Where Neurodiversity Meets Feminist Theory: Executive Summary

This series of posts (Part I, Part II, Part III) was written in response to this article by Amherst College Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science Kristin Bumiller, which appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of the feminist journal Signs.

In her article, Bumiller describes the neurodiversity movement, sketches a history of knowledge about and attitudes toward autism, and draws analogies between the social model of disability and feminist theories about the social construction of gender. Both movements, she argues, seek to enable their constituencies (women, people with disabilities) to participate more fully in democratic societies by reorganizing those societies so that those groups are no longer disadvantaged.

She calls those "antinormalization" strategies for social integration --- rather than seeking to enable more people to meet society's standards for full citizenship, they seek a loosening of standards. I chose to highlight two issues where feminism and neurodiversity (and disability-rights activism in general) both urge antinormalization strategies: caregiving and gender roles. As it stands, caregiving is done primarily by women, either within families for no pay or within institutional settings for little pay, and the relationship between the caregiver and the person with disabilities tends to be a hierarchical one in which the person with disabilities has relatively little autonomy, dignity or control. I think that if there were more choices between full independence --- home ownership, full-time employment, car ownership, etc. --- and total dependence --- the institution or group home --- everyone would be able to live in the way that best meets their needs, and pressures would be lifted from both women (who currently do most of the work of caring for elderly or disabled relatives) and disabled people (who don't want to be burdens to their families, and are easily guilted or browbeaten into choosing living arrangements that don't suit them but are convenient for their families).

Employment Issues in Autism: Executive Summary

My own frustrating experiences looking for jobs (discussed in Part I of the series) has prompted me to do an informal literature review (Parts II and III) on the topic of autistic adult employment.

I wanted to know: Are we unemployed at higher levels than the general population? If so, how bad is it? When we are employed, do we experience any special problems in the workplace? What factors contribute to our higher levels of un- and underemployment (if we have it, which I soon found we do)? Are any of these factors changing? What can employers do to make workplaces more autistic-friendly (Part IV)?

To answer those questions, I consulted the following sources: Karen Hurlbutt and Lynn Chalmers' (2004) interviews with six highly educated adults with diagnoses of Asperger syndrome about their difficulties finding jobs, their having to settle for very menial jobs well below what they're qualified to do, and their difficulty holding onto even those jobs for very long; Gena Barnhill's (2007) and Patricia Howlin's (2000) literature reviews on adult outcomes in Asperger syndrome/high-functioning autism; Leo Kanner's (1972) and Hans Asperger's adult-outcome data on the children they originally studied who led them to define "autism"; Eva Billstedt, Carina Gillberg and Christopher Gillberg's (2005) follow-up study of 120 adults who were diagnosed with autism in childhood during the 1960s, '70s and '80s; and André Venter, Catherine Lord and Eric Schopler's (1992) eight-year follow-up study of 58 "high-functioning" autistic children.

The predominant impression I got from the literature was that most autistic people were either completely unable to get work in the competitive job market (they are either unemployed or working in sheltered environments just for people with disabilities) or they tended to work strings of low-paying, menial jobs far below their skill level. They also tend not to hold onto jobs for very long, due to difficulties stemming from interactions with coworkers, and also from not being very good at the kind of fast-paced, multitasking-heavy service jobs that are often the only jobs they can get.

Several posts from Joseph at Natural Variation cast doubt on the high unemployment rates that are commonly cited for autistic adults, though; he raises the point that so many of the studies of employment outcomes among autistic adults rely on study populations derived from state disability services. This population is probably much more likely to be unemployed than the general autistic population. So that's an important caveat --- the studies I found probably overstate the degree to which most autistic adults fail to find jobs and integrate into society, but the problems they describe are still real.