The Masking Dilemma: How Job Interviews Push Autistic Candidates Into Disconnection
Friday, April 25, 2025.
If you’ve ever spent a job interview sweating through your nicest blazer, straining to remember the "right" amount of eye contact, and calculating the microcalories of every smile, you’ve experienced—briefly—what many autistic adults endure every time they apply for a job.
Except for them, it isn’t one uncomfortable afternoon.
It’s a career-long performance.
What Is Masking?
"Masking" refers to the conscious or unconscious effort to suppress natural behaviors and imitate socially expected ones. In autism, it often means mimicking neurotypical communication patterns—like smiling when uncertain, maintaining constant eye contact, feigning casual small talk, or "toning down" intense passions and interests (Hull et al., 2017).
Masking can make an autistic soul seem more "normal" to a neurotypical audience.
It can also make them exhausted, depressed, and at higher risk of burnout.
It’s like holding your breath so you can pass for someone else.
The Problem With Interviewing for Neurotypicality
Traditional job interviews don't just assess skills. They audition personalities.
In one corner: charisma, ease, social "fit."
In the other: authenticity, task competence, resilience.
Guess which wins?
Research shows that first impressions during interviews often outweigh actual qualifications (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998; DeBrabander et al., 2023). In studies like Grossman’s (2025), autistic candidates were rated less favorably based on perceived awkwardness—even when they were equally or more qualified than their neurotypical peers.
Faced with this rigged game, many autistic job seekers adapt by masking. They work to simulate whatever performance will best lower suspicion.
But there’s a dark side.
Chronic Masking Is Psychological Self-Harm
Long-term masking is not harmless. It’s associated with:
Increased anxiety (Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019)
Depression and suicidal ideation (Cassidy et al., 2018)
Identity erosion (“Who am I if I can’t be myself?”)
Deep social exhaustion
Masking creates a tragic paradox: success at being hired may depend on not appearing autistic—but the cost of maintaining that mask can make the job itself unsustainable.
It’s a bait-and-switch of the cruelest kind: get through the interview pretending to be someone else, then spend your employment trying (and failing) to maintain the illusion.
Why Masking Isn’t the Solution—And Never Was
Masking doesn’t solve the fundamental bias embedded in hiring.
It conforms to it.
By asking autistic adults to mask better, we’re effectively saying: “The problem is not that we judge you unfairly. It’s that you’re bad at hiding.”
This mirrors historical dynamics seen in other marginalized groups, where individuals were told to assimilate—code-switch, tone-police, minimize their otherness—in order to succeed (Wingfield, 2019).
It’s not inclusion.
It’s conditional acceptance.
It forces neurodivergent candidates into a toxic choice:
Authenticity or survival.
And the cost of that choice is steep: lower self-esteem, chronic stress, and, ultimately, premature exit from the workforce (Botha & Frost, 2020).
The Deeper Shift We Need: Universal Design for Hiring
If we want genuine neurodiversity inclusion, it’s not enough to tell autistic candidates to mask better—or even to prepare them for interviews better.
We have to change the structure itself.
Here’s what a real shift would look like:
Skills-First Assessment: Evaluate based on actual job competencies, not small talk prowess.
Structured Interviews: Use standardized, transparent questions to minimize bias.
Alternative Evaluation Formats: Portfolios, trials, or asynchronous problem-solving tasks.
Education + Context: Train hiring managers deeply about neurodiversity and normalize diagnostic disclosure (Grossman, 2025).
Disclosure-Neutral Hiring: Allow candidates to disclose disabilities in a way that leads to accommodations, not discrimination.
Authenticity-Positive Culture: Create workplaces where people don’t have to burn out hiding who they are.
If interviews remain performances of superficial social mastery, companies will keep filtering out not only autistic candidates—but also anxious ones, introverted ones, immigrant ones, disabled ones.
In a world where human originality and problem-solving are increasingly valuable, we can’t afford to only hire the best small talkers.
Final Thought: Hire the Brain, Not the Banter
The next time a candidate seems “awkward” in an interview, pause before your unconscious bias clicks into gear.
Ask yourself: Am I judging their ability to do the work—or their ability to entertain me in a five-minute performance?
Autistic candidates don’t need fixing.
The hiring process does.
And the first step to fixing it is to stop forcing people to choose between belonging and being.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
References
Botha, M., & Frost, D. M. (2020). Extending the minority stress model to understand mental health problems experienced by autistic people. Society and Mental Health, 10(1), 20–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/2156869318804297
Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(5), 1899–1911. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-03878-x
Cassidy, S., Bradley, L., Robinson, J., Allison, C., McHugh, M., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2018). Suicidal ideation and suicide plans or attempts in adults with Asperger’s syndrome attending a specialist diagnostic clinic: A clinical cohort study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 1(2), 142–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(14)70248-2
DeBrabander, K. M., Morrison, K. E., & Sasson, N. J. (2023). First impressions of autistic adults are consistently negative across multiple levels of exposure. Autism, 27(1), 120–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221113888
Grossman, R. B. (2025). Why people with autism struggle to get hired − and how businesses can help by changing how they look at job interviews. The Conversation, April 17, 2025.
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., & Mandy, W. (2017). The female autism phenotype and camouflaging: A narrative review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 4(4), 306–317. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40489-017-0120-6
Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262–274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262
Wingfield, A. H. (2019). Flatlining: Race, work, and health care in the new economy. University of California Press.