Why the workplace needs to close the 'autism job gap'
When she was a little girl growing up in Copenhagen, Charlotte Valeur used to climb tall trees and sit in the branches for hours. “I loved it because the world couldn’t reach me,” explains the former merchant banker and chair of the Institute of Directors, who this week became the first senior business leader to reveal she has autism.
For Valeur, the decision to publicly announce her diagnosis – which came three years ago, aged 53 – was a difficult one, but ultimately highlights why she decided to speak out.
“I was afraid there would be some board positions I wouldn’t get as a result of this,” she tells me on the phone from her home in Jersey. “I’m a single parent with three children aged 16, 19 and 21, who I need to get through university. That was my first concern, that speaking out would affect them.
“But then I realised that’s exactly why I needed to. I spoke to my children and we made a family decision to do it. We need to change the way people think about autistic people. We need to change the way the workplace thinks about them. And that starts with speaking out.”
The fact that somebody in Valeur’s position was concerned about being discriminated against only highlights the need for a radical re-think about neurodiversity in the workplace. This is why she’s launching a campaign, Know More, with the charity Autistica, this week to encourage the Government to invest in autism research and for companies to be more open to hiring autistic people. Just one in six autistic Britons are currently in employment.
Growing up, Valeur knew she was different from her peers, and even her three sisters and brother. “Our mother died of breast cancer when I was seven, so it was often put down to that. But even before then, I was a quiet, withdrawn child who, like a lot of autistic children, was bullied by my peers. I just didn’t ‘get’ other children, and I couldn’t understand why they bullied me. I often wondered if I had a sign on my head saying: ‘Bully me’. I was quiet. I didn’t want any trouble. But they instinctively knew I was different.
“I became a bit of a tomboy, because boys’ friendships were more straightforward. But the social complexities of girls’ friendships baffled me. I had no friends. My siblings were my friends, but even with them I often felt like an outsider.”
Aged 18, she went to work in a local bank, in her twenties she worked on the stock exchange in Denmark, before moving to the male-dominated trading room floors of 90s London. “I became a bond trader and I loved it,” she says. “It was high-intensity work and you had to be hyper-focused on numbers for 12 hours a day.”
Valeur says she could be blunt, something she put down to her Danish outspokenness, but she says the other traders didn’t care about differences, only results. “The only part I didn’t enjoy was going to the pub after work, and I never took clients out for drinks like the other traders,” she says. “I just went straight home to bed.”
It didn’t matter. She was always in the top 10 traders on the floor, and former colleagues have since written to her thanking her for being a pioneer – “but I didn’t think of myself as the only woman on the trading room floor, I just found the deals interesting,” she says. She went on to work at Société Générale, BNP Paribas and SG Warburg, and oversaw several multi-million pound mergers, before becoming chair of the Institute of Directors.
Valeur has been married three times and has three children with her last husband. Their eldest son is also autistic.
When her son was four, experts suggested he could be on the spectrum, but he wasn’t diagnosed until 14. “Initially, I thought, why put a label on him if he’s coping well academically?” she says. “But the teenage years are when things can unravel for autistic children, and there isn’t a lot of support. There’s support for younger children, but it tapers off.”
Her son was even expelled from school at 16 because of an incident while taking his GCSEs. “He found the exam process difficult, being in a hall with 65 other children, so we asked if he could sit his exam in a separate room. The school said no, and he became overwhelmed and confused on the day,” she tells me, pointing out how neuro-discrimination can start early for autistic people, who often experience anxiety and sensory overload from certain sounds or acoustics.
After her son was diagnosed, Valeur wondered about herself and took six different online tests. “They all said I had autism, and suddenly things made sense.” An official assessment in 2017 confirmed it.
Valeur thinks her late father was autistic, too. “He was easily overwhelmed by life, and would occasionally drink for days, most likely as a coping mechanism,” she says. “We were both avid readers and would lose ourselves in books, and he had these little quirks, like constantly clearing his throat when he didn’t need to. When I was diagnosed, I called his sister and she said: ‘I think your father was, too. He was always so different to the rest of us.’ Of course, they didn’t know anything about autism back then.”
Despite her own diagnosis, Valeur thinks that women and girls are still vastly under-diagnosed.
Autism has long been seen as a male condition, but researchers now believe there could be tens of thousands of undiagnosed females, because diagnostic tests are developed with male autism in mind, using male brain imagery. As a result, doctors and teachers don’t know what female autism looks like, and girls are typically diagnosed later than boys and have to show more severe signs to be referred.
Symptoms in girls, however, tend to be subtler and often manifest in – and are mistaken for – shyness or anxiety. Autistic girls are also better at learning to ‘socially camouflage’ or ‘mask’ to try and fit in with peers.
While the ratio of autistic boys to girls was often put at 16:1, the National Autistic Society recently said it believes women account for a quarter of autistic people.
Valeur thinks the true figure is closer to half. “We present differently, we mask better, but, more than anything, the medical profession has always been more concerned with men, using male mice for general testing,” she says. “When autism was first discovered, women weren’t even counted as human beings. But of course we have autism, too.
“There are women out there who have always felt different, who may have coped by self-harming, or developed eating disorders, or who have terrible anxiety, who are being missed. One woman wrote to me to say her son is autistic and she thinks she might be too and asked her GP to refer her. He told her she wasn’t, she was just anxious, and to take some pills. It’s a great shame.”
The other great shame, says Valeur, is how the workplace is missing out.
“They nicknamed me ‘Cassandra’ on one board after the Greek goddess who uttered true prophecies, but was never believed,” she says. “When I’m on the board of a company, I focus on everything about that company. My brain pulls together all the information and I can predict what will happen long before anybody else. This comes from my father, who taught me to question everything until it makes logical sense.
“Autistic people think differently and like to rewrite the rule books. Take the people in Silicon Valley who create wonderful things. I’m sure some of them are autistic, and I only wish they’d find out and then speak out to help others.”
However, Valeur says that while autistic people have many gifts, they also have what she calls “non-gifts”. “Take my son’s experience. Many bright autistic people struggle with exams, or university, and get left behind. They feel overwhelmed by the traditional interview process, or struggle to thrive in a workplace that celebrates extroverts, so they miss out.”
Valeur says that while organisations have made great strides in being more diverse in terms of gender, physical disability and race, autistic people are still being sidelined. “We can’t let that happen, and have all that autistic talent go to waste, just because of a stigma that still exists.”
Valeur says one of her greatest blessings was being raised by parents who gave her the freedom to just be herself. “That built confidence in me, so I believed in the power of my own judgments and opinions. Yet I see parents forcing their high-performing but overwhelmed autistic children to take their A-levels three times over until they pass.
“For years, autistic people have been encouraged to fit in with the neurotypical world, or else get left behind. When really, the world and the workplace should become more accepting and accommodating of us.”
