Yes, I'm Autistic. No, I'm Not a STEM Genius
Commentary: You probably work with autistic people. Here's how you can better understand and support us.
Hire them, and you'll have walking supercomputers on your hands: near-infinite processing power and perfect conformity to rules. Sure, they'll short-circuit in social situations and overheat on occasion. But aside from that, they're perfect robots who won't exhibit those bothersome human emotions that can stifle their usefulness.
They are the future of Silicon Valley: Einstein, Gates and Zuckerberg, all rolled into one. As long as you keep them tucked away behind monitors where they can't cause trouble, they'll be your company's greatest assets.
They're the picture of autism.
And they're not real -- no matter how badly companies want them to be.
April marks Autism Acceptance Month here in the US, where more than 1 out of 50 adults have autism, according to an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I am one of them. I've spent 22 years navigating a world that views my autism as simultaneously a burden to be stamped out and a commodity to be taken advantage of. Though most of us with autism want to be employed, ignorant attitudes about the disability pervade workplaces, making them less accessible for us.
To be sure, companies have made commendable progress in recent years thanks to advocacy from autistic people and our allies -- and I feel fortunate to work with caring folks who are helping to foster an environment that supports my needs. Some companies have started employee resource groups, consulted autistic people in making their workplaces more accessible and even cultivated hiring programs to train neurodivergent workers.
But these wonderful steps will only go so far when popular misconceptions about autism still permeate workplace culture and guide policy in less-than-accessible directions.
Pigeonholed and misunderstood
The psychologists who knew me as a toddler would consider it a miracle I'm even employed in the first place. I was diagnosed at age 3 with Asperger's Syndrome, a neurological and developmental condition that's nowadays classified as simply autism spectrum disorder. (That change in terminology is a good thing: Austrian autism researcher Hans Asperger was shown to have collaborated with the Nazi regime.)
Researchers aren't sure what causes autism. I struggled to interact with my preschool peers, "melted down" when switching from one activity to another, and sobbed in grocery stores because the fluorescent lights felt like daggers in my eyes. "What time is it?" my dad would ask me. "Wednesday," I'd respond. It's not that I didn't know the answer, it's that I didn't understand the question due to my auditory processing difficulties.
Doctors told my parents I'd never be able to drive or live independently. "Mary often appears to be staring through you rather than looking at you," reads one preschool teacher's remark in my file. "During free-choice time, she just sits in the middle of the floor and stares."
I'm exceptionally lucky my loving parents had the resources to send me to occupational and speech therapy, which were critical in teaching me how to speak, interact with others and handle my sensory challenges. Like many autistic people, especially those socialized as women, I observed my neurotypical peers and learned to "mask": putting on a manufactured personality to hide my autistic traits, even as it exhausted me to the point of tears by the end of the day.
By the time I was about 10, I reached a point where the untrained eye couldn't clock me as autistic. I excelled at school and standardized tests, especially in the humanities. Then I'd go home and shut down, drained from the masking and sensory overload. When my parents would show my teachers my diagnosis and ask for a simple accommodation -- like the option for me to go sit in the school library for a few minutes to calm my overstimulated brain -- they would respond with dismay, disbelief and outright dismissal because I didn't match their preconceived notions about autism.
