Is my manager being reasonable or is this discrimination? New grad, autism diagnosis, probation at risk. (UK based)

I won't comment on the legal issue. But whether you think they're being fair with you, or not, I think you should try correcting some of the issues they mentioned.

She saw me wearing my coat and holding my bag in an internal meeting (it was the last meeting of the day)

This one should be easy enough.

She saw me eating during a meeting

This one should easy enough as well (unless it's a working lunch, in which case, you should document the fact that it's a working lunch and other people are eating).

She saw me occasionally scrolling my phone during an 8-hour team away-day seminar

This one can be tough. Many people are addicted to their phones. If you can't spend your day away from your phone, I'd suggest you get yourself a dumb phone during your working hours, and at least for the remainder of your probationary period.

None of these were flagged to me at the time.

It doesn't matter. For now, I think you should assume the best of intentions. And you should do your best to take corrective actions.

Even if they have bad intentions, continuously trying to improve your behavior should give you brownie points, for your legal case, should the worst happen.

Note that I specifically didn't mention "eye contact", I wouldn't worry about that one. If they fire you for that reason, they'll get themselves in trouble. I'm surprised they mentioned it at all.

Unfortunately your situation illustrates perfectly why disclosing things like autism is such a minefield, been there, done that - didn't even get a lousy t-shirt!

Now I don't for one minute think this is what you are doing, but from your manager's perspective they were raising legitimate performance issues that placed you passing probation in jeopardy - and you responded by weaponizing a diagnosis to make it difficult to get rid of you. So they think you're fighting dirty and have responded to that by doubling down on their desire to get rid of you, even though the original performance issues have now been resolved.

The legal protections that are in place, while better than nothing, aren't perfect - they prevent the most blatant abuses but ultimately if a company wants rid of you then all that requires them to do is get a bit more creative in the reasoning so as to avoid contravening the letter of the law. Even if that is nothing more than making you low-key miserable until you leave of your own volition.

In your case you're less than 2 years in to your employment with them so all they need is a reason that isn't considered "automatically unfair" and that's that.

It's not all doom and gloom. You've got two things going for you at this point - firstly your manager isn't doing a particularly good job of making their efforts look unrelated to your autism. The "eye contact" reasoning feels like a spectacular misstep on their part, even the most ill-informed HR dept in the world is going to know that's a stereotypical autistic behaviour, the other "issues" aren't really in the same category, but they're also incredibly thin (and more than a little petty IMO).

Secondly HR seems to at least be reasonable about the situation - which suggests that getting rid of you is the manager's agenda not the company's, and they're agreeing that the "complaints" aren't particularly concerning. The potential problem is when multiple minor issues come together to form part of a larger pattern. Take the "eating during a meeting" and "had coat on, bag ready during meeting", neither are particularly heinous but together they can start to look like you don't consider meetings to be important or worthy of your full attention. So I'd be addressing those, and any similar behaviours as a priority. Especially since neither are things I'd be expecting any accommodation for your autism to cover, but they are things you can "fix", so there's no need to panic just yet!

Still, there's no guarantee that this situation can be salvaged - ultimately it may come down to how far the manager is willing to push this and whether the company would rather keep them (an established employee) or you (a new starter). If you want to stay then your best bet is probably to grit your teeth and show as much willing as you can - keep the performance levels up, keep doing what you can to display engagement/interest. Essentially either outlasting the manager's stamina to try and poke at you or that they get told to back off. Pay attention to the cultural fit aspect as well, "just" doing the job well is not always enough, sometimes this is going to mean observing the norms of the culture around you and adjusting your mask as best as possible to conform to that, it might seem bewilderingly pointless, and it will almost certainly be tedious and exhausting but sometimes it's just what you have to do.

It is probably worth at least having a conversation with ACAS, they're independent and there to help - and if the situation devolves further they can advise you on your options and how to proceed.

As for any future roles the question of whether to disclose or not is one you have to answer for yourself. I've been working for over three decades now and personally it's never gone well for me when I've disclosed, but that doesn't mean my experience is universal. What I would say is that when weighing up whether to disclose or not consider how much you need the job at the time - for example if you're in a stable position and just shopping around for a possible better role elsewhere then you can disclose as part of the interviewing process and if it doesn't work out then you've not really lost anything beyond a little time. Conversely if you're in dire need of a job to pay the bills and don't have anything to fall back on then keep schtum and mask like your life depends on it. If you ever need to defend yourself or your performance at a role (regardless of whether you have already disclosed or not) only mention the autism if it's a direct factor, anything else is asking for trouble.

