Autistic women: a life more ordinary

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Why do women make up only one in four of those diagnosed as autistic? Could it be that they are simply better at pretending not to be? Charlotte Moore meets a group of women for whom 'normal' is an alien language that they battle to learn

I am in Godalming, Surrey, sitting with a group of pleasant, personable women who have come together, as they do each month for an all-women's night, to share news, views and experiences. You'd imagine that the room would be alive with a babble of voices, but it's not. The gossipy, reciprocal flow of normal female conversation is absent, and so far not one of them has asked me, a stranger, a single question about myself or what I am doing here. The stilted atmosphere would strike outsiders as disconcertingly weird, but these women are oblivious to the awkwardness. They are autistic, and for them this is normality.
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Very nice link. Wouldn't that be nice...being in a group of quiet people who have no need to ask nosey personal questions? I'm not sure why girls are less likely to be diagnosed. Maybe it is because we relate better to, and act more like, NT males? I can certainly agree with the article on that point.

Thanks for link to article.
Have read the book "Women from Another Planet", and it's neat to hear more about them.

Makes me a little envious, though, because I dearly wish I had group like this (speaking as a woman with AS myself) accessible to my geographic location.
However, there aren't even enough (recognized) adults with AS nearby (since I live too far from urban centers) to have a group for "non-children", "non-parents": just "grown up" individuals (with ASD themselves)-let alone, have a group comprised only of females with AS.
Y'know ?

Autism and AS seem to affect women very differently than men. Moreover, aspergers in women seems to be FAR LESS obvious than in men. That may be why aspie girls go relatively unnoticed in childhood whereas with aspie boys its very clear something is amiss once they reach the age where they should be talking and running around.

I think the traits do manifest somewhat differently in women. At the same time, when I was young, it was clear something was amiss; all my teachers informed my parents that I had social problems in school. (I was a child back in the days before kids were being diagnosed). My parents went through great effort to "make me more social". I felt pressured to make friends with people my own age, but this in turn made me feel totally anxious...I was basically scared of the other children. (I vaguely remember being forced to have kids over to play). It was clear that this was something "important", and my self esteem was on the line. I wonder: would I have been treated differently, or would there have been less pressure put on me, had I been a boy? Because of this situation, it became clear to me that I had to "act social" and get by somehow. Basically, I learned to coast through. I also observed people- a lot- and did a lot of reading on the subject. Because of my experience, I think that probably women learn how to "blend" better because so much pressure is put on them to do so.

As for me, I've always seemed "different" through all my childhood (the AS diagnosis wasn't invented then, though.)
But maybe it was because my parents had my two NT sisters to compare to, and I was different from them.

Autsertiveness awareness topic

I know I was more timid when in my twenties (I was overwhelmed by child rearing, I believe, and lacking in self esteem) and it is only in the past two years that i have become more assertive, perhaps as a result of menopause. Yep, you read this right. Without the hormonal surges I am much more level headed (though I will defend myself very quickly). I actually have become more true to type, rational (though I will become passionate about an issue). I think more clearly--this is the best time of my life. I hope other women also find a time when they are happiest being themselves.

Autsome Auticle, sinsboldly.

I love this article.

Oh I was definitely different and autism was not as known back in the day either. But my psych said "that it is easy to not label women under the spectrum because many times the traits can be missed". I am not sure if I agree with that 100%. Sometimes it may be true, some women under the spectrum may have pretty good social skills and that could be why it is missed?? I don't know.

Sorry for jumping in on this forum where I'm not gender qualified, but this topic is exceptionally interesting. It's probably the biggest mystery about Asperger's.

If you're gonna say that a condition occurs four times more often in one gender than the other, the first and most obvious question is why. I can't figure out why so many "experts" simply accept this extreme gender bias, as if it was a perfectly normal thing.

I don't have much faith in the pharmaceutical corporations or the public relations "medical researchers" they generously finance, but still I think it's most probable that the cause of Asperger's is genetic.

Asperger's is a syndrome, a set of characteristics that occur together. In the case of Asperger's, these characteristics seem wildly unrelated; inability to perceive or transmit nonverbal communication, obsessive interest in obscure topics, extreme responses to sensory inputs.

This is far from certain, but I'm inclined to believe there's an "aspie gene," or I don't see how there could be a recognizable syndrome, these unusual and seemingly unrelated traits would almost never occur together. The technical term is pleiotropy, where one gene influences multiple traits, generally by switching on or off the action of several other genes.

The aspie gene is very likely recessive, since it seems pretty clear that aspies produce fewer children than the overall population average. Dominant genes that reduce reproductive output tend to get eliminated from populations pretty quickly because their effects are manifested any time they occur. Rare recessives that reduce reproductive output can stay around in populations for a long time because they're usually hiding in stealth mode, invisible to natural selection.

