Am I scary?

Probably one in fifty of the people you know are autistic – how does that make you feel? Maybe you’re chilled out about it, but maybe you’re a bit worried. Is autism getting more common? Why can’t people just be “normal” any more? If you were going to hire a new employee and one of the candidates was autistic, how would you feel about that? I was talking to a colleague about how and why autistic people can find ourselves rejected and that got me thinking about how the unfamiliar is intimidating to most people.

Autistic people have different brains – it’s like we’re on a different operating system – and many people don’t realise how many autistic people they meet in their day to day lives. (1-2% of people at least are probably autistic – so you are likely to have met an autistic person today.) Things that are different are scary because you don’t understand them so well and people who are different may respond differently to how you expected. This is what it’s like the whole time being autistic, incidentally – having to cope with people who respond in a different way to what we expect.

To think about how that can play out – and also how unfair and unreasonable it can be – think about the world a hundred years ago. If you were sitting in the equivalent of my office back then, you’d almost certainly be a man. You might be wondering what would happen if you hired a woman to work in your organisation. Men are people you’d be used to working with – you’d know how they’d react and how they’d perform at work. Women though are a bit of a mystery to you. They haven’t traditionally worked in offices except in the lowliest roles (this is back in 1923 don’t forget!) and they’re emotional and unreliable and unpredictable, according to your 1920s male attitudes. So you might be presented with a brilliant female candidate but it’s just not worth the risk is it? Who knows what she’d do under pressure? You might have to change working practices in the office to accommodate her (such as fitting a women’s loo!) and it’d all be a bit of a risk. So probably just as well to hire a man.

Flipping back into 2023, that 1923 attitude is appalling. It’s sexist and a hundred years of progress has shown that only drawing on the talent of half the possible workforce (the male half) was a really bad idea. Women now have a track record working in every job, and it’s not socially acceptable to be prejudiced against them. (Well, in most places it isn’t!) But hopefully you can see how women in the workplace being unfamiliar in the past made hiring them and working with them a bit worrying for th men.

Now think about 2020s attitudes to autistic people. The world of work isn’t particularly used to us, and because we’re not well understood we might be seen as unpredictable or unreliable. We might need changes to working practices. The attitude to us now has got things in common to the attitude to women a hundred years ago, or indeed any other marginalised group that have been excluded for being “different” or a bit worrying. Clearly unleashing the potential of about one in fifty people (= 2%) isn’t such a big deal as integrating women into the workforce, but it’s still a big deal.

So please try not to be scared of autistic people. Yes we might not be like you, but that’s OK. I personally am likely to be a bit blunt, and possibly point out when you’re being illogical, and I agree that’s probably a bit worrying. (I try not to – honest!) But we’re all around you, all the time. Autistic people are just part of humanity – getting used to us will hopefully bring down that fear factor and help us be treated as equals.