Summary

In addition to many points mentioned in other answers, I see communication issues at work here which are central to autism. I'd personally refrain from calling the described situation discrimination. Some requests (eye contact) are clearly unreasonable, though. For the other issues, more details would be needed to find out the underlying causes and then decide what is reasonable and acceptable.

• Discrimination: even though in discrimination the legal burden is (here in Germany) on the employer - and rightly so -, for personal consideration I'd still be willing to give the manager the benefit of the doubt (or apply Hanlon's razor if you prefer): their behaviour can be explained by lack of knowledge about autism which lead to disaster when typical communication issues happened.

  To be clear: it is the manager's duty to get themselves informed so that they can implement suitable accommodations when they learn about health-related or disability issues of someone in their team. The manager here clearly failed. Sadly, from what I see around me, such failure can and does happen even with best intent. Which of course does not exclude ill intent on the side of your manager - I just don't know.

  Personally, I find that it is better for my mental well-being to assume mistakes rather than ill intent, so intentionally rather err on the side of thinking better of people than they may be. But there is an important companion-thought to this: either the mistake can be resolved in a civilized manner, or I take other action to ensure I won't suffer from such mistakes in future. In the described situation, I'd tend to count the meeting with HR as civilized attempt to resolve things - which so far has not worked out sufficiently well. I'd start thinking about finding another team & manager (but see below).

• If you conclude there is discrimination, the next question is what to do about it. IMHO it is a tough choice and one that should be considered well, possibly with the help of someone with whom you can discuss the details of your situation.

  It may be the right choice to fight the discrimination - others have written advise on this.

  But this is hard and strenuous, already so for people whose disability does not include communication issues! The reversed burden of proof clearly helps, but it doesn't work miracles. Thus, it would also be valid to conclude that for your very own well-being it is better to not fight this battle and instead invest your energy in finding a position that is better for you.

• In any case: at the very least the eye-contact request of the manager is entirely unreasonable (as others have already written), and so is expecting "corrected" behaviour without giving timely constructive feedback and a properly followed procedure to arrive at an appropriate and acceptably solution for the underlying issue.

• Accommodations you may want to ask:

  • Likely required though no direct mention in the post: manager should communicate in a clear, direct and unambiguous, yet friendly way.
  • Manager should give immediate constructive feedback whenever seemingly inappropriate behaviour is encountered, and
  • a process to search for better solutions for the underlying issues is needed. Usually, that would be up to the manager - but here a third person who can translate between autistic team member and NT manager may be needed.

  All 3 are likely vital to you, but the first 2 (if not no. 3 as well) are good for all employees. Which means good chances that HR will like these requests.

• (Lack of) Cultural fit: even if the manager would be willing, that doesn't guarantee that she is actually able to accommodate your communication needs. Depending on the size of the company, there may be some other more suitable team, or they may all operate in an extremely neurotypical way - which means that you'll have to expect continuous misunderstandings even if they can be cleared up afterwards. As strangers on the internet, we cannot know.

• Personal skill development:

  • IMHO it will be very important to find ways of constructively dealing with such communication issues: there are infinite further possibilities how these communication issues can manifest... similar issues are likely to come up again and again.
    Thus, you'll need working strategies how to get useful accommodation in practice.

  • A related important skill is to recognize where one fits sufficiently well (or: what can be expected and what is then the level of misunderstandings that just happens), and where it is better to leave. But this is life experience that IMHO one cannot possibly have at the first employment.

    The most important part of this skill to me is: knowing when it is better for oneself to leave. It's your well-being that is at stake here.

  • Both skills are IMHO sufficiently important to bring up with a therapist (not sure whether it belongs more into psycho- or ergotherapy, though).
    Also autistic peer-groups can help, since they can gather quite a lot of experience with workplace trouble.

    Over here, autism diagnosis can get one access to psycho- and ergotherapy. Finding a therapist who is knowledgeable on autism in adults, plus a good fit personally, is still a challenge though.

