Last year I spent a lot of time thinking about camouflaging / masking / code switching. These terms are all related to a response that a minority or muted group has to try to ‘fit in’ in situations where the dominant group is making an implicit cultural requirement on a minority group to behave in a way that is not natural to them. Masking is one of the consequences of in-group thinking, in that the person in the minority group who is masking feels obligated to act in a way that is acceptable to the dominant group. The requirement to mask imposes added cognitive load on minority groups.
Masking is exhausting and demeaning. When a person feels the need to mask, the effort put towards masking detracts from their energy to do their job. It also takes away from group productivity in that the group is not taking advantage of the full benefits of the diversity in the group and of the different perspetives of the minority members. Finally, when a person feels compelled to mask, this forces them to suppress their identity, takes away from their sense of self-worth, and detracts from the value others place on their work and their contributions to the team.
The original LinkedIn article can be found here.
When I left my last full-time tech job over a year ago, I left partly because I could look back over the years and see that over time, my neurodivergent co-workers were having an increasingly difficult time in the technical workplace, and I wanted to work towards amending that problem in some way. I had been aware of this issue for a while; twice in my past few jobs, I asked management to put someone on my team who I thought might be neurodivergent; in both cases I was told no, and in both cases the employee eventually left the company.
There is a growing recognition that diversity in general and neurodiversity specifically are important drivers in innovation, creativity and process. For instance, see The Business Case for Diversity in the Workplace is now Overwhelming and Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage. Neurodivergent people process information differently from neurotypical people, which means that they are predisposed to thinking outside the box and seeing problems from different angles. They often see details that many other people miss; some can understand code visually as opposed to just a bunch of lines on a screen.
What drives neurodivergent employees away from a workplace? I would say that one reason is that underlying all of this is the sheer exhaustion of their being required to ‘fit in’ to a society that was not designed for them, using a process they call ‘masking’ or ‘camouflage’.
Masking / Camouflage and Diversity
So what is masking? I remember back in my early days in tech, back in the 1980s, when I was one of the few women who were interested in and capable of programming a computer. On the one hand, I really enjoyed those days. They were fun and inventive. On the other hand, I did have to think consciously about some things — for instance I developed a concept of defensive dressing, which meant that I did not wear anything to work that would be even vaguely interpreted as sexy. I did my best to assimilate into the male culture and not look too odd. I learned to laugh at and tell dad jokes. I learned not to react to offensive and sexist language. You see similar sentiments expressed in the first half of the Pixar short Purl. In retrospect, this was my first introduction to masking-like behavior.
There is also plenty of evidence that this sort of thing happens with other minority groups as well For example, see The Exhausting Burden of Code-Switching for White People. Here, Carl Anka talks about, “… the need or belief that I have to show a mask to the world to protect myself and any future Black people who walk through the door …”. He speaks of the need to mask, not only as a survival tactic for himself, but also as a requirement to protect his race, other people like him.
The gap that neurodivergent / autistic people have to cross to fit into our neurotypically driven society is relatively large. Therefore, their use of masking or camouflaging is quite pervasive. “Camouflaging is often about a desperate and sometimes subconscious survival battle,” says Kajsa Igelström, assistant professor of neuroscience at Linköping University in Sweden [The costs of camouflaging autism]. In the autistic person’s experience, masking becomes a lifestyle for survival, and this lifestyle causes them to ignore their own needs and their natural way of going through life for the comfort of the people around them. The result of this is exhaustion, social anxiety, and (unfortunately) an increased risk of suicide [Is Camouflaging Autistic Traits Associated with Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviours?].
When is Masking Toxic?
We all adjust subtly to the people around us in order to fit in better; in fact, any relationship involves a certain amount of give and take towards each other. However, at some point this behavior becomes exhausting, toxic and identity-sapping.
There are many reasons why masking has these awful effects on the person doing the masking. One big one has to do with the majority/minority subgroups within a group. When one type of person forms the majority in the group, they typically create a group culture that revolves around their own ways of thinking and doing things. This creates an adjustment imbalance in the group, where a few people are required to do all of the adjusting while the majority does relatively little adjusting. This imbalance basically communicates that the people in the majority have more intrinsic worth than the rest of the people, which is incredibly demeaning; hence, this leads to a harmful work environment for the minority.
There is also the issue of who is placing the burden to mask on the individual. Many of the articles on masking state that the person masking sees it as a requirement to survive, or to gain respect, or to fit in. In these situations, the masking becomes an imposition. Even in the case where someone chooses to mask in order to ‘look normal’ or make a good impression in a job interview, it feels like an imposition, especially when the behavior they are masking does not impact their ability to do the job. I think we would all agree that when a person imposes their desires or behaviors on someone else, explicitly or implicitly, it is destructive and counterproductive.
