I’ve had this blog post drafted for a while now but have been a little anxious to post it and have not had the time what with everything else that is going on both in my own working life and in the world. It’s a post that, like my one on the reasons I want to work in marketing (which you can read here), is honest, upfront and without apology. It’s also going to be my last emotive post for a while – more on that later in this post...
Autism is defined by the National Autistic Society (NAS) as ‘a lifelong developmental disability that affects how people perceive the world and interact with others’. It is equally one segment of disability and a type of thinking style. The National Health Service (NHS) point out that it is “a spectrum” and, in other words, that “everybody with autism is different”.
This makes it, what Matthew Syed calls in his 2019 book Rebel Ideas, both a “demographic diversity” and a “cognitive diversity”. Yet, what is usually overlooked about autism is that those who identify with it do not all have the same experiences of it; we are homogenised. And, as most of culture is, we are gendered – autistic women are a minority statistically in that recent studies have shown that the gap is 3:1.
My Autism
I was diagnosed at a rather young age but was not told about my diagnosis until I was older. Over the years, as Sarah Hendrickx writes on her own autism in her 2015 book Women and Girls with Autism, I’ve ‘hidden it’ as ‘a subconscious response to a life-long understanding that the ‘real me’ was not usually particularly welcomed or approved of’. This was, and is, partially because of societal issues – stereotypically found and more likely identifiable in boys and men – but the rest is all on me.
I definitely own up to routine camouflaging and I’m currently finding it difficult to balance my long-term stance on not being explicit about my autism whilst also trying to make it part of my professional elevator pitch. Whilst I say I’m a “neurodiverse communicator and content creator”, I appear to be being asked by those I meet (virtually at the moment but it has also happened in the physical world) what that actually means. With so much emphasis on clarity at the moment, I obviously need to become clearer in what I want to do but I’m not sure of the wording yet!
This emphasis on clarity includes the content I create. A lot of my content has been heavily emotional, including this post. As Albert Einstein cleverly put, “if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got”. I’ve said that I want to get into marketing and I should keep continuing to create content but that content needs to be more marketing focused and less about me.
In other words, I should simply write about the marketing industry more often than I do and be a little less subjective. I’m going to begin to do this by this being the last personal post for a while. Talking about the industry and work and things that are happening in the world rather than yourself is also something that I’ve learnt about during the HubSpot Content Marketing online course so this isn’t just something that I’m being told to do, it’s something that I believe will also help me to grow professionally. I may write about emotive topics in the future but it is also important to talk about things outside of my identity/about me.
The Benefits of Autism
As Charlotte Amelia Poe points out in her 2019 book How to Be Autistic, “Humans are bias machines, and we are especially influenced by negatives. We want to believe the worst about ourselves”. This is not surprising considering the increase in discussion around the topic of imposter syndrome – the psychology of thinking that you’re not good enough, you doubt your abilities and fear that you’ll be exposed as fraudulent. Yet, negativity is a very dominant description, stereotype and viewpoint of both autism and disability in general.
There are actually many positives of autism and advantages of us being within all of society, including the workplace. Some are things that I have and some I don’t but that others with autism do. Mine are creativity, structured organisation, expertise in what the NAS say are “intense and highly focused interests”, attention to details and deadlines, methodological approaches (being analytical), integrity and resilience.
Bringing More Autistic People into Workplaces
As I noted in my blog post on Neurodiversity (which you can read here), only sixteen percent of adults with autism are in full-time employment, even though seventy-seven percent want to be working. This is heavily disappointing given that, according to the NAS, ‘around 700,000 people in the UK are on the autistic spectrum’. Though various organisations such as The Valuable 500, Uptimize, The Business Disability Forum and auticon are helping to try and change things, there’s still a long way to go. As Mary Portas notes, “work should be a place where you bring your whole self” and we can’t do that if we are being pushed aside at the first point.
Those who want to be or who are employed and have autism, present or future employers can help one another to make the working environment more neurodiverse; work is such a reciprocal relationship and you can’t change the workplace, or society for that matter, on your own and both parties have to do things to help each other. I’ve begun to do this by putting the benefits of my autism within the profile section of my CV and will continue to do this by being as authentic as I possibly can be in a professional sense.
What employers can do in return is listen to, understand and appreciate us by modifying the recruitment process and bringing in suitable adjustments into workplaces. Regular structure and feedback giving is really important for us. Perfectionism, although something I’m trying to lose, can be a trait so please know that we can do work but we sometimes might not be 100% happy with it. Career development is also something we really rely on and this should be already in place in most companies.
Whilst these are useful things to think about, employers and companies should remember that tailoring for those with autism is based on individual situations as we’re all distinctive and not like one another. This includes skills, the language they use, the adjustments they need and how they act, speak, work and socialise in general. Work is personal to each and every one of us and because of this we should be seen as full people – autism is only part of us, not the full picture.
Autism/Disability and Self-Employment
This slightly links back to my post on flexible work (which you can read here) but also relates to where I am currently in my own work life. I’ve begun to do work for other people online and this could either be seen as being self-employed, within the gig economy or working from home. I’ve written a blog post that goes deeper into WFH (which you can read here) but it is not uncommon for those with disabilities, including autism, to be self-employed. Reports have been written by both IPSE and the Department of Work and Pensions into this.
I am currently considering going freelance/self-employed completely as I’ve realised through the work I’m currently doing that I quite enjoy the benefits of it. I’m unsure how to do it without starting a business or whether it’s the right thing to do considering how new I still am to the professional world of work, but I would like to talk to others about it. So if you or someone you know works as a freelancer or is self-employed, let me know!
Final Thoughts
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog post but I want to make one final point. I read Seth Godin’s blog and really like the following from his post from April 2nd: “We can’t change how things are in any given moment, but we can change how we will approach today.” I hope that with the inclusion of more autistic (and disabled) people in the workforce and everyday life, but that this is not something that one person or company can do alone. It is also not on me but I can do something to change by focusing more on what I want to do – social media marketing.
Beth x