Why Late-Diagnosed Autistic Women Copy Others: Understanding the Copying Instinct

Some women are diagnosed early, others decades later, yet both can grow up without room to know themselves. Diagnosis alone never guaranteed identity. Many were taught to perform a version of acceptable womanhood before they ever learned their own cadence.

I rarely trust people who have never taken themselves seriously. People who avoid their own interior world often cling to others for direction. They borrow tone, rhythm, conviction. Not because they are malicious, but because self-avoidance always seeks a host. And proximity to someone grounded feels like safety when you have never built that grounding yourself.

They don’t always gravitate toward me because they like me. Sometimes it’s because I make sense of things they’ve never had language for. They study how I speak, how I phrase the in-between, how I move through certainty without apology the way my grandmother raised me to. They think it’s admiration, maybe even connection. But I’ve learned to feel the difference between being seen and being studied.

It starts small. A phrase I’ve used and translated from one of my indigenous languages to englih for for years shows up in someone else’s caption. A turn of tone I’ve crafted through silence and repetition echoes back to me, slightly off. The cadence is mine, but the person wearing it doesn’t understand where it came from.

They mimic it because it feels like authority, like something they wish they could hold or something they wish their caregivers taught them. I used to take that as flattery, until I noticed how empty it feels to watch someone wear your voice while you stand voiceless beside them. Then other people would find me after they have found them and realise this person was borrowing my words and cadence.

That’s the part no one warns you about when you are raised african and unmasked, unpathologised, how exposure makes people think you are replicable.

For late-diagnosed autistic women, unmasking isn’t just about peeling back layers. It’s about realizing the person underneath has always been a pattern people copy to feel whole. After decades of masking, of performing safety for other people’s comfort, you finally show the truth of yourself… and someone else wears it.

I think often about what masking taught us, that safety was performance, that adaptation was survival. It rewired our instincts until copying became both shield and language. Hull and colleagues called it social camouflaging, but it’s deeper than mimicry of gesture or speech. It’s the kind of adaptation that turns personality into costume. When you live like that long enough, even freedom becomes a threat. You unmask only to realize the world has been watching closely, waiting to take the script.

The irony is unbearable: to spend part of your life in the west hiding and the other part being impersonated. Diagnosis was supposed to return authenticity, not multiply your reflections. Yet in my work with late-diagnosed autistic women, I’ve seen this pattern over and over—the women who find me, study me, and begin to sound like me. It’s rarely intentional. They don’t know where the line is between inspiration and identity absorption because they were never given permission to build one. Masking didn’t end with diagnosis; it evolved.

That’s the quiet tragedy of the copying instinct. Many late diagnosed women learned to survive by becoming who others needed, and now, even in recovery, people reach for us to become who they need.

Unmasking was supposed to feel like freedom. Sometimes it just feels like being worn.

Mimicry in Therapy: Why Autistic Women Mirror Their Therapists (And How to Stop)

When I speak with and work with late-diagnosed autistic women, I often notice the same quiet panic in their language, the fear that even their healing is performative.

They don’t just repeat stories of masking at work or in relationships; they describe carrying that same reflex into therapy, into friendship, into self-discovery. They mimic the very people trying to help them.

In their writing, I can hear my phrasing. In their sessions, they echo the structure of my thoughts. It isn’t theft, it’s survival. Mimicry is the only language many of them were ever fluent in. After years of hiding behind borrowed gestures, they step into recovery and reach instinctively for the next available model of safety: me, a therapist, a friend, a community figure. It’s the continuation of the same neural script—copying as a form of belonging.

Developmental Trauma in Late-Diagnosed Women: How Childhood Masking Prevents Identity Formation

To understand this pattern, you have to look backward. Most late-diagnosed autistic women were socialized without ever having stable access to selfhood.

From the start, the world treated their difference as defect. No one mirrored back that their way of being was acceptable. Without that reflection, they built identity through observation and replication—studying others for cues on how to exist.

Every developmental stage that should have allowed play, trial, and harmless error was replaced with correction. Childhood became rehearsal. Adolescence became damage control. By the time adulthood arrived, the scaffolding of authenticity had never been built.