Example: disaster by lack of knowledge by employer with best intentions

A professional acquaintance of mine who runs his own lab business was willing to take an autistic employee. They contacted the unemployment office who also sent someone from the official employment integration/accommodation services. The latter guide employers and employees to appropriate accommodations for the specific case. The employer relied on this service to provide them with useful guidance. Unfortunately, he did not himself have sufficient knowledge about autism to detect that this official guidance was totally off (as in: they didn't even warn him that doing phone call duty for incoming customer calls is most likely impossible). By the time the employer started to realize something was seriously off, the autistic employee had decided that they cannot do the job, and asked him could he please fire her (which is better for the employee than cancelling the contract themselves, due to unemployment insurance law).

Also the autistic employee was not able to communicate their reasons nor needs to the employer - but then of course, that's a) inherently to be expected with autism and b) the reason why those accommodation services are called in.

I may add that I've met information about autism that was presented in what I consider quite a misleading way (e.g. by leaving out any explanation how described behaviour is rational under typical sensory peculiarities). That sadly includes an information event that was run by a parents organization.

If official integration/accommodation services and parent organizations spread misleading information, how can one expect even willing employers/managers to arrive at helpful conclusions?

If anything smells like discrimination your best shot is to engage professional legal help. There complicated laws around this and strangers on the internet are not a reliable source of information. Citizens Advise is a great start, but you can also consider talking to a local labor lawyer.

You should start immediately documenting any related interaction in full detail: date, time, people involved, what exactly was said (if you can remember) and e-mail, messages or SMS related to this (screens shot them and safe to a non-corporate storage media). HR fears good documentation and it helps any legal adviser to come up to speed.

Typically in cases like yours a medical professional would need to certify that there are issues and prescribe what "accommodations" you need to make this work. The company then implements those accommodations. If you are seeing a medical professional, you should discuss this with them too. You can Google "accommodations for neurodivergent employees" or something likes to figure out how this might look like and what might be applicable and helpful to you.

Even if you have specific rights here, I would tread VERY careful here. Threating legal action is highly likely to end your career there for good. Even if they can't outright fire you right now, they can make your life pretty miserable and eventually manage you out the door. It's much better if you can come to a "mutually beneficial" agreement but, again, a legal adviser can help draft this up and create a negotiation strategy.

Going forward you should consider disclosing during the interview that you need accommodation. While this is likely to lose you a few opportunities along the way, the one's that you eventually going to land, will a much better fit and more long term sustainable.

Even though there are laws against discrimination of disability, in reality it is still a minefield to disclose disabilities, as people may take issues with common behaviors of a disability.

I don’t make eye contact with her

How so? But even ill-informed managers should know that this is a typical autistic behavior. Fortunately HR agrees with you here, so perhaps the manager is the one trying to cause issues or even fire you.

She saw me wearing my coat and holding my bag in an internal meeting (it was the last meeting of the day)

I wouldn't consider this an issue myself. Subjectively, one can say it's weird. For some with autism or sensory issues wearing coats and bags may be a sensory coping mechanism. You may be in a rush to leave work so you might be wearing your coat and holding your bag. If you did not need to work after this meeting then I think this is a little petty of your manager.

She saw me eating during a meeting

Giving you the benefit of the doubt, this could be a sensory issue. However if so you need to gather the medical evidence for this.

She saw me occasionally scrolling my phone during an 8-hour team away-day seminar

Not the best behavior, but something that should not be picked on. We all occasionally get distracted. Would the manager cite someone for occasionally looking out the window during an 8-hour seminar? If not, and they do not have disabilities, you might have a case here.

None of these were flagged to me at the time. She’s using them as examples of me “not paying attention,” even though HR said individually these behaviours aren’t normally concerning.

This feels suspicious to me. HR even admitted individually these behaviors 'aren't normally concerning'. Then why are they having issues to these behaviors later than that time?

I believe that you are judged on things that do not objectively matter.

I would advise you going forward that you do need accommodations in the workplace and, if accepted, to supply the medical evidence for such accommodations. Immediately document each interaction in full detail and save these in a safe place. Then when you file your complaint (if you wish) state this and the reasoning as well as the claim, whether that be discrimination, harassment or creating an unsafe work environment, or bullying, or anything you wish to formally complain.

In my opinion it is unfortunate that many with such disabilities face these petty issues and that the law has flaws. Societal change takes a long time. Until then (or if it even comes) you should step up and advocate for yourself and for the people who depend on you.