>I'm not coercing anyone to go to lunch with me, so I'm not really sure what your point is here. If you are in a position to influence a promotion, then an inv

>I'm not coercing anyone to go to lunch with me, so I'm not really sure what your point is here. If you are in a position to influence a promotion, then an invitation to lunch is not simply an invitation to lunch. I would hope that you would be involved, either as a peer or a manager, since you come across generally as pro diversity. The thing is, #neurodiverse message boards are full of posts like "My manager has asked me to go to lunch and I am terrified. What do I do?" Their fear is that if they don't go, they will be dismissed as not a team player, but if they do go, they may exhibit behaviors that uneducated NTs find disturbing. Many neurodiverse will just mask up and push through it, and many of us are effective at that. The right thing, of course, is to communicate (I wrote "have a conversation" and deleted it, because Autism) but many NDs don't have access to such support systems to even get the advice. If they are on a #nd channel, then we can help them. So I'd ask you to consider that, unless you have absolutely no power in your organization, then yes, asking someone to lunch is a non-neutral decision ("coercion" is too strong a word) for an ND person that carries risks and stress. I'm not asking you to stop having lunch with people. I'm asking you to consider ways to interact with ND people and to get familiar with the challenges ND people face.