A neurotypical child learns who they are through contrast and consequence testing boundaries, changing styles, failing publicly, and learning from the feedback that love remains. Autistic girls often learn the opposite: that missteps invite ridicule, that tone or eye contact misjudged will be punished, that being wrong socially carries real cost. Mimicry becomes safer than failure.

That’s how identity fractures long before diagnosis. For many, there was no period of safe becoming, no space to experiment without punishment. So they grew into women fluent in performance but foreign to themselves.

When diagnosis finally arrives, it doesn’t rebuild those missing years. It gives context, not construction. You can understand why you masked, but that doesn’t hand you the childhood you lost learning to mask. The diagnosis names the wound; it doesn’t restore the developmental process that would have taught you who you are.

I’ve met women in their forties who have never asked themselves what they actually enjoy. They can tell you who they’ve been expected to be in every room, but not what they want when no one’s watching. Their sense of self feels like an unfinished sentence.

Even in spaces meant for liberation—support groups, advocacy circles, social media communities—many find themselves performing the same pattern. They unmask publicly but rebuild a new mask shaped like whoever seems most confident. A therapist’s cadence. A mentor’s tone. A neurodivergent advocate’s vocabulary. They copy, hoping it will turn into identity.

This is the mimicry paradox: the attempt to heal through the very behavior that caused the wound. It’s not vanity or malice—it’s neurological reflex. After decades of survival through imitation, autonomy feels foreign. The body associates authenticity with danger. So even the act of recovery can become another form of camouflage.

Diagnosis may explain why the pattern exists, but it doesn’t undo the circuitry that created it. Adulthood doesn’t automatically grant selfhood; it only reveals how long it was deferred.

The hardest part of working with these women isn’t helping them unmask. It’s convincing them that there’s a person underneath worth meeting—and that she doesn’t have to sound like anyone else

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Masking vs. Mirroring: Why Some Autistic Women Have No Stable Sense of Self

There’s a moment in every conversation with a late-diagnosed autistic woman when I can tell the difference between masking and mirroring.

Both look similar from the outside, carefully chosen words, softened tone, delayed self-reference, but the intention underneath is different.

Masking says: I know what to perform to stay safe.

Mirroring says: I don’t know who I am without reflection.

Masking is strategy. It’s calculated self-protection, an active adjustment of behavior to avoid punishment or rejection. Mirroring is survival shaped by absence. It’s what happens when you’ve never been reflected accurately enough to build a stable sense of self.

Many of the women I work with don’t realize they’re mirroring until they feel depleted. They leave a session and describe feeling both seen and hollow. The safety of recognition triggers the instinct to replicate—tone, phrasing, cadence. They absorb me not out of envy or malice, but because resonance feels like oxygen after a lifetime of social suffocation.

It’s not a performance; it’s osmosis.

That’s what years of misrecognition do. When you spend childhood contorting to avoid scrutiny, your nervous system learns that safety depends on symmetry, on reflecting back what others want to see. Eventually, even connection becomes mimicry.

I’ve seen it so often that I can anticipate the moment it happens. A woman will begin using my metaphors, my sentence rhythms, the same half-smile when explaining her boundaries. She’ll talk about her “anchor,” not realizing the word came from something I said weeks before. It isn’t flattery. It’s a nervous system repeating the conditions of survival.

Mirroring, for these women, is a form of delayed belonging. They’ve spent years misread, dismissed, and pathologized. So when they finally find someone who reflects back understanding, their bodies lunge toward it. They copy as a way to stay close, hoping that sameness will secure permanence.

But mirroring can’t build identity. It can only reproduce proximity.

That’s why some women, even after diagnosis, feel emptier the closer they get to authenticity. They were told to unmask, yet what emerges is an echo of whoever helped them remove the mask. The result isn’t autonomy—it’s an upgraded version of dependency.

The difference, I’ve learned, often lies in anchors.

Anchors are what keep identity from dissolving into reflection. They are the moments of early acceptance that told you, consciously or not, that you were real before you were understood. My grandmother was that anchor for me. She didn’t have the language for neurodivergence, but she had language for me. She didn’t translate me into something more acceptable; she treated my difference as matter-of-fact. Because of her, I grew up with a self to return to.

That’s what many late-diagnosed women never had: an origin point to come back to. Without anchors, they become relational chameleons—adapting to whoever offers understanding, mistaking reflection for recognition. The tragedy is that the world confuses this mimicry for empathy, when in truth it’s the residue of survival.

