The Performance Vs The Person
Autistica UK surveyed 2,241 neurodivergent employees from 96 organisations. 29% reported experiencing discrimination at work (Autistica, Neurodiversity Employers Index Market Report, 2024; https://www.autistica.org.uk/downloads/files/NDEI-Market-Report-FINAL.pdf).
That number sits with me. Corporate and government IT, autistic the whole time. I made it work by performing a version of myself that fit the environment well enough to stay employed. Eye contact I didn't need. Small talk that felt like reciting lines. Meetings where I tracked every micro-expression to figure out what people meant instead of what they said.
That performance is what masking is. And masking is what most workplaces demand without ever naming it.
What Understanding Costs When It's Missing
The discrimination the study documents isn't abstract. The pattern is documented in research: masking to meet workplace expectations, burnout from the cost of holding the performance together, job loss when the performance fails.
That's not a metaphor. You perform normal until you can't anymore. The cost of holding the performance together – the sensory overload you ignored, the executive function you burned through, the shutdown you delayed until you got home – eventually breaks you. Then the job that required the performance fires you for failing at it.
The rare managers who understand don't require the performance in the first place. They accommodate sensory needs. They give clear, direct instructions instead of assuming you'll pick up unspoken expectations. They measure output, not conformity to neurotypical social norms.
Most managers don't see the performance as a performance. They see it as professionalism. When you can't maintain it, they see failure, not exhaustion. They don't fire you for being autistic – that's illegal. They fire you for the gaps that show up when masking stops working.
The Machine Learns What The Manager Already Believed
Now we're teaching AI to do the same thing.
A 2025 UC San Diego study found that people building human-like AI overlooked how their systems enforce neuronormative communication standards. The AI treats neurotypical interaction as correct. Everything else gets flagged (arXiv, 2025; https://arxiv.org/html/2506.12098v1).
A Springer paper from 2026 describes AI social-skills tools that push autistic users toward neurotypical behavior – "correcting" traits that are natural expressions of how we communicate (Springer, "AI and extended authenticity: autism as a case study," 2026; https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-026-03101-x).
The managers who don't understand neurodivergence now have tools that encode their assumptions into systems. The AI doesn't see masking as a cost. It sees unmasked autistic communication as something to fix.
That's workplace bias scaled up and automated.
What I Burned To Stay Employed
Here's what a career of masking cost:
I learned to make eye contact even though it felt like staring into headlights. I learned to laugh at jokes I didn't find funny because not laughing marked me as other. I learned to say "How was your weekend?" on Monday mornings and track the answer well enough to reference it later, even though I didn't care and the other person knew I didn't care and we were both performing a script neither of us wanted.
I learned to sit through meetings where three people talked for an hour to say what could have been an email, because refusing meetings was insubordination. I learned not to correct people when they were wrong, because being right mattered less than being liked.
The performance kept me employed. It also kept me from being fully present in my own life.
Research on autistic burnout identifies masking as a key precipitating factor (ScienceDirect, "Autistic burnout: Early insights from a systematic review on characteristics, precipitating factors, and protective mechanisms," 2026; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013700626001946). I'm the data point. The burnout is real. So is the pulmonary fibrosis – a terminal diagnosis.
The Thing That Doesn't Survive Translation
When most managers don't understand neurodivergence, the problem isn't individual managers. It's a system that treats neurotypical communication, sensory processing, and social interaction as the only legitimate way to work.
The few who do understand aren't better people. They've learned – usually because they're neurodivergent themselves, or they have a neurodivergent family member – that different doesn't mean deficient.
The rest assume the performance is the person. When the performance fails, they think the person failed. They don't see the cost of holding it together. They just see someone who stopped meeting expectations.
Now AI is learning the same assumptions. It's being trained on data that treats neurodivergent communication as error. It's being deployed by managers who think the solution is teaching autistic people to act less autistic.
The tools are learning to discriminate because the systems already do.
And the cost still falls on the 29% who experience discrimination and on workplaces that haven't learned why that's a problem.
