Satomi Beyond Bias

When Experience Isn’t Enough I recently met Vanessa (name changed). She gave nearly 20 years to the United Nations.Field missions. Headquarters. Crisis response. Last year, her contract ended. She went home thinking: “I’ll land something soon.” After all, she was experienced. Respected. Highly mobile. She applied across the UN system. The very system she knew how to navigate. Her career coach encouraged her to keep applying. Six months in. Very few interviews. Funding cuts everywhere. Ten...

I’ve spent over 15 years in the world of Talent Acquisition . Across the private sector and the United Nations . I see patterns before people see outcomes. Right now, the pattern is brutal. UN and INGO professionals are exhausted. They’ve applied for dozens—sometimes hundreds—of roles. And nothing is moving. Not because they lack skills. But because the system they are applying into does not understand them . What Actually Happened When the Contracts Ended For many I work with, the loss...

I may not be popular for saying this. But in much of the disability and neurodiversity inclusion space, the challenge isn’t intention. It’s execution . Across Asia Pacific, I’ve seen the same pattern repeatedly: well-designed ideas fail because they don’t fit the cultural and operational reality organisations are working in. Context Matters in Asia Pacific In Japan and many Asian countries I’ve worked in, formal diagnosis and disclosure are far less common than in many Western contexts. This...