New Zealand has been my permanent home for the past six years, and I travel to Japan regularly for business. In that time I have become involved with Autism New Zealand, where I sit on the community advisory group. Working across both countries, I have a natural interest in how each accommodates people who are autistic, have ADHD or have other neurodivergent conditions.

On 1 July 2026, Japan raised the share of a private company's workforce that must be filled by people with a certified disability from 2.5% to 2.7%. Japan recognises three categories of disability for this purpose, physical, intellectual and mental, and each has its own certificate. The mental category (精神障害) covers mental health conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, and it is also where Japan places autism, ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions, which the law groups together as developmental disabilities (発達障害). An autistic person who also has an intellectual disability may hold the intellectual disability certificate instead. New Zealand has no quota at all. That difference in language, where Japan files neurodivergent people under mental disability and much of the New Zealand community rejects the word disability altogether, is the first thing worth examining, and the next section looks at it.

I wanted to explore two questions. The first is whether a quota creates genuine inclusion, or simply a legal obligation that employers meet on paper. The second is what enterprise technology employers in both countries are doing beyond the law, and which accommodations are actually helping neurodivergent people into work, keeping them there and giving them a career they find fulfilling.

A note on language

In New Zealand, many autistic people and people with ADHD do not describe themselves as disabled. A diagnosis is accepted, but the common preference is identity-first: I am autistic, rather than I have autism. The second form reads as a label someone carries, and the first as a description of who they are. This piece uses identity-first language and the word neurodivergent.

Rejecting the label does not remove the stigma. In the 2022 New Zealand Workplace Diversity Survey, 63% of respondents who identified as neurodivergent said their organisation did not know, and around a third said their condition had held back their career. The pressure falls hardest on people who do not match an expectation of what autism looks like. Autism New Zealand does not use the terms high-functioning and low-functioning, which it regards as inaccurate and harmful, and prefers to describe the level of support a person needs. In either country, an autistic engineer with low support needs is often the person most likely to stay quiet.

Japan's system runs the other way. The quota counts certificates rather than diagnoses, so an autistic employee counts only if they hold a mental health and welfare certificate (精神障害者保健福祉手帳). In other words, inclusion through the quota requires a person to accept a disability label in writing.

Many do not. A 2016 health ministry survey estimated that around 481,000 people in Japan had been diagnosed with a developmental condition, and only 22.5% of them held that certificate. Labour bureau guidance describes the choice candidates face. They can work open (オープン就労), disclosing a condition and gaining accommodation, or closed (クローズ就労), working on the same terms as everyone else and expecting little support. For an enterprise technology employer, this means much of the neurodivergent talent in its candidate pool is invisible to the quota, and will stay that way unless the workplace gives people a reason to be open.

The cost of staying closed shows up in retention. A JEED survey of job seekers with developmental conditions found that 58.8% had not disclosed at their previous employer, mainly because they did not want people to know, or feared worse pay or not being kept on. More than 40% had left that job for reasons related to their condition. Tomoyuki Kimura of the Japan Research Institute describes the result as a cycle, in which people hide their condition, receive no accommodation and leave.

Japan's quota in brief

The quota has applied to private employers since 1976 and now covers any company with 37.5 or more staff. Only certificate holders count, and most part-time employees count as half a person. Employers with more than 100 staff that fall short pay a levy of ¥50,000 a month for each missing person. Separately, every employer has been required since 2016 to provide reasonable accommodation in recruitment and employment, and that duty does not depend on a certificate.

The headline numbers are records. More than 700,000 people with disabilities work in private companies, and a study for the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training argued that the quota has achieved real gains in employment. The detail is weaker.

  • Only 46% of companies met the quota in 2025, and 57% of those falling short employed nobody with a disability at all.
  • Research by JEED, the government employment agency, found that 49.3% of people with mental health conditions, the category autistic employees are counted under, were still in their job after a year. The main reasons for leaving were workplace relationships, fatigue and worsening symptoms.
  • Groups can meet the quota through certified special subsidiaries, which employed around 46,000 people in 2023, often in routine work away from head office.
  • A sector of employment proxy businesses places disabled employees on indoor farms on behalf of client companies. Disability organisations call it segregated employment, and the Diet has asked the government to discourage it.

A JEED employer survey released in March 2026 summarises the problem. 88.8% of companies said meeting the rate was a priority, but only 33.5% aimed for disabled employees to contribute to core business.

New Zealand: no quota, and the results so far

New Zealand relies on the Human Rights Act 1993, which prohibits disability discrimination in employment and expects employers to take reasonable measures to accommodate. The Act never uses the phrase reasonable accommodation, and a University of Otago doctoral thesis argues that the duty works as a defence to a claim rather than a positive obligation.