Belonging, for them, has always been conditional. They learned that safety requires imitation, not authenticity. And so, even in spaces built for freedom, they reach for mirrors instead of roots.

That’s why unmasking can feel like free fall. Without roots, every reflection feels like home until it isn’t.

The Anchor and the Mirror: When Your Autistic Clients Start Sounding Exactly Like You

There’s a quiet moment in therapy or consultation when I know it’s happened again. A client repeats my phrasing word for word, or structures their reflection with the same rhythm I use when untangling a thought.

It isn’t deliberate imitation. It’s the nervous system rehearsing safety. I watch it with both tenderness and caution. Because I know what it means—to borrow someone’s voice in the absence of your own.

For many late-diagnosed autistic women, mimicry doesn’t end at the threshold of therapy. It follows them in, disguised as progress. They echo my tone, my language, even my pauses, mistaking resonance for self-discovery. They think they’re finding their voice when they’re really borrowing mine. That’s the therapeutic paradox: helping someone find themselves when their coping mechanism is to become whoever helps them.

When I first began noticing this, it unsettled me. I worried about the ethics of influence. But over time I learned to see it as information, not failure. The mirroring tells me they feel safe enough to attach. It also tells me how fragile their identity boundaries still are. My task isn’t to stop the imitation—it’s to build a container strong enough that they no longer need it.

I can do that because I have an anchor.

My grandmother gave me one before I ever understood what it meant. She built identity relationally, not reactively. In her world, personhood wasn’t something you constructed through comparison—it was something you carried through language, ritual, and belonging. She taught me that selfhood could be communal without being dissolving. That difference could be recognized without apology.

That grounding is what lets me sit across from women who are still shape-shifting in the hope of being chosen. I can hold empathy without absorption because I know where I end and where I come from. That is the gift of cultural anchoring. It keeps you from mistaking sameness for safety.

Black matriarchal lineage taught me that individuality doesn’t have to be separation. It can exist within relation. The women who raised me didn’t build selfhood through opposition—they built it through continuity. I never had to perform to belong; I only had to exist within the rhythm of our shared language. That stability, born from community rather than conformity, is what so many late-diagnosed women were denied.

Without anchors, therapy becomes another mirror—one that reflects safety but doesn’t teach structure. With anchors, therapy can become a bridge to selfhood rather than another stage for performance.

I often think of my grandmother’s words when I see a client slipping into my cadence: Let them rest in your voice until they remember their own. It’s an act of patience, not panic. Because the goal isn’t to stop the echo—it’s to help them hear where it ends.

And when they do, something small but extraordinary happens. Their language begins to shift. Their metaphors become their own. Their tone changes shape, not to fit mine, but to fit them. That’s when I know the anchor has started to form.

How Autism Masking Erodes Identity: Nervous System Adaptation and Recovery

The hardest truth about working with late-diagnosed autistic women is that therapy can sometimes reinforce the very pattern it’s meant to undo.

When your survival has depended on mimicry, you will turn even healing into performance. You’ll study the person helping you and become them, mistaking that imitation for progress.

This is the paradox I sit with every week. My role is to guide women toward autonomy, yet some can only reach safety through imitation. They mirror the rhythm of my speech, adopt my boundaries as theirs, even quote my words back to me as evidence of self-understanding. It looks like growth. It feels like intimacy. But underneath, it’s still dependency dressed as insight.

To understand why this happens, you have to see what identity erosion looks like from the inside. Years of masking don’t just suppress expression—they rewrite the nervous system. They teach you that every relational dynamic must begin with adaptation. You learn to watch others’ faces for approval, to measure your tone against their comfort. By adulthood, it isn’t conscious anymore. It’s woven into the fabric of being.

Diagnosis brings awareness but not immunity. The reflex to mold yourself around others persists long after you’ve stopped wanting to. For many, it becomes the only way to connect. They are fluent in belonging through replication but not through self-expression.

In those moments, I can feel the weight of their effort. Their need to mirror isn’t manipulative; it’s devotional. They’re trying to stay safe in a world that has punished authenticity. The impulse to become me, or anyone who feels steady, is the echo of a lifetime spent building safety through resemblance.

