Girl_Kitten wrote:
It's 1-2% of the population but five times as many boys as girls. Women and girls often (though not always) show Autistic traits differently especially as we get older because of the increased social pressure and greater punishment for showing Autistic traits. There is no logical reason why boys would be that much more Autistic than girls, except for imperfect identification. Here on WP, repeated polls show a much closer to 1:1 ratio of men to women on the spectrum. While those polls aren't carefully controlled and my suffer from self-selection bias or other variables, they are still replicable and still point to a problem. If men and women are Autistic at approximately the same rate but only one woman is identified for every five men, that means that there are likely four women unidentified for every six people who are identified. It would mean that our population is roughly 3% Autistic when factoring this in, not 1-2%.
This is just one place, it is online, it is a forum, any member (not just autistic ones) can vote (it's the gender of our members, not of autistic people). All of those factors (and more) mean, even if repeatedly done on this site, the results mean nothing for actual incidence rates. If autistic girls want to find other girls with autism and they see this site has its own subforum (women's discussion) it'll obviously attract them here as opposed to other autistic sites. And women may just be slightly more likely to want to discuss their life with others like them than men. And since most people here are looking for advice (mostly to do with diagnosis) and women are more likely to have been not recognized as a kid, it may put it out of proportion.
Of the studies I've seen I don't truly think it is 1:1, even taking in those factors. I think it's more likely to be 1:2 to 1:3.
16 Sep 2015, 9:13 am
