Autism why boys

And when I did my study looking at undiagnosed women, they tended to have better social functioning and empathy, which can easily mask autistic traits. Historically, the diagnostic measures have been based largely on a male perspective due to the stereotypical view of autism.

If a girl doesn't fit this profile, their symptoms can easily be misinterpreted as something else. As a result, many females with autism are misdiagnosed and miss out on the support they need.

Also speaking was Dr Pooky Knightsmith , who explained how these stereotypes can cause many issues when trying to spot autism in girls.

Because no single symptom means that you must have a diagnosis - and because there isn't a single symptom that means you can rule out a diagnosis - we must consider a variety of factors when trying to diagnose autism in females. Special interests are one of the most common characteristics of people with autism. Again, this can present differently in females, as Pooky explained. Many people will say things like, 'Oh, maybe he's autistic.

An autistic girl might have a special interest similar to that of a neurotypical girl but may not be recognised for her special interests. The intensity of her interest is what makes her different from the neurotypical girl, and this can present itself in several ways, such as the way she talks. While many autistic children don't speak much, others may talk about their special interest frequently and in great detail. For autistic girls, their speech may appear neurotypical but typically, they tend not to engage in small talk, and this can be a problem when interacting with other girls during childhood and adolescence.

This can lead to girls with autism naturally developing mechanisms to help them to interact with people more successfully. This can come at a huge cost to themselves and means that we often don't pick up on important issues. My year-old daughter is autistic. When hearing about the things she finds hard at school and then reflecting on my own school days, I wonder how I got through it. She also wants to track the changes in cortex measurements over the lifespan, to see if the male and female differences remain from infancy throughout adolescence or whether they begin to appear later in life.

Contact us at letters time. By Alice Park. Related Stories. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Male brains tend to be disproportionately larger than female brains. On standard IQ tests, men and women consistently test to the same average score—but that is by design, since the tests are structured to elicit an average of among the general population.

When IQ tests were first being developed, girls routinely scored higher than boys up until around the age of Despite having the same overall average, within some components of the overall IQ test there are differences in scores between men and women. Interestingly, different tests have found that women tend to score higher on verbal abilities while men outperform on visuospatial abilities.

Taken to extremes, of course, this almost perfectly describes one of the core symptoms of ASD: deficits in verbal communication. So if men are already inclined to be less skilled at verbal communication, is this what makes them more susceptible to autism? According to some researchers, the reason is that autism is an excessive expression of those aspects of brain development that are already pronounced in the male brain.

The extreme male brain theory posits that it is an overdevelopment in the male traits of cognition that causes ASD patients to over-systematize, leading to a breakdown of verbal and social capacities.