The outcomes are poor. In the June 2026 quarter, 36.4% of disabled New Zealanders aged 15 to 64 were employed, against 78.4% of non-disabled people, and the gap has not narrowed since the series began in 2017. The Accessibility for New Zealanders Bill, introduced in 2022, was criticised for creating committees without enforceable standards, and the government stopped work on it in August 2024.

Support outside the workplace has been unstable too. In March 2024, the then Ministry of Disabled People abruptly restricted what disabled people and carers could spend their flexible funding on. Those restrictions were formally reversed in March 2026, but the pressure has not eased. CCS Disability Action reported in May 2026 that eligibility had tightened and waiting lists for assessment and equipment had grown, Budget 2026 added no new money for disability services, and advocates continue to report individual support packages being reduced.

Much of the progress in New Zealand has come from outside government. Autism New Zealand runs employment support for autistic job seekers, including interview practice, job coaching and autism awareness training for their employers, and in 2022 adapted an evidence-based workplace guide for New Zealand employers. Altogether Autism provides a free national information service that includes resources on autism and the workplace.

Inside companies, it is now common for large corporates to run a neurodiversity network or committee, or to include neurodiversity in their diversity strategy alongside the gender, ethnicity and sexuality pillars that came first, either on its own or grouped with disability. Diversity Works New Zealand found that the share of people who said neurodiversity was an important issue for their organisation doubled from 12% in 2021 to 24% in 2022. A growing number of independent consultancies support that work. Human Fabric provides neuroinclusive leadership training, coaching for neurodivergent professionals and an accreditation for organisations across New Zealand and Australia. Remarkable Minds, an Auckland consultancy, combines one-to-one coaching for neurodivergent adults with workplace programmes, including its Neuro-Inclusion Pathways and Resilient Minds programmes for organisations.

The two countries cannot be compared directly, because New Zealand measures disability by survey while Japan counts certificates. What can be said is that one has a quota and the other does not, and neither has closed the gap.

Technology employers in Japan doing the work

The more convincing examples in Japan come from companies that hire neurodivergent people for technical work and then change how the work is organised.

The business case is strongest in enterprise technology. In IPA's 2025 survey, 85.1% of Japanese companies said they lacked the people to drive digital transformation, against 23.8% in the United States and 44.6% in Germany. ISC2 estimated a shortfall of around 110,000 cybersecurity professionals in Japan in 2023, and in 2024 there were 11.88 openings for every data scientist job seeker, against 1.25 across all occupations. Meanwhile, the Japan Research Institute notes that university graduates with developmental conditions are employed at a rate nearly 30 points below graduates overall.

Omron: hiring through a technical internship rather than interviews. In 2021 Omron began recruiting STEM graduates with what it calls unusual talent, deliberately putting little weight on interviews and most weight on how candidates handled a hard technical problem during a three-week internship. One intern, a graduate in advanced information studies with a developmental condition and exceptional programming ability, had failed to find a job because he could not sell himself at interview. He joined in April 2022. He wears earphones because of noise sensitivity, meets regularly with his manager, an occupational doctor, a counsellor and HR, and is given time to answer questions in meetings. Omron reports that his work arrives faster than expected and at very high quality, and the programme has since grown to seven job categories and a Kyoto council of local employers.

JGC Parallel Technologies: a fully remote IT team designed around sensory needs. The JGC group set up this IT subsidiary in Yokohama in 2021, and around 90% of its 37 employees have developmental or mental health conditions. Because of sensitivity to commuting, crowds, light and sound, everyone works remotely. Tasks are assigned individually rather than to teams, and the company chooses work that is important but not urgent so people can set their own pace. It is a separate subsidiary, the model critics of the quota worry about, but its work is IT the group depends on rather than routine tasks.

Marui Group: structured training before placement and ongoing support after it. The retailer puts neurodivergent hires through a structured training period so both sides understand their strengths and needs before a role is chosen, and new hires are often trained by autistic colleagues. One trainer, who is sensitive to sound and finds phone calls difficult, told NHK that his work became stable once he had colleagues who understood him. Marui supports both the employee and their co-workers after placement, and says this is why people stay longer.

Persol Neuro Dive: training and placement for AI and data roles. Persol's Neuro Dive centres prepare neurodivergent people for advanced IT work in AI, machine learning and data science, and have placed more than 90 people since 2019, mostly in data analysis and AI engineering.

