Numbers — Employment, IQ, and autism or My name is Dr. Doe and it will be my pleasure to serve you at the 2nd window
The numbers, such as they are, are quite staggering. Website after website, study after study tell us that up to 85% of autistic adults are unemployed, and of those remaining 15% that are employed, 66% of them are underemployed?
Forbes, The US Department of Labor, National Institutes of Health, EBN, multiple scholarly journals, and website after website point to the facts that those of us who are autistic can all pretty much attest to, and that fact is this, we aren’t being utilized to our best potential.
Now, putting aside the whole capitalist ideas of a person’s worthiness being measured by the work they can produce (I am not here to bury or praise that Caesar) these statistics are a huge problem, not only for those of us with autism, but for the whole of society. Just look at the numbers. If 85% are unemployed (a figure that, frankly, astonishes me), and 66% of the remaining bit (15%) are underemployed (this one I get), that means that 95% of us are either unemployed or underemployed.
85 + 15(2/3) = 85 + 10 = 95 (see, I can show my work…take that high school math teachers who got mad when I didn’t show my work when I was just able to come up the right answer).
I am one of those autistics that are underemployed, and have been for one reason or another, for…ever.
My jobs have been (roughly, but not necessarily in order), janitor, fast food (Krystal), pizza (Little Caesar’s), traffic intersection counter, inventory, document analyst/database populator, phone answerer for Talbots (I lasted for 3 days), inventory, brand new grocery store shelf stocker, state government website text writer,
courier, gourmet candy maker, graduate assistant, community college adjunct, technical college adjunct, university adjunct, trade publication reporter, for-profit college librarian/text book distributor/guinea pig, and my current position at a public library.
Not bragging, but my intellectual metrics are very high, so to see where I am at this point in my life is a bit baffling as well as humbling. In grade school I was top of the class, crammed into higher grades, used by teachers to tutor the kids that were having a bit more trouble with the material (kids who then turned around and bullied, you know, you’ve seen movies)
and yet, I’m, theoretically, in a position non-reflective of my education or core intelligence as are a whole heckuva lot of other autistic folk.
Why is that?
Masking or camouflaging and passing is hard — this is not news to those in the autistic community, nor is it news in any other “non-standard” community. Masking can be dangerous, not just to one’s mental health, but also to their physical health — ask any member of the LGBTQ+ community. As an example, just look at the dangers that face left-handed folk. Study after study indicate that the accident/accidental on the job death rate for left-handed workers is 135% higher than for right-handed workers, especially in fields where more manual labor is required. Safety guards on power tools are on the right side — sawdust or detritus thrown off the tools being used come straight in the faces of left-handers, white-hot shells ejected from rifles and handguns fly away from a right-handed shot, but fly into the body of a lefty (ask me how I know). The left-handed are even likely to have more physical problems/injuries on the job in office jobs as well, and the dominant right-handed world has no real knowledge of this.
And this is just one of the many articles. There are even government documents (which I tried to set up a link here, but it just wouldn’t embed, so)
Some of the overall reasons for underemployment in the autistic community as a whole and on my account, often have to do with job-hopping. The job I currently hold, this is the longest I’ve ever been with an employer. Prior to this the longest I held a job was with the trade publication I talked about toward the end of the “autistics and gullibility” story I linked to earlier on this piece. Go check it out if you choose, or let me recap here…the company advertised for an “associate editor,” by which I thought they meant they needed actual editors. They were apparently as desperate for an employee as I was for a job so they “massaged” the job description a bit. To this day, I have NO IDEA how I was able to stay at that place for five years. In point of fact, I have managed to block out a good bit of the memory of those 5 years at that job, but I do remember vividly my lunch breaks. Most every day, I would take my sandwich and sit out in my car and just look at the sky and breathe. Just breathe. Just recharge before I had to go back in and make 3 dozen more phone calls to people who did not want to talk to me in a terribly uncomfortable office that was, really, just a call center.
Prior to that the longest I stayed with a company was with Little Caesar’s. I started working there right before I started college and worked my way through all 4 years plus a bit more. Other than those two places, the longest I ever worked with any other company was about 18 months. This job hopping is kind of a hallmark of autistic employees.
Because we tend to do this, we’re not able to put down roots at any particular company which keeps us at entry-level positions anywhere we try to go. On top of this, we do not (or cannot) play corporate games nearly as well as allistics. Corporate culture, corporate games are not our strong suit, to be sure…small talk, kissing up, backslapping and glad-handing (I’m shuddering just thinking about these elements) are elements associated with career advancement that a great many autistics just cannot do. For me, I do so much better with written instructions and with a manager who doesn’t mind if I check in with them when I start worrying. But, if you are an employer and you have an autistic employee that you treat right, you’ve got a loyal employee who will out-produce and out-perform everybody else on your team.