Another issue is that masking requires studying and imitating other peoples’ behavior, not behaving in a way that comes naturally to you. Thus, a person masks by developing a conscious set of scripts, behaviors, or ways of speaking that do not make intuitive sense to the person making the adjustment. For example, the article 21 Job Interview Tips: How to Make a Great Impression provides advice like, ‘The interviewer should extend their hand first to initiate a handshake. Stand, look the person in the eye and smile.’ However, if you are autistic, the sensory experience of looking someone in the eye can be overwhelming. If a person is trying to learn to make eye contact ‘normally’ for American society, they may have a running dialog going, ‘now I need to make some eye contact … oops 10 seconds is too long … maybe they thought I was creepy? … look away for a sec … wow this feels awful … is that long enough? … ‘. The issue here is that they are expected to be as fully functional in the situation while taking up part of their cognitive load to figure out how to manage their scripts around their sensory discomfort. Anyone who has tried to have a conversation with someone when there is an annoying noise in the background like a loud, piercing tone will be able to relate somewhat to this challenge. For someone to feel they need to mask in a situation places an unfair cognitive load on a person. A person interacting with them judges them both based on their reduced cognitive capacity and any ways in which their scripts differ from what would normally be expected in the situation.
How Do We Adjust?
How can you tell if a person is masking to the point of toxicity? One good guideline is to look at the general well-being of the individual. Are they showing symptoms of exhaustion or disorientation? Social anxiety? Depression? Is the person’s (normally adequate) productivity decreasing? Is their ability to be resilient and emotionally regulated decreasing? Are they sick often?
In these situations our first response is often judgmental or condemning. If someone has a fit of temper in the office, for instance, this often leads to office gossip and disapproval. Yet, the person may truly regret having lost their temper. A good question to ask here is not so much, ‘Why did they lose their temper?’ as ‘Why did they need to lose their temper?’. Similarly, if someone starts crying, a good thing to try to understand is, ‘What (emotion) are they trying to communicate by crying?’. Our behaviors are ways we communicate, and if a person is not communicating in a ‘socially-acceptable’ way, they still are trying to communicate something, so it is important for others to listen. In these situations, it is possible that their efforts at the ‘socially-acceptable’ way of communicating have failed, they do not have a script for the situation, and things have snowballed from there. I recall one situation where someone was yelling, ‘If I tell you I do not know how long it will take me, it means that I actually do not know how long it will take me!’ The initial failure to communicate provoked the outburst; thus some of the fault for the ‘bad behavior’ rests on the person who did not listen to their colleague in the first place.
If you see signs of toxic masking in a teammate, colleague, or in someone you manage, how can you adjust to ease their situation? The key here is respect. We respect our coworkers by listening to them, and by accepting what they say even if we do not fully understand it. We respect our coworkers by asking them how we can adjust our behaviors and situations to ease their burdens — by effectively taking some of the adjustment requirements off of their shoulders and taking them on our own shoulders. We respect our coworkers by valuing them as peers, rather than trying to use power or privilege to make things more comfortable for ourselves.
The Cost of Masking
In order for us to have a truly diverse workplace, everyone needs to be able to bring their full selves to the workplace. Requiring people to mask in order to ‘fit in’ not only exhausts them, it also prevents us from taking advantage of the full strengths that their diversities provide. Requiring people to use ‘acceptable’ language and social cues places a cognitive load on them which saps their ability to apply that brain power to other things. The mental effort required by a person to make others more comfortable takes away from the time and effort they have available for actually doing their jobs. Masking then is all about the privilege of the majority culture, and it is a diversity squasher.
The cost of the mask is not only to the person doing the masking, although that cost is significant and not to be ignored. The cost of the mask is also to your workplace and its wellbeing. The cost of the mask is an inability to use all employees to their fullest capacity, and to have everyone be successful and engaged. The cost of the mask is a loss of innovation, creativity, and productivity.
Giving people the freedom to take down their masks in the workplace requires adjustment by all for the purposes of building trust. When people can come to the office and know that their colleagues want to listen to them and understand their worldview and viewpoints, when people can accept that something might be true that they don’t really understand, then we can start building the trust required to enable people to start unmasking. It is only once people can be comfortable unmasking that we will be able to take advantage of the full benefits of diversity.
Misty Nodine Coaching 