Qualcomm Institute, University of California San Diego

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PROJECT MUSE, SCREENING OUT NEURODIVERSITY

A research paper published by Jada Wiggleton-Little and Craig Callender.

ABSTRACT. Autistic adults suffer from an alarmingly high and increasing unemployment rate. Many companies use pre-employment personality screening
tests. These filters likely have disparate impacts on neurodivergent individuals,
exacerbating this social problem. This situation gives rise to a bind. On the one
hand, the tests disproportionately harm a vulnerable group in society. On the other,
employers think that personality test scores are predictors of job performance
and have a right to use personality traits in their decisions. It is difficult to say
whether these negative disparate impacts are a case of wrongful discrimination.
Nevertheless, we will show that pre-employment personality tests prey on several
features of autism in an unfair way, and for this reason, we suggest the contours
of some regulation that we deem necessary.