Leveling the employment playing field for people with autism: Does diversity training help?

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Authors

Rachel Kaup¹ , Cindi May¹ , Chris Whelpley²

1. College of Charleston
2. Virginia Commonwealth University

Conference / event

College of Charleston EXPO 2022, April 2022 (Charleston, United States)

Poster summary

Job interviews are an integral component of the hiring process in most fields. Our research examines job interview performance of those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to neurotypical (NT) individuals. ASD and NT individuals were taped engaging in mock job interviews. In our first study, candidates were rated on several dimensions by respondents who either watched the interview videos or read interview transcripts. In both conditions they were naive to the neurodiversity of the candidates. NT candidates outperformed ASD candidates in the video condition, but in the absence of visual and social cues (transcript condition), individuals with ASD outperformed NT candidates. These findings suggest that it is style, rather than substance, that impedes success for ASD candidates in job interviews. In a second study, we demonstrate that the biases against ASD candidates in the job interview process can be reduced with both neurodiversity training for evaluators and diagnosis disclosure.

Keywords

Autism spectrum disorder, Diversity training, Neurodiversity

Research areas

Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Education, Business, Economics and Finance

References

1. Whelpley, C. E., & May, C. P. (2023). Seeing is Disliking: Evidence of Bias Against Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Traditional Job Interviews. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 53(4), 1363–1374. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05432-2
2. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor (2023, February 23). Persons with a Disability: Labor Force Characteristics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/disabl.pdf

Funding

No data provided

Supplemental files

No data provided

Additional information

Competing interests

No competing interests were disclosed.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and / or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Creative Commons license

Copyright © 2023 Kaup et al. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.