My task is not to shame that instinct but to redirect it—to help them use imitation as a bridge, not a cage. That means creating boundaries that signal containment, not rejection. If they start quoting me, I might ask, “What part of that feels like you?” If they echo my metaphors, I’ll pause and ask what images come naturally to them. Small interventions, subtle invitations to shift from replication to authorship.

The goal isn’t to stop the mimicry immediately. It’s to transform it into self-definition—to turn repetition into reflection. Because for women who never had permission to experiment, mimicry can be the first stage of identity construction. The trick is helping them know when to step off the bridge.

Boundaries protect both sides. Without them, therapy or mentorship becomes a feedback loop of emotional fusion—where the client mistakes presence for possession and the practitioner begins to feel drained by the constant reflection of their own voice. Clear structure, scheduled pauses, written summaries, and explicit acknowledgment of progress help separate shared space from shared selfhood.

Over time, you can see the shift. They begin to speak with more certainty, less echo. Their tone develops contour. Their stories stop circling mine and start expanding outward. That’s when identity begins to solidify—not as an act of rebellion, but of emergence.

The work is delicate because mimicry isn’t just behavioral—it’s neurological. It is the body remembering how to survive. But survival is not the same as living. And the work of therapy, mentorship, or community isn’t to strip that instinct away—it’s to help women recognize that the self they were searching for doesn’t need to be performed to be real.

The danger of mimicry isn’t just that it hides identity. It’s that it offers belonging at the cost of becoming. And healing, at its most honest, must always move in the opposite direction.

Can Autistic Women Develop Authentic Identity After Mimicry? Healing and Selfhood

Mimicry doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It can also be a beginning—if we stop treating it as pathology and start seeing it as adaptation waiting to evolve.

For many late-diagnosed autistic women, imitation was never about deceit. It was language. It was survival. It was the only available method of connection in a world that punished difference and rewarded disguise.

If that’s the case, then the question isn’t how to erase mimicry but how to reframe it. What happens if we treat it as a developmental stage in identity reclamation rather than a flaw to correct?

When women who’ve spent their lives performing start echoing others in recovery, they’re showing readiness to attach. They’re saying, I trust you enough to try this on. The work, then, is to help them move from trying on to inhabiting—to translate borrowed reflection into lived expression. Mimicry becomes a bridge only when the person guiding them refuses to walk it for them.

Authenticity doesn’t emerge from exposure alone; it emerges from safety. Safety makes experimentation possible. And experimentation—the freedom to fail, to sound strange, to say something unrehearsed—is what builds a self. Most of these women never had that. Their lives were assessments disguised as interactions. Every sentence was a test. So the reclamation process must include permission to play again, to be wrong without penalty.

In that sense, healing after late diagnosis isn’t about stripping away masks; it’s about giving women the emotional room to build new skin. The difference between camouflage and creation is context: the same behaviors that once hid them can, in safety, reveal them. The same instinct that once copied others can now be used to curate, to integrate, to construct meaning through deliberate choice.

Community has a role in this too. Belonging doesn’t have to mean sameness. It can mean proximity without absorption—a rhythm of call and response rather than chorus. Healthy community reflects possibility, not template. It invites difference without demanding distortion.

When women are surrounded by models of authenticity, not performance, they start internalizing variety instead of hierarchy. They see that there isn’t one right way to be autistic, or woman, or alive. They learn that belonging can be circular—each person both reflecting and expanding what it means to be whole.

That’s what autistic identity reclamation looks like at its healthiest: not a return to some preexisting self, but the conscious assembly of one that can finally breathe. The goal isn’t to erase the instinct to mirror—it’s to choose what to reflect.

Every woman I’ve seen move through this process reaches a point where the imitation fades naturally, not because I asked her to stop, but because she no longer needs it. Her voice gains weight, her humor sharpens, her edges return. She begins to exist in motion, not performance.

Maybe that’s the truest form of healing after late diagnosis: learning that the fragments you borrowed from others were never proof of emptiness. They were proof of persistence. You survived by building with whatever material the world gave you. Now you get to rebuild with your own.

Through the mirror, what was once camouflage becomes creation.

Gender-Responsive Autism Screening: Why Girls Are Missed and How to Change It

The late-diagnosed women I meet are not anomalies. They are the predictable outcome of a system designed to notice distress in boys and discipline adaptation in girls.

