My name is Mark Lyons. My wife, Sally, and I have an adult son, Samuel, who is, among many other things, autistic. He is 25 years old.
Many autistic adults struggle with employment, as does Samuel. Current hiring practices of many businesses do not support autistic adults. We are asking for your help in advocating for change in the hiring and employment process. Given the chance, autistic employees can benefit businesses, as I will note later.
So, here’s the question: How can the hiring practices and processes of businesses be changed to benefit autistic workers and the businesses at the same time?
First, a few statistics:
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
+ 1 in 44 children in the United States are diagnosed as autistic. ¹
+ 5.4 million adults or 2.2% of adults in the U. S. are autistic (That is more
than the population of Chicago and Houston combined.) ¹
Image by Jurgen Polle from Pixabay
Image by F. Muhammad from Pixabay
+ 500,000 autistic children in the U. S. will transition into adulthood.
over the next ten years ¹
+ Approximately 75% of autistic adults are unemployed or under
employed ¹
Image by Nur fandilah from Pixabay
Next in the series: What Is Autism?
Citations:
1 - Autism Society of Greater Cincinnati (2022) Autism Facts and Statistics. Available at: https://www.autismcincy.org/autism-facts-statistics. (Accessed: 19 December 2022).
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