One possible explanation for the reported aspie gender bias could be that the aspie gene is located on either the X or Y chromosome. We can rule out the Y right away, or there would be no aspie females at all.

I've seen a couple of reports suggesting that the genetic basis for autism might be carried on the X chromosome, but this doesn't seem to be a widely accepted view among the DNA types, and it wouldn't explain the facts very well. Let's assume it's correct and see what it would mean.

Recessive genetic conditions carried on the X chromosome manifest more often in males, since males only have one X chromosome, so the corresponding dominant gene that would otherwise mask the recessive isn't around. A female needs to draw two matching rare cards out of the deck. A male only needs to draw one.

It's safe to say that Asperger's very often goes undiagnosed, so nobody really has any idea how many of us are out there. Let's take a guess and say that one percent of males are aspies. Every one of those males had a mother carrying the aspie gene on one X chromosome, so the aspie gene is carried by a minimum of one percent of females and presumably an equivalent number of males. The actual number would be higher, since not every female carrying the aspie gene would pass it on to a son, so let's say two percent of the population is carrying the aspie gene on the X chromosome.

So how many aspie females would be born under this scenario? Females get one X chromosome from each parent. The frequency of a female carrying the aspie gene breeding with an aspie male would be two percent times two percent, or 0.04 percent, but only half the female offspring would have two copies of the aspie gene, so the actual number of aspie females in the population would be 0.02 percent.

That means that if the aspie gene is a recessive located on the X chromosome, there would be five hundred aspie males for every aspie female. I don't think this corresponds to reality.

So let's assume the aspie gene is somewhere other than the X and Y chromosomes. That would give us a straight 50-50 ratio, half of all aspies are male and half female.

So why the widely reported four to one bias?

Let's start by following the basic rule of science and assume the simplest possible explanation, making as few assumptions as possible, and going for more complex explanations only when the simplest explanation doesn't fit the facts.

Let's consider the possibility that Asperger's manifests itself exactly the same in females as it does in males. What would cause the perception of a gender bias?

Let's assume too that wrongplanet is a more or less accurate representation of the aspie experience.

It seems to me that aspie males have a more difficult time fulfilling the expectations of male behavior than aspie females have of fulfilling the expectations of female behavior. This by itself could explain the perceived gender bias with no need for any further assumptions.

I'm not inclined to attribute this to "culture" or "society" because this "cultural" expectation seems to occur worldwide, throughout history, and back into mythology and legend. For this reason, I'm inclined to suspect it's more fundamental than culture, and culture is merely a superficial manifestation of something more basic.

An example from my own family. My aspie brother, after getting his master's degree, was dissatisfied with his job. He was fascinated with sports photography, and wanted to see if he could become a professional photographer. My parents were horrified, and they found it impossible to shut up about it, telling him he was "wasting his education."

Because he was male, it was assumed that he was required to work in the highest status job he was able to get, regardless of what he really wanted to do.

If my sister had completed her master's degree and decided she wanted to be a professional photographer, nobody would have objected.

Nothing conclusive there of course, but perhaps nothing atypical either.

Note that the change in perception of gender roles during the last half century hasn't much effected male roles. Society's view of female doctors has changed much more than society's view of male nurses. Society's view of female lawyers has changed much more than society's view of male secretaries.

Hollywood sells people what they want to buy. Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in the movie Kindergarten Cop was able to establish the legitimacy of a male working as a kindergarten teacher only because the character was introduced at the beginning of the movie beating people up and blasting down walls with a shotgun to terrify dangerous criminals.

This isn't by any means certain, but I'm inclined to think that might be the explanation for the mysterious four to one ratio, all the explanation that's required.

Okay, this thread is interesting, so I´m back now...
I guess, the first time I looked at the original Post, I missed the article completely- I just went ahead and said my piece (sorry! I tend to do that sometimes). Now that I finally read the article, I would like to say that I agree; I think more women have autism than are actually diagnosed (the logic of which was very well explained by CanyonWind). Interesting article...I was also one of those passive but "not always fully there" kinds of children, I even went through an anorexic phase for a little while...(luckily I got out of that...)

Anyway, here is an article I found explaining how the traits may show up differently in women: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7616555.stm

Of course, as some women on this thread suggested, sometimes the manifestation of Asperger´s Syndrome show up similarly in women as they do in men, and maybe those are the women who tend to be diagnosed (the 1 in 4); maybe the other "3" have some different traits, OR just learn to get by better (girls often have higher social expectations put on them at a young age- I know I did!) I´m curious what will come up as they research this more...