Personal Perspective: Autistic people are in dire need of a neuro-affirming workplace. Facing catastrophic unemployment numbers, they struggle in jobs due to their well-intentioned point of view.
Autistic people may understand hierarchy but lack an innate instinct for it.population range from 70 to 85 percent. There’s little doubt that autistic people are the most unemployed, underpaid, and overeducated disability population.
While no research suggests that autistic people are poor workers, there is research that shines a light on how well their bottom-up processing and “noisy brains” make them particularly suited for plenty of productive work. Autistic people may face serious challenges in the work world because of their sensitivity to social justice, their lack of awareness of hierarchy, and their good intentions. America spends billions on meetings, the primary function of which is to exercise the hierarchy. When ideas are floated and changes are announced in a meeting, they rarely do anything of any consequence before another idea or change comes along and pushes last week’s action items out of view. Some of the ideas and changes can be comically bad or so terribly underdeveloped as to present as little fictions that are being introduced simply to take up the time. Often, the absurdity of the content of meetings can trigger reactions from an autistic person, who believes their role in the meeting is to identify the illogical proposals, point out the holes, and save the company time and money. Though never spoken aloud, this is far from the truth in the eyes of those signing the paychecks.Autistic people are processing the information in meetings bottom-up; they are constructing a framework in their minds of what is being announced or proposed with relatively little context. These ideas come across as half-baked, ineffective, and impractical more often than not. A bottom-up processor is looking for a logical geometry that will support the rationale of any change being proposed. Before an idea by managers is tested, it is invariably unstable, having too many holes to fill in than can be tolerated by the context-sensitive autistic person. However, the top-down processors in the room have a shared sense of context that helps to pad the blow of any meeting agenda. The non-autistic person knows that a meeting is a kind of social ceremony and that critical analysis isn’t invited to the party. Through an innate understanding of the shared experience of other such social ceremonies, their nervous systems don’tthem; they fully understand that this conversation means nothing. Or, rather, that the meaning of the conversation is just social grooming. The managers are practicing managing, reminding the managed to be obedient, and essentially putting on a performance so that everyone has played “company worker” that day. In the face of the pointlessness, the autistic person is urged to either ask for more context so that ideas can come into focus and make sense, or they are compelled to simply state the obvious fact that the ideas are incapable of holding any water. Either reaction, no matter how well-intentioned, is seen as a challenge to the authorities in the room. The autistic person understands the nature of hierarchy, in that they know who the bosses are, but they may not understand the implications of speaking up against it.I want to be sure the reader is following along here: Autistic people are from a different culture than non-autistic people, so let’s illustrate this another way. Imagine a gathering of monkeys where they practice social grooming. They line up from the most important monkey to the least, and they begin to pick parasites off of one another. They continue to do this, even if there are no parasites in evidence, moving their hands pleasantly through their superior’s fur and pretending to eat what they’ve found. Enter an autistic monkey. Having plucked the last bug off of his neighbor—who, in other contexts throughout the day, has treated him as a pal—the autistic monkey stops the social grooming. There’s nothing left to get! Any more would be a waste of energy! This autistic monkey would be run out of the clan, having challenged the social order in an attempted coup.Neurotypicals know this in their bones: Do not question your boss when they are bossing, even if they act like one of the gang the rest of the day. They have an instinct for nodding their heads and smiling in agreement, even when a proposal is impractical. If you could ask them directly, they might say, “None of the managers actually know what we do, so their ideas never make sense. We just do what we have to in order to make them feel like their idea worked.” In the work world, it is very hard to be fired for incompetence, but very easy to be fired for insubordination. Asking for more context is, but the boss’ amygdala will not feel it that way; it will sound the alarm that this upstart is attempting to move up in the food chain. And if this worker who is being so challenging is, but simply calling out the hierarchy safely from the sidelines. If we are to have true workplace accommodations that work for autistic people, then tolerance for their experience of the work world must be standard. This is a disability population in crisis, and we need to be able to articulate this problem.The Autistic’s Guide to Self-DiscoveryWhatever your goals, it’s the struggle to get there that’s most rewarding. It’s almost as if life itself is inviting us to embrace difficulty—not as punishment but as a design feature. It's a robust system for growth.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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