When girls withdraw, imitate, or perform normalcy too well, professionals rarely ask what that performance costs them. They call it maturity. They call it coping. They call it quiet success.

That misreading builds a lost generation.

Most diagnostic frameworks were designed around externalized traits—disruption, rule-breaking, visible difference. But many autistic girls learned to survive through invisibility. Their success at imitation became their disappearance. By the time they’re finally diagnosed, often decades later, they’ve mastered every form of social masking except self-recognition.

If we want to prevent the next generation of mimicry and erasure, the solution isn’t awareness campaigns that glorify acceptance. It’s structural reform. Gender-responsive autism screening means re-evaluating what “functioning” looks like through a lens that includes cultural, linguistic, and emotional nuance. It means recognizing that burnout, eating disorders, anxiety, and “perfectionism” may be the visible debris of invisible masking.

Clinicians need to ask different questions—not just “Can she make eye contact?” but “At what cost?” Not “Does she socialize?” but “Who does she have to become to be allowed to?” These are diagnostic inquiries, not poetic ones. They change outcomes.

The same applies to racialized girls. Black autistic girls, for example, are often seen as defiant rather than distressed, precocious rather than perceptive. The cultural penalties for misreading their behavior are not theoretical—they are disciplinary, sometimes lifelong. Gender-responsive screening cannot exist without racial literacy. Because when clinicians don’t see race, they don’t see reality.

Policy must move past symbolic inclusion. Schools and healthcare systems need mandated training that distinguishes masking from adaptation, and adaptation from achievement. Therapists must be equipped to recognize when a client’s “insight” is actually echolalia in disguise. And communities must create peer-led spaces where women can experiment with identity without needing to mirror to belong.

Diagnosis should not arrive as an obituary for selfhood. It should arrive early enough to preserve the possibility of play.

The women who come through my work are often exhausted, but not hopeless. Their resilience is staggering. They are rebuilding selves from the shards of survival, proving daily that the ability to adapt is not the same as the inability to exist. But they shouldn’t have to. Their children shouldn’t have to.

A gender-responsive system would not wait for burnout to prove what a listening clinician could have heard in childhood. It would recognize masking as harm, not skill. It would see mimicry as a wound, not a performance. It would understand that invisibility is not success—it is abandonment with good manners.

If we fail to change how autism is recognized in girls and women, we will keep diagnosing ghosts—versions of people long gone from themselves by the time they are found.

The next generation deserves better than recovery. They deserve recognition.

How Gender and Whiteness Shape Autism Masking: The Hidden Cost of Compliance

1. Performance as Currency

White autistic women are disproportionately praised for compliance, politeness, and emotional caretaking—traits read as “feminine” and “agreeable.” From childhood, they are rewarded for social camouflage and punished for deviation.

This isn’t just individual conditioning; it’s structural reinforcement. Schools, workplaces, and therapy models often equate success with social fluency and emotional containment.

When a white autistic girl adapts quickly, she’s called mature. When she masks discomfort, she’s resilient. These compliments shape her identity long before diagnosis, teaching that value equals visibility control.

The cost of belonging is constant self-editing.

The societal impact here is double-edged: white autistic women are protected by whiteness—assumed capable, professional, articulate—but that protection depends on consistent conformity. Masking is rewarded so thoroughly it becomes indistinguishable from selfhood.

2. The White Feminine Ideal and the Autism Double Bind

Western femininity demands harmony, warmth, and intuitive empathy—traits autistic women are often told they lack, then overcompensate for through hyper-empathic performance.

White autistic women often internalize this as moral obligation: to manage tone, soothe discomfort, anticipate need. The performance of empathy becomes labor rather than instinct.

This cultural ideal is sustained by two institutions:

* Therapeutic culture, which frames regulation and emotional labor as personal responsibility.

* Workplace culture, which equates professionalism with neurotypical affect.

Society therefore rewards the white autistic woman not for authenticity, but for how convincingly she can simulate it.

The result: burnout looks like competence.

3. Autism and Social Capital: Why Whiteness Matters

White women’s mimicry is often read as charm, adaptability, or creativity.

Black and brown autistic women performing the same behaviors are more likely to be read as disingenuous, unstable, or “too much.”

