Autism and the Gendering of Technical Labor

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 4: Devotion, Discipline, and Inequality in Contemporary Labor Regimes

Abstract

Autism haunts contemporary constructions of technical labor whether or not autism is named as such. This paper investigates how the gendering of autism reinforces the gendering of technical labor. Autism is disproportionately diagnosed in boys and men, producing gendered understandings of autism in scientific research, popular culture, and (in this analysis) the labor process. I investigate how gendered constructions of autism legitimize, or occasionally undercut, gender inequality in the technology industry through an extended case analysis of autism hiring programs in the technology industry. Since the early 2000s, many large companies and independent contractors in the technology industry have developed programs to hire and train autistic workers, whom they deem an untapped talent supply for a “new economy” based around technological innovation. I conducted eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork and 22 interviews in one such autism hiring program, which I supplement with five years of intermittent fieldwork and 33 interviews with stakeholders in the broader autism hiring field. I find that the autism in tech industry constructs its idealized autistic worker as white and male, naturalizing gender inequality and especially the “glass walls” separating men in technical roles from women in non-technical roles. However, some women and queer autistic workers dispute these constructions through analysis of autistic women’s social situations and through dissection of gender norms, which they argue autistic people are uniquely positioned to identify as socially constructed. Yet their organizing naturalizes the racialization of autism, as they take for granted the whiteness of the category rather than critiquing this racialization as similarly socially produced. The self-advocacy of autistic women and autistic queer people thus offers lessons for organizing in the tech industry. Overall, this case illuminates the co-construction of types of work with race, gender, and disability categories, advancing intersectional feminism.

Author

• Emily Hawley Ruppel, University of California-Berkeley