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Comment by mathgeek | Hacker News Reader

So, honest question: how is this not discrimination?

Not that I feel discriminated against personally, but it seems like they'd be opening themselves up to a HUGE legal liability. You can't hire someone based on their gender identity or the color of their skin, but you can hire based on a physical difference in the brain?

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Autism is, in some aspects, a handicap, so this is not much different from programmes to help e.g. blind people. Or more neutral a programme to help types of underrepresented people like women or certain races.

You could maybe qualify it as positive discrimination, but nowhere it's said that autistic people will have a higher chance of a job so it's not even really that.

Uh, it's completely acceptable to "discriminate" against people based on factors that relate to their ability to succeed in the job. I don't think it's controversial that people's social skills or style of social interaction has a bearing on their job performance. You can argue to what extent and so on, but it's bizarre to think that it's not relevant.

"People who do not have a disability" are not a protected class, while people with disabilities are. This seems intuitive enough to me...

The problem with this statement is that you need to define "a disability." You will immediately have to deal with the problem of classifying clinical depression, for example.

You know this has already been done, and clinical depression is indeed considered a disabling condition, right? Check out the ADA and SSDI.

Yes, I'm aware of it. I was making sure that the respondant was, as it's the classic example of why you can't simply say "has a disability" as a way of classifying individuals. Plenty of people have disabilities that you cannot easily identify, let alone require them to disclose.

It is and what people consider permissible discrimination is subjective as we see here.

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