A Sydney panel asked whether board governance itself shuts autistic people out

The question came from the audience, and it was about accessibility at the top of organisations. An audience member at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024, who joked that this was the panel they wanted to sit on, said that in leadership positions you are supposed to fit the mould. You are supposed to know exactly what to say and when to say it, and to be professional, and anyone who challenges things is labelled unprofessional. The audience member said they sat on a board, they believed as its token autistic member, at an organisation that was supposed to be highly accessible. “I’ve actually been called unprofessional for just being myself.” The audience member said they knew that was not true, and that the rest of the board did not understand it was an inaccessible environment working in a highly unprofessional way. The question to the panel was how to deal with it.

One panellist said they had sat on three board roles and had been diagnosed as autistic a year earlier, and had then asked what they were doing in a board role chairing a forum. Picking out cues, managing different personalities, and handling and working through the politics is “not an autistic person’s happy place”, the panellist said. Looking back, the panellist had been very unhappy, and the roles were voluntary. The panellist said plainly that this did not answer the question, and that they had stepped away from all of those board roles because that was not where they wanted to spend their time.