nature to be respected, an analytical tool for examining social issues, and an argument for the conservation and facilitation of human diversity” on a website titled Neurodiversity Hub. Singer was noted to have a short career due to her need to take care of her child with autism in an article written by Nancy Doyle for Forbes. She discusses on her blog how neurodiversity is not a scientific term, but rather a political term as it was meant to fall under the term intersectionality, or the intersections of gender, class, race, and disability.

Dr. Grunya Sukhareva
Dr. Grunya Sukhareva was a young doctor at a Moscow clinic who utilized the term of autistic tendencies when autistic was a new term in psychiatry. She found six boys to have autistic tendencies that she would go on to describe similarly to how autism is described in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Sukhareva’s work on these boys was one of many that were overlooked in the composition of the DSM-III as noted by the Spectrum News article written by Lina Zeldovich. Her descriptions of the boys’ symptoms were simplified so that those with lesser education on psychological disorders could easily understand the symptoms. Sukhareva placed significant emphasis on the presence of sensory abnormalities in the criteria for having autism, which was noted in an article by Annio Posar and Paola Visconti in the Journal of Pediatric Neurosciences. Her lack of recognition of her contributions was thought to be due to her article being written in Russian and then translated to German with a misspelling of her name. Her findings were then published around 70 years later in English according to the Forbes author Nancy Doyle.

Dr. Esther Thelen
Dr. Esther Thelen was referred to as a developmental psychologist in the article by Nancy Doyle for Forbes. Her interest in behaviors started when she took a graduate course on animal behaviors, as noted by the Indiana University Bloomington, as she started a graduate program in zoology. Her focus was in infants and she noted some of the developmental milestones needed to be met on a scale of normal development. In her research, she was noted for recognizing the complex relationship between the infants' development and their environment as seen in the Forbes article and in her journal article titled “Dynamic Systems Theory and the Complexity of Change.” Her work highlighted that there are multiple factors that contribute to the development of the infant. This plays a large role in determining the criteria for various disorders to this day.

Overall, all of these women made significant contributions to the neurodiverse community as setting the baselines for what are now diagnosable disorders. It is important to recognize the contributions of these women as they are often overlooked when credit is given to those who contribute to the neurodiverse community.