Is Autism Different for Girls and Boys?

Abstract

Autism is a common condition that affects the way people think and interact with the world. Most of our knowledge about autism is from research done with autistic boys. This means that we do not know much about the ways that autistic girls may be different than autistic boys. Now, researchers are including more autistic girls in their studies to find out about these differences. However, not all researchers find the same results: some researchers find that autistic boys are better at some tasks and other researchers find that autistic girls are better at those same tasks. In this article, we review some of the findings about differences between autistic girls and boys and talk about why it is important to understand these differences.