Whiteness cushions the social consequences of masking. It offers plausible deniability when emotion spills over. It allows “quirky” to exist as an identity category.

This is why so much autism representation online centers on white women—it’s socially palatable. Their self-disclosure is read as vulnerability, not volatility.

But that same privilege keeps structural scrutiny shallow: when whiteness softens deviance, it hides systemic bias. The conversation stays at the level of personality (“we were misunderstood”) rather than politics (“who gets permission to be complex?”).

4. Therapeutic Implications

In therapy, white autistic women often enter with high narrative fluency—they can describe emotions articulately but struggle to feel them without performance. This can fool practitioners into assuming emotional integration that isn’t there.

Their whiteness can also create over-identification with therapists, who mirror back validation without challenging conformity.

Treatment may reinforce the social script rather than dismantle it: “assert boundaries,” “self-care,” “find balance”—advice that centers adjustment, not autonomy.

The structural impact: therapy reproduces the same social contract that delayed diagnosis—accommodation through imitation, not systemic critique.

5. Social Media and the Reinvention Loop

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok magnify these dynamics. White autistic women often become cultural translators of neurodivergence, their aesthetics aligning with algorithmic palatability: soft lighting, careful tone, soothing explanation.

The algorithm rewards digestible vulnerability. Their mimicry—of therapy language, of activist tone—earns visibility.

The consequence is subtle: social validation keeps them curating autism rather than living it. Representation becomes performance art, reinforcing the belief that to be believed, one must still perform acceptably.

6. Intersectional Contrast

For Black autistic women, the problem is not over-validation but disbelief. Their affective range is politicized: calm becomes “cold,” intensity becomes “aggressive.”

Where white autistic women are told to tone down for politeness, Black autistic women are told to soften for safety.

The societal impact diverges: white women disappear into over-acceptance; Black women are erased through over-scrutiny.

Both are forms of misrecognition—but whiteness hides the violence of its own praise.

7. Identity Reconstruction in Context

For white autistic women, post-diagnosis healing involves unlearning reward loops that equated agreeableness with worth. Authenticity feels selfish at first, even dangerous.

For racialized autistic women, it often involves reclaiming visibility—learning that assertion isn’t aggression, that volume isn’t violence.

Both paths require dismantling gendered conditioning, but one must also confront racial hierarchy.

That’s why autistic identity reconstruction cannot be apolitical. It has to include the question: Who gets to be complex and still be safe?

8. Reframing the Work

To address societal impact, practitioners and advocates must:

* Contextualize masking as social conditioning, not personal failure.

* Recognize how racialized gender norms determine diagnostic visibility.

* Teach selfhood through agency, not adjustment.

* Use therapy to disrupt mimicry’s reward system—help clients build internal validation that doesn’t rely on social approval.

Authenticity should not be another performance. It should be the quiet state that remains when no one is watching.

Reframing the Work Ahead

True reform demands a new diagnostic and therapeutic lens. Clinicians must see that what looks like competence may be collapse.

We need gender- and race-informed approaches that don’t just look for difference but understand the cost of sameness.

A gender-responsive system would stop congratulating women for disappearing. It would ask what their politeness conceals, what their calm protects, and what parts of them were lost in the transaction of acceptance.

Until then, every diagnosis of a late-diagnosed woman should come with an apology: for the years we mistook survival for adjustment, and for how perfectly she learned to disappear.

Identity Reconstruction Circle for Late-Diagnosed Women With Lovette Jallow

In December, I am opening a closed small-group session for late-diagnosed autistic women who want structured guidance rather than broad advice. This circle is designed for those who recognise themselves in this essay, especially the parts that touch on mimicry, identity loss, and the difficulty of knowing where you end and other people begin.

We will work through the mechanics of mimicry, how to recognise your own voice, and the difference between preference and performance. We will also look at how to rebuild autonomy after years of masking and how to navigate connection without absorption.

This space is intimate and guided. It is for women who want clarity, language, and grounded support while reconstructing a self they never had room to build.

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Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

In addition to writing, I work internationally as a neurodivergent inclusion strategist, keynote speaker, and consultant.

I help organizations move beyond surface-level diversity initiatives to create environments where neurodivergent, disabled, and marginalized individuals are genuinely supported.

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Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

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* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

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Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

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