Somewhere inside a council, a woman whose job was to assess support applications for children with additional needs was given an instruction. ‘Turn down 98 out of every 100.’
Jess Rad heard that first-hand, from an advocate she paid to help her fight for her own daughter. It took Jess three attempts to secure an EHCP, the legal document that guarantees a child support at school. She did it alone, papers covering the floor, a process she compares to writing a dissertation on a topic nobody would choose. She calls the system a sieve: it filters for whoever has the tenacity, the time, the energy, the money, English as a first language. The privilege, in other words, to keep going.
I went into this conversation with a theory. I have watched AI arrive on both sides of that fight, systems processing applications on one side, exhausted parents using AI to write better appeals on the other, and I asked Jess whether AI is getting between families and fairness.
She stopped me in my tracks. It is not AI turning them down, she said. It is people. These statistics existed long before AI. The systems are underfunded, and they were built by people with no lived experience of what they administer. Her point, borrowing from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is that you need diverse experience in all the places decisions are being made. If parent carers had built these systems, they would not work the way they do, she says.
Jess is the founder of The WomenHood, a gender equity and neuroinclusion business she has run for seven years, helping organisations close gaps and boost allyship. She is a national award-winning keynote speaker with a 100% NPS score, and her strapline says it all:
Outspoken about the unspoken.
Before that she spent 12 years in film and TV with Disney, the BBC and 20th Century Fox, blowing up caravans with Richard Hammond along the way, until motherhood met a workplace with no flexibility and she built something better.
When I asked her where she sits on the AI spectrum, she surprised me: an eight out of ten. Her reasoning is one of the most compelling cases for AI I have heard on this show. A neurodivergent brain has what she calls a spiky profile, effortless brilliance at some things, real difficulty with others. Anything that lifts the weight of the difficult parts creates room for the brilliance. In her words: I’m game for it. I’m here for it.
We also get into the one percent change that shifted how men became allies at Depop. Why these conversations must stop being opt-in, and what it took to be diagnosed autistic and ADHD as an adult, in a world where the diagnostic criteria were built around white males.
Her line of the episode: ‘I don’t want my daughter to grow up feeling any shame for who she is. I just refuse that.’
Where in your organisation are decisions being made by people, or systems, with no lived experience of what they decide? And who is carrying the load in the meantime?
The companion article will be published in the next few days.
Listen in and stay sovereign.
