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The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s

“Adults have learned to compensate over time,” said Whitney Ence, a psychologist at the University of California San Francisco who works with autistic adults. “They may have learned like ‘I can’t display that in public, and so I do that in private.’”There’s also an overlap of symptoms between various disorders like ADHD and OCD that can complicate an autism diagnosis due to difficulties with nonverbal social cues or executive functions like attention span, working memory and problem-solving.

Symptoms present differently for everyone, and many of the traits are common for people without autism, like enjoying routines or enjoying going down rabbit holes of information.But to meet the diagnostic definition of autism, the symptoms must cause significant impairment, said Dr. Arthur Westover, a psychiatrist who specializes in autism at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.“We’re human beings in general. We like routines ... just having a bit of pleasure and feeling better with routines does not mean you’re autistic,” Westover said. “It goes a little bit deeper than that.”

Russell Lehmann, 34, has lived with his autism diagnosis for more than 20 years. The motivational speaker has routines that he describes as both comfortable and stressful. Eating the same food and buying the same groceries, he said, brings him comfort. But if he skips going to the gym for an hour and a half every day, he becomes overwhelmed with feelings of depression and failure.“It’s like no gym, no day,” he said. “... My routine is an incredibly existential burden, because every night I go to bed knowing I have to do a routine I do not like simply to function.”

While there are various online screening tools, autism is a complex diagnosis, so experts recommend talking to your primary care physician for a psychiatry referral.

That psychiatrist might want to interview people who were present in your early childhood, like family and friends, who can attest to symptoms being present at that time.“I’m really worried — where are these folks going to go? Who’s going to hire them?” she asked.

Employment gaps for disabled people have been an issue across the federal and private sectors for years. When the Labor Department began recording disability status in its employment trends in the Current Population Survey in 2009, just 30% of disabled people between ages 16 and 64 were working at least part time. That’s compared with 71% of people without a disability.Last year, employment rates for disabled people hit a record high of 38%, but the decades-old disparities still persisted: 75% of people without disabilities were employed that year.

Disability hiring in the federal government became a prominent effort in the 1970s, shortly after the passing of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits disability discrimination in federal agencies. Expectations to hire disabled people expanded from there.In 2014, Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration began requiring that federal contractors meet specific goals related to hiring disabled people.