The Neurodiversity Management Research Group: employers sharing practice. In 2024 the Japan Research Institute formed a neurodiversity management research group with SCSK, TIS, Seven Bank and others, focused on putting neurodivergent talent to work in advanced IT, and it has since been joined by Fujitsu, Sysmex and others. The institute estimates that around one in ten people in Japan has a developmental condition, and its researchers have published a running series on company practice in Forbes Japan, Toyo Keizai and Diamond. In 2025 it began piloting an IT work experience programme for people with developmental conditions.

Job redesign: separating technical work from coordination. Analysing technical assessment work on IT systems at member companies, the group found that the main barrier was not the technical work but the coordination and negotiation attached to it. At one company, separating the technical role from the coordination role, and allowing remote attendance at meetings the person was not leading, cut the share of the work likely to hold back a neurodivergent employee from 35% to 6%. Managers at both companies involved said they would consider hiring on that basis.

SoftBank: Short Time Work for people who cannot work long hours. Since 2016 SoftBank's Short Time Work has let people whose condition rules out long hours work under 20 hours a week. More than 230 companies have joined the alliance it set up, and the law began counting some of these roles in 2024.

Professor Yuji Umenaga of Waseda University makes the practical point that people with the same diagnosis can have very different strengths and needs. He notes that more Japanese companies now adjust the work itself, for example by allowing people who find team interaction difficult to communicate by email.

Keita Suzuki, who co-founded the neurodiversity employment specialist Kaien, makes the point well. He compares a conventional organisation to a brick wall, which assumes every piece is the same shape, and argues that a wall built from stones of different shapes can be the more stable of the two.

Technology employers in New Zealand

Without a quota, the New Zealand examples are voluntary, and the better ones were designed with neurodivergent staff rather than for them.

Xero: workplace changes led by its neurodiversity employee group. The accounting software company built its approach with its neurodiversity employee resource group. The result was quiet spaces in every office, noise-cancelling headphones, and fixed desks for people who find hot-desking difficult, along with resource libraries and external speakers for everyone else. Its head of diversity has stressed that resources only matter if managers are given time to use them. In an internal survey, 88% of respondents said Xero met or exceeded their expectations on neuro-inclusion.

SAP: the Autism at Work programme in New Zealand. SAP made New Zealand the eleventh country for its Autism at Work programme, which replaces the standard interview with an extended assessment and supports people into roles across finance, development and project management.

NZ Police: analyst roles created with Autism New Zealand. In 2022 the police financial crime group advertised three analyst roles open only to autistic applicants, in partnership with Autism New Zealand, to remove the barriers its usual process created.

Foodstuffs North Island: autistic technology consultants placed through Auticon. Auticon, an international IT consultancy that employs autistic adults as technology consultants, places its consultants inside client teams with the support of trained job coaches. Foodstuffs North Island brought Auticon in as part of its diversity and inclusion strategy, starting with neuro-inclusion training for the teams involved. One Auticon consultant now works in a technical data engineering role in the Foodstuffs data and analytics team, a role he has said he could not have secured on his own, and he built a new system in his first week.

None of these employers required a formal diagnosis or certificate before making accommodations. The internal programmes relied on employees coming forward, often through employee resource groups and internal communications, while Auticon and Autism New Zealand worked with employers from outside to design the roles and the support around the people being hired.

What hiring managers can do

Most international enterprise technology companies in Japan run lean subsidiaries, and many now sit above the 37.5-employee threshold. The quota will be met or missed in a handful of hires, and how those hires are made matters more than the arithmetic. Little of what works costs much.

  1. Ask every candidate what they need to interview well. Japanese guidance already expects candidates to raise needs before an interview and employers to discuss them, so make the question routine rather than a disclosure.
  2. Test the work, not the pitch. Omron and SAP both moved weight from the interview to a work trial or extended assessment. For engineering and data roles, a take-home problem or paid trial tells you more than a panel.
  3. Offer more than one format. Questions sent in advance, written answers, camera-off video and extra time all remove noise from the assessment.
  4. Fix the environment once. Quiet space, noise-cancelling headphones, a fixed desk and remote days help neurodivergent staff and almost everyone else.
  5. Make hours flexible from the start. JEED found that people with mental health conditions who started on 20 to 30 hours a week stayed longest, and many later moved to full time.
  6. Give managers time and a structure. Regular one-to-ones, written instructions and a named point of contact address the two main reasons people leave, which are relationships and fatigue.
  7. Let neurodivergent staff shape the policy. Xero's most useful changes came from its own employee group.

None of this depends on a certificate, and in Japan it is what gives people a reason to work open rather than closed. The quota has risen steadily and is likely to rise again. The employers who meet it without paying their way there will be the ones that made accommodation part of how they hire, and those are the clients I would most like to be introducing candidates to.

Sources

Japan: the quota and the certificate
Japan: outcomes and criticism
Japan: employers
New Zealand