Do Aspies have greater income inequality than nuerotypicals?

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I don't have any university studies, so of course, this is to be taken with some grain of salt, but according to a poll on this forum, 40% of us are professionals, 20% have average jobs and 40% are unemployed. It's basically an inverted bell curve.

With an average nuerotypical, I'd expect 30% professionals / 50% average / 20% unemployed.

It does make sense anecdotally, many of the Aspies I know are either scientists/professors making $80k a year or they're making the $8k a year that their SSI check gives them.

I guess we either use our intelligence and obsessiveness to pursue something that's in demand, or our impairments prevent us from doing so.

That is employment inequality rather than income; the latter only applies to those in comparable jobs.

Being unemployed is nonetheless low income, dependent and poor.

WP may be a sample bias (or full of liars), but I highly doubt 40% of nuerotypicals have professional careers.

True, unemployed is a low income.
However, income inequity would be where a NT programmer earns $1800 a month and an, equally skilled/experienced, aspie would earn $1500 in the same company.

You used the wrong term. (Even though the above does happen, usually becouse the aspir won't know how/dare/think of asking for a raise).

As for the real question, yes, aspies are also less likely to be employed, especially now that all jobs ask for advanced social skills.

I think that 40% of NTs having a career isnt a strange number, I think it's low even, since employment numbers only include those who *want* to work (stay-at-home parents arent seen as jobless, so they don't count in the % of working people, for example)

The real stats bare out that there is a much higher unemployment number for those on the spectrum than what is recorded on this forum not to mention underemployment, there are a lot of people here that identify with certain traits but otherwise have no noticeable deficit or disability.

I asked this question in my recent study. I am not including the results of income comparison in my thesis.

Autistic workers seem to have a problem in comparing themselves to their co-workers when it comes to knowledge that they have to guess at. I ALSO asked people if they thought any of their co-workers were on the autism spectrum. Most people were able to guess at this, I suspect because autism presence does leave "clues" such as ways of moving, speaking, and behaving.

But when it comes to comparing their salaries to their co-worker's salaries, most people seemed to have trouble guessing. I suspect a lot of people had never thought about it.

As a test, I asked a few neurotypicals, and they seemed to spend a lot of time comparing themselves to others and wondering what other people make. It was easy for them to give me sure and immediate answers. They even had guesses as to why they thought they made more or less than others.

Your other point is about the basic employment of people on the autism spectrum. The vast majority of people in my study were employed, at the appropriate level for their experience and education. It was a HIGHER than expected employment rate, based on the US and UK employment figures for ALL people. The "90% under- and unemployed" figure that is often quoted in the media for autistic workers is a myth. I have spent a lot of time tracking it down and it goes back to a small study of a UK vocational program. 90% of those people were under and unemployed going into the program, which is what you would expect. You wouldn't go into a vocational program if you had a job you were happy with.

I'm on the milder end of the spectrum, have a graduate degree and an in-demand niche set, so have never had trouble finding work. A not insignificant number of my colleagues are also on the spectrum - as I work in a field where all eggs in the brains basket and none left for social skills is more or less par for the course.

The trick is to be way more useful than you are difficult as a result of disability, i.e. replacing me would be very expensive + the new person would need 1-2 years of training to do my job. My employer (and every employer I've had) was willing to accommodate me, i.e. no direct reports, as few client meetings as possible, as little travel as possible.