Autism inclusivity: we've got to talk about job descriptions
The excessive emphasis on social skills excludes potential autistic candidates qualified to bring innovative solutions to the job
From CASIO fx-991 user manual, wikimedia commons
I often pay attention to job descriptions for positions compatible with my educational background and experience. When you’re tenured, you lose interest and ability to evaluate possible job openings. However, if you are a freelancer or a sole proprietor business, you keep browsing. It’s an unstable life.
After I was diagnosed as autistic, I realized that all the job descriptions of compatible occupations, even the strictly academic ones, had a longer list of desired, preferential or mandatory social skills than actual professional skills. In fact, I am over-qualified, over-educated and over-experienced for most openings, but I lack something crucial: the mandatory social or inter-personal skills.
That’s the reality of autistic adults:
1) Much higher unemployment rates than the general population, controlling for educational background and cohort. Depending on how and what parameters are measured, unemployment rates among autistic adults usually range from 60-80%.
2) A much higher percentage of autistic adults is overqualified for the jobs they currently hold.
3) A high percentage of autistic adults gives up finding a job and retires on health-related benefits (disability).
4) Autism represents more disadvantage in job seeking and retention than any other intellectual, neurocognitive or physical disability.
5) The most significant factor in autistic unemployment and poor job retention is lack of understanding and support in employment settings.
There are several social skills training programs for autistic adults. The focus is mostly in providing tools for the autistic individuals to adopt appropriate behaviors, including how to use white lies. There is even a term for that: “soft skills”. In a nutshell, to promote and perfect the skill of camouflage, which is a set of behaviors autistic people develop to avoid being identified as different, or to “pass as” a neurotypical person. Camouflage represents a huge emotional burden and source of distress.
Even a few authors from neurodiversity organizations and movements submit to these strategies. There are several articles out there with “tips” for autistic people to dodge social games and pass as normal at the workplace.
Let’s take a look at a set of generic social skills for the workplace. Here is a list from the skill-building company Canover:
1. Managing relationships
2. Understanding the feelings of others
3. Cooperating with others
4. Great Attitude
5. Showing respect
6. Appropriate contact
7. Active Listening
These are all euphemisms for social games, whether ritualistic or perverse. In one way or another, they all involve supplying unacknowledged needs from a third (neurotypical) party. No matter how much we are “trained”, all our brain power (often greater than our colleagues’) makes us a pitiful, beta versions of an artificial intelligence algorithm. Any neurotypical child can beat us. We all tried and most of us failed epically.
Eric Bern offered an interesting model of social games on his famous book “Games People Play”. It was written in 1964 as transactional analysis approach to both functional and dysfunctional social interactions. Although transactional analysis did not evolve much, Bern’s contribution remains relevant. Of special interest to us are the social or mind games, which are sets of behaviors with an overt or explicit set of motivators and assumptions but concealing the actual drivers for the involved parties’ actions. Games substitute the true, concealed interaction, often with detrimental consequences to both parties.
Autistic people are not equipped to play mind games. We cannot learn the skills necessary to play these games games. We can map individuals’ non-verbal reactions and create scripted responses. However, in the end, “surviving” the game involves saying or denoting something that we don’t mean (deceptive behavior). At best, we can learn tricks to evade them. Eventually, we fall prey to them.
In their Ph.D. dissertation, Yuxian (2008) defined work related social skills and proposed a typology to classify them. According to them:
Social skill is becoming increasingly important in today's workplace because organizational structures are becoming flatter with more service-oriented positions. Strong social skill can facilitate interpersonal interactions, which can in turn lead to effective job outcomes.
They defined social skill as a learnable social behavior used to achieve social goals. They suggested it is a higher-order construct with three sub-factors: social presentation, social scanning, and social flexibility.
Doesn’t look great for us, autistic adults, does it? Not now, not in the foreseeable future.
If training autistic people to mimic behaviors that neurotypical individuals use automatically and skillfully is not a solution, what would improve autistic inclusivity? Instead of hiding, how about opening any conversation with the autistic identity? Once this is done, the burden of malicious social games falls back on its source. What is more important, it keeps the nature of unspoken rules exposed, dramatically affecting their chances of success.
But would this work? It would and it does: at least one study has shown that autistic adults who disclosed their ASD diagnosis to their employer were more than three times as likely to be employed than those who did not disclose it.
Are there risks in disclosing our autistic identities? Of course there are: there is a percentage of any group that is intolerant by nature and will actively discriminate against autistic individuals. However, even if our ASD identities are kept confidential, these people very quickly figure out that the autistic person is “weird”, a type of weird that they won’t tolerate. As noted before, if our autistic identity is disclosed from start, intolerant colleagues are at a disadvantage because the whole staff is informed about us. Their overt or covert discriminatory or invalidating behavior will be immediately exposed. And if the whole group shares the same prejudice, it will be a hell of an embarrassment when they finally get rid of us. Perhaps grounds for legal action. Maybe that’s the reason why full disclosure is associated with much higher job retention rates.
Full disclosure helps but only if the environment is legally bound to handle such full disclosure. Since ASD (autism spectrum disorder) became one of the recognized disabilities and, therefore, under the protection of the American Disability Act, autistic people have some level of protection, in theory. However, until inclusivity and accessibility procedures are incorporated into hiring protocols and job descriptions and evaluations, this protection is mostly formal.
Going back to Yuxian’s study about social skills at the workplace, there’s a difficult question that we must ask and aim for the most rigorously scientific answer: are we, autistic adults, an expensive redundancy in the workforce? In other words: do we, autistic adults, with our neural deficits and our neural surplus, bring something useful to society through our work?
That’s a tough question, isn’t it? Even those who would rather have us confined away from the public eyes or even euthanized, as I’ve frequently read after the Sandy Hook shooting, avoid asking this question with so many words. If the answer is “no”, than it puts us with all other disabled people: we are at least as productive as our neurotypical colleagues and the investment and regulations to ensure our inclusion are part of the social contract since disability protection legislation started to be adopted by several countries. If the answer is “yes” - yes, we, neurodiverse individuals bring something different and positive to professional tasks -, we must assume that the resistance to integrate us stem from fear of the “other” or, worse, fear of the “better”.
Both attitudes are detrimental to all involved: yes, we can be embarrassing to be around, especially in environments that crystalized their perverse social games. It is enough to have one person not playing the social game to totally disrupt it. After all, the functionality of the game depends on a pact of silence: we all pretend there is no game. Autistic people will burst this hypocritical pact almost immediately by not understanding anything.
We should then ask ourselves: what does society have to gain by keeping those games in place? Is there a social win to rewarding deceptive behavior and indirect speech? And the answer is “no”.
And that’s the relevant answer: the more highly qualified we are, the worst it is for us because our presence disrupts power relations, mostly built over oppressive social games and the pact of silence about them.