Is AS more common in boys, girls or neither?

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I've always wondered, because during my ponderings around on AS research on Wikipedia, I recall reading that there's a certain ratio of occurence for AS in boys and girls. Somewhere I read it was 1 girl for every four guys, but on another source I read it was 1 girl for every 100 guys!! ! I'm not beleiving a shred of it until I get some evidence or at least an opinion, because I'd really like to know. Just by being here, I can tell that this 1:100 thing should be re-considered.

So yeah, anyone got some evidence, articles, facts and junk for us?

I'm too lazy to look it up but its thought a different set of genes cause female Autism.
Low fuctioning Autism LFA is in fact more commom in women. I have seen the 4:1 figure
for aspergers/HFA. Some say because women are under reported.

I have a feeling based on experience the ratio of male/female autistics is nearer 1:1, a lot of male autistics I have met offline were diagonsed as children and teenagers, while the females were diagonsed later on life, as young adults. There are likely a lot of undiagonsed female autistics.

Boys and men almost always get more medical attention than girls and women, so the ratio could very well be 1:1.

I don't believe either ratio if they are substantially different. If the two ratios were more consistent like, say, 1:4 and 1:5, then I might believe it. But 1:4 and 1:100--that is highly suspect to me.

Tim

I think the ratio is closer to 50/50, myself. I also think that the degree that a person is affected has to do with Personality and motivation, other than Gender.

I personally think it's equal. It's just that when looking for an Aspie partner, it seems like the females are either (a) already in a relationship, or (b) not looking.

Tim

I believe it is about even.

However more effort (by parents and family) is put into teaching girls to behave properly - socially. So Aspie girls learn to hide their Aspergers much quicker than boys.

So Tony Attwood (www.tonyattwood.com.au) says - the ratio in diagnosing children is about 4 boys to every 1 girl. But in adults getting diagnosed for the first time it's more like two men for every 1 woman.

I think when more is known especially among the "professionals" - the diagnosis rate will be about even between male and female.

I concur. Although we have what's termed an "extreme male brain", the corresponding sensitivities that come with that are simillar to ordinary female characteristics. I suspect that the ratio is about equal, but that some of our characteristics are more easily accepted in females than males, and therefore those NT diagnosticists have a harder time telling the difference between ordinary femininity and Aspie/Autie traits.

A logically-minded female with poor social skills will be considered a studious worker during school years, whereas the same traits in a male will seem unusual, and (supposedly) require attention.

I think the mental health industry's view that asperger's is predominantly a male condition is equivalent to their belief that depression primarily affects females, ignoring the fact that males kill themselves four times as often and die eight years earlier (depression does not promote longevity). History proves that stuff "everybody knows" is very often wrong.

The mental health industry went from worshipping freud to worshipping butch without even tapping the brakes as they sped past reality. Their so called theoretical and empirical work is just plain dumb, and I have never seen evidence that even one of them has any integrity or conscience as an individual.

Asperger's can be characterized as an "extreme male brain" which primarily affects males. That's why aspie males end up at the bottom of male heirarchies, why they do not appeal to females, and why they so often get characterized as "fa***ts".

I know, they got data. Like Kurt Vonnegut said somewhere, "Most of the people who describe themselves as scientists are actually just technicians." If it don't make no sense, it don't make no sense. That's what real science is all about.

All my real world experience with aspergers tells me that the 4 males to 1 woman ratio is real and the cause is not lack of diagnosis, it's just that more males are born with it. I don't think there's a problem with the diagnosis because I diagnosed them, hehehe, and after so much research, I know my kin.

Like most things, I'm not sure.

That's incredibly subjective. See, in my experience, it's very close. Women in my family are just as likely to have AS or strong AS traits. In fact, since there's more women in my family and AS comes from my grandmothers' sides of the family on both my mom and dad sides, AS women are more common in my family. See, that's how the logic of subjectivity works - only as far as the subject's experience.

As a special ed teacher, I know my school district has far more male LFAs & PDD-NOS than female. In many schools, there are no female LFAs/PDD-NOSs at all.

The ratio for male to female students with AS is extremely close, overall. However boys with AS are more likely to have serious comobrid conditions like ODD, IED or ADHD, or simply be more disruptive in class, thus require to be "pulled out" into a self-contained spec ed class more often than females. So if you walked into one of our self-contained spec ed classes, it would look like AS students are more likely to be boys, but it would be misleading.

On the other hand, female AS students in our district are more likely to remain in regular ed classes (although they still are technically spec ed and require an IEP - Individualized Education Plan) and often do better academically and socially than the boys. They are far less likely to require further specialization due to comorbidity, and they pass the test for Gifted and Talented test more often than AS boys.

But that's only one public school district. But I note that some of these stats reflect Attwood's findings fairly closely.

Last edited by Cade on 14 Oct 2006, 1:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've seen different numbers quoted by the "experts." I've seen 1:3, 1:4 and another study that said it was "somewhere between 1:10 - 1:15" but I've never seen anything say anything higher than that. Certainly not 1:100. I've also read that all types of learning disorders are much higher in boys than in girls (at approximately the same ratios).

My personal opinion is that the difference isn't THAT huge, but that there still is a difference. I think it might be 1:3 or even 1:2.

Like pretty much everything else, I think a lot of this will become clear once we have a biologically based method for diagnosing autistic disorders.

I think women might be under reported, because society doesn't place as much importance on women to assimilate, as it does for men. So if a girl acts kind of quirky, they'll say it's cute. If a guy does it, they'll call him a freak. It's one of those annoying double-standards thingies.

Women have different neurological structures, though-- not extremely different; but different. Being more communication-oriented in the first place, and more sensitive to emotions (that's probably cultural in part), they might have autistic traits offset by a female brain. And girls tend to be generalist instead of specialist; they're better at making connections between different areas of thought at the expense of being worse at specific things, while guys are better at focusing on one subject, possibly missing the connections a female would make.

I'm an Aspie girl... if I were male, I might have had that language delay and more communication problems, and been HFA instead. And even so, I wasn't diagnosed until a year ago; had I not had depression and lucked out on a psychiatrist with personal experience with AS, it's doubtful I'd ever have been diagnosed at all--just having thought of myself as a strong-willed child and an eccentric adult.

AS and being female do interact with me. I'm asexual, so there aren't any girl-guy issues to worry about; but having a female brain... definitely.
My interests are general. I jump from topic to topic, sticking with one intense interest for as little as three months (or as much as five years). But they don't stay in one area--one look at my list of interests, everything from physics to feral cats to "Lord of the Rings" (BEFORE the movies came out)--makes it clear that I'm a generalist, or at least as far as AS allows me to be. And though I go on and on about obsessions, I've also learned to make small-talk (which is boring) and to make my going-on-and-on seem at least partially "normal"--that's the female communication focus coming to the forefront. In my physics labs, where my partners were always male, I'd usually make those obscure observations that made the experiment easier for everyone--little things about the apparatus or procedure that, when changed, worked wonders. But the guys never noticed them, because they were focused on the experiment only--not on all the things that could possibly be associated with it.

Not that there's a huge difference between guy and girl brains--it's probably less than the difference between an Aspie and NT brain--but it might be enough to make the difference between being diagnosed and not. A girl who'd be diagnosed with AS might just be seen as "shy, but nice"... while the same girl with an extra Y chromosome might be seen as "a loner who needs help" when he spurns a school basketball game to read about butterflies...