Put an outside advocate in workplaces that hire autistic people, a panellist argued

One panellist’s argument started from a question of fairness. Autistic people who want employers to change how they work are asking a lot of businesses that the panellist described as already too busy, tired and run down. Speaking on the employment panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in June 2024, the panellist said “we cannot ask them to take a loss for us when we are the minority asking that of the majority”. If the changes autistic workers need are going to happen, the panellist argued, someone outside the business has to share the responsibility for making them work.

The panellist, who is not named in the captions, came to that view through enterprise, and had worked as a baker. While working independently as an entrepreneur, before joining an organisation whose name the captions do not make clear, the panellist joined what was described as the world’s largest networking organisation with nothing to sell, simply to talk with small and large business owners about why autistic people were not being employed. The summary of those conversations was that employers do not know how to handle the communication gap. Autistic workers are hypersensitive, the panellist said, and employers are scared. Many workplaces are not nurturing places. In a bakery, the panellist said, there was no way to tell the boss you were feeling anxious and needed another day off, and the panellist had never disclosed being autistic to anyone before joining that organisation.