Why are there so many AS females on wrongplanet?

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I thought that autism is like 8 times as prevalent in males, but I've noticed so many of wrongplanet's members are female.

-Male speaking here...

I agree with the fact that females aren't getting diagnosed and whether we are self diagnosed or finally find a true diagnosis we find Wrongplanet first and come here to talk of are issues and find out there are others like us. If females were diagnosed like males it'd be more equal ratio on WP. Sadly it's not.

It's because we find WP while doing searches and that kind of thing, and when we read posts by other women on the spectrum, we go, "Wow! That's just like me! For the first time in my life, I'm seeing that there are other people who experience life like I do!" So we stick around.

But a lot of us are not diagnosed, because the professionals who do the diagnosing only understand how AS tends to show itself in boys.

I saw the website advertised on myspace and I was bored. I clicked the link and read a few post and, basically, though "Oh my God...they sound like...me!". And, so, here I am.

Because that is diagnosed. One of the things many researchers have found out is ASD manifest differently in Women. Alot of women fell through the cracks, and many psych professionals will not diagnose a woman with ASD. There is still alot of sexism built around this issue, and when they were creating the diagnostic requirements, even that was built around men. This is why you have alot of women who get diagnosed with PDD-NOS at a young age, then lose the diagnosis or have it replaced with NLVD. One can also ask why is NLVD now twice as prevaliant amoung women...when many of these women exhibit many of the same manifestations of AS.

They are all relevant questions...One of the things is that number used to be 8 times as many...more recent statistics say its 4 times as many. One of the problems is doctors didn't do a good job with recognizing it in women because it is more subtle and the manifestation is different than it is for boys.

The answers are COMPLEX. The best answer...it is just easier to spot with boys, but that doesn't mean its any less common with women.

I've wondered what the actual M/F ratio on WP is. Do we have an admin, moderator, or someone else with those stats? It'd be interesting to find out what the ratio actually is.

I'm here as a mother of a nonverbal auntie who's male, alot of mothers are on the parenting forum. I find it a helpful to get insight here because my son doesn't speak very much and when he does it's mostly to tell me things like th world is made up of "cheese and notcheese, and he is made of cheese". Cute but not very helpful.

It's because they have something to say and share .... The rest of us (males) just don't know what to say -

actually I truly see truth in that. We women is somehow in more need to speak out and express feelings and experiences and therefor we might get more attention here
I have that impressions of males in general that you "dont know what to say", that you are not that expressive as women. But of course there is examples showing the other way round

As for me I got the impressions that there is a LOT of Men here and miss to see more women.... wondering what I have missed...

ANd that's a problem?

Females are being let down by the system. I imagine many have had a lifetime of being misdiagnosed, then stumbled across Aspergers in one way or another and had a revelation. In fact, there have been several articles recently in the Uk press expressing that females on the spectrum are being let down by a system that does not recognise that females tend to present the traits differently to males. It has been found, for example, that 1 in 20 females with anorexia meet the criteria for Aspergers. That comes from Tony Attwood. I know there are some working to change this and educate diagnosticians in the differences between how males and females with Aspergers present. But this is probably why there is a disparity between the ratios...because females on the spectrum are being misdiagnosed, or missed altogether.

I think Graelwyn made an important point.

LOL, I made a thead not too long asking why there was more men than women on WP.

As for me, I was put through one doctor and therapist after another half of my life and no one brought up autism or aspergers. They still couldn't get what was wrong with me and why I isolated myself from people. Most of them asked and even suggested that I had been traumatized in my childhood or the possiblity of having been raped......which never happened.

Needless to say one therapist who happened to be female ironically asked if I had ever been diagnosed for aspergers. I asked her what it was and she gave me a pamplet about it. I showed it to my family and my family looked it up. They were all pretty much in agreement that I definitely seem to show much of the characteristics. It took me a long time before I was diagnosed and like the OP said, I was told it was more prevalent in males. But now I'm learning through many articles and studies that this isn't so or at least not as prevalent as we once thought.

Anyway I really didn't know much about the real ratio in terms of male to female aspergers but I'm sure there's probably more females than males who go undiagnosed. I think what some people said here is true, females tend to display them differently than males and I think it's expected of us to be shyer and more introverted than our male counterparts.

Really? I always thought that females were expected to be more talkative and have the stereotype of chattering all the time.

There seems to be a lot of women stereotypes but shyness and passivity seem to be the ones I hear a lot.

we just present differently so we fly under the radar.