Autistic Gender Imbalance Denial

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Here is something I am getting sick of hearing: "Autistic women are good at mimicry ... so there are just as many autistic women as autistic men."

That would be interesting if it were true ... but it isn't. If someone is so good at masking their disorder that they can fool a professional then they are probably normal.

Yeah ... our movement can be a sausage fest at times. So what? Sausage fests can be fun. Anyone who has played TF2 know what I'm talking about.

The way I heard it put that made a lot more sense was that in our society, girls are expected to be more social and are pushed into being more so rather than boys who are more likely to be left alone. Many girls on the spectrum end up with another more outgoing girl taking them under her wing, so to speak, which is what happened to me. We are forced to learn the rules more so than boys, and there is a bigger backlash if we fail to do so.

Is anybody denying that there is an 'imbalance' or is just that females are underdiagnosed? The ratio is like 4:1 and even higher on the higher functioning end of the spectrum so there is a lot of difference between underdiagnosed and 50:50.

Women are often diagnosed with different personality disorders - especially borderline and mixed (two labels, that basically mean: "We don´t know what´s the matter, but something is") and most of have been called "strange" and other things. Others have been so good at mimicry and being the perfect quiet girl or the one, who cares for others , that nobody knows, that anything is the matter before they simply break down.
Many have just been outsiders all their life and wondering about how other people do to fit in.

That women often seem able to function apparently flawless for a number of years before they break down does not mean, that they aren´t autistic.

The criterias have so far been built on behavior observed in boys, but our brains are very different, so finding out the female characteristrics is a newly started process and will raise discussions here and there.
Certainly it might turn up, that there is a slight overweight of boys on the spectrum, because the male gender is the "extreme" gender with bigger leaps in everything, but personally I wouldn´t tip the difference to be more than 55% boys + 45% girls.

Have there ever been a systematic study to work out if there's a gender imbalance? In other words, do we actually have any reason to believe the gender imbalance is real?

Not really.

What would help, I believe, is to determine the ratio of women/girls to men/boys on this Site.

Maybe you should start a poll

Not sure that could clear things up entirely, and also not everyone is autistic - there are parents and questioning people too.

I do think there have been studies looking into it. I'll edit in if I can find the ones I've seen before if I can find them.

Edit: http://sfari.org/sfari-community/commun ... -conundrum

Saw it on viewtopic.php?t=288422

Last edited by iliketrees on 30 Jul 2015, 8:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

I would say most on this Site on either autistic or (at least) identify as being autistic.

This would be a really big poll!

Yeah, it would. Be interesting to see the results though. Then again those would be WP's results which wouldn't necessarily be the same as the result for those with autism as a whole.

That's true, what you say....but I think the poll would illustrate the notion that there are many females "under the radar" as far as autism is concerned.

Do you actually believe there are five times as many males as females on WP?

Yeah, girls are definitely under the radar in general. But I'm still not sure if there is enough to be 1:1, I'm skeptical of that. May be as much as 3:1, even 2:1.

No, but there are more males than females - not sure if this counts as an official study of WP, but the men keep winning on this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=30&t=127319

Not to mention the women's section is fairly dead.

Yes, absolutely. Girls are also disciplined by their parents for not making eye contact, and not speaking when spoken to. Girls are told by their peers when something they do is weird or not feminine. Even NT women are often told to smile; girls' and women's "proper" behavior seems to be everyone's business, and as such girls get much more social feedback, instruction, pressure, and discipline than boys. After all, the phrase "boys will be boys" is still often used to excuse boys' rude behavior. No excuses are given to little girls.

The threshold to be undiagnosed is not that girls are so good at mimicry that experts in Autism don't notice them. The threshold to be undiagnosed is to be so good at mimicry that parents, school administrators, and pediatricians (who may know a bit about Autism but usually not much) never send girls to the expert. That is a very different standard.

That would open up another debate on what defines women/girls and men/boys.

There has already been debate on whether or not to add more categories to the Male/Female description in our member profiles, so how would it be best determined what this ratio actually is?

I wonder about this too. I have a lot of traits but I think I am more ADHD/ADD with autistic tendencies. The thing that separates me in my mind of having AS all the way is that I can generally tell implied meanings and can have a conversation about thighs I know about now. I used to have a hard time with that. I either had to be in control of the conversation or know a lot about it and I just didn't know much about a wider variety of topics. I knew a lot about Civil War medicine but generally people don't talk about that. When I was younger (like high school and college) I set out to learn or pick up bits of information about different things so that I didn't feel and look so stupid when I had no idea what peers were talking about and so that I could contribute something to the conversation. It struck me that only people who knew about a lot of things were considered intelligent and if you knew a lot about one thing that nobody else was interested in, you were just "dumb" or not "cool". I took this very seriously and thought I was stupid. I have learned how to joke around with people now without crossing serious boundaries to where they get angry and can do a three-way conversation. I was never completely literal. My "literal-ness" comes more from visualizing things that are said. For instance, you said "sausage fest". I picture real sausages fresh off a grill (hot and greasy) and "fest" is short for festival which brings to mind confetti horns and bits of paper suspended in the air. So now I am seeing sausages being thrown around. However from your context, it seems this is an antagonistic/war thing so it's like people are throwing sausages at each other in a war scene. Like paintball, just with sausages splattering but staying whole in their skins. Then I also have learned that people like to use words like "wiener" and "hot dog" as slang for male genitalia. So then I wonder if "sausage fest" is supposed to mean just a battle of wills with a weird imagery involving innocent pork sausage or if it means that males are being used once again to typify an argument or if...I lost my train of thought. But I don't know if this is "autistic literalness" or normal literalness. Anyway, I have to convert literal images to abstract concepts. Over the years it has gotten a lot faster.

I wonder if girls can fake NT so well, doesn't that mean they know the social rules enough to be NT?

Conversely, I also really relate to and understand this from Jensen.

I think women learn to play roles in different situations, totally breakdown at home or behind-the-scenes, have more motivation to learn social rules but have trouble applying them. I know in my case I over-applied them in order to stay safe and not attract too much negative attention. I was terrified of offending someone because I didn't want to be thought of as rude or careless and didn't joke around with people because I didn't know what would be funny and what wasn't. Had bad experiences in that department. We also feel the stigma of being quiet more than males do. No one of the opposite sex or even of the same sex, first thinks that a quiet girl is worth anything. Women and girls are judged in our society for their wit and charm. You don't have that and you are seen as being invalid somehow. If you aren't socially adept and "confident" you are invisible/boring, etc. Role playing is useful in classroom settings, work place settings, etc. It's a lot harder to learn in interpersonal relationships and yet you still have to copy to get by even there, never really bonding with the person because you aren't really interacting socially with them but with a representation of them in your mind that you can anticipate and control in order to get past that part and keep up with the real person. At least that is the way it is for me. I don't have to think so much anymore about appropriate facial expressions to put on but do still find myself copying others in my mind. The thing is that I can usually accurately nowadays apply these examples from others' personalities to my own interactions. I wonder still if I can coming across as fake or like I am acting and am bad at it. So is this normal or not? I don't know. Nobody talks about how they analyze interactions so I don't know.

Not to mention, older people used to say about me when I was in middle and high school, "You have to watch out for the quiet ones." I knew they meant it in jest and we're trying to give me positive attention, but what does that mean? What are they implying? I still haven't figured that one out. I should look it up I guess.

I'm a male....and the "social graces" were pressed down my throat on a regular basis when I was a child.