This one makes me very frustrated; it is not a coincidence; it’s built into the system, because a huge chunk of the original research into autism was done on small groups of boys, not women or girls, but boys. Hans Asperger’s original study, the one so much of our early understanding of autism came from, only included boys, and Leo Kanner’s foundational study around the same time was overwhelmingly male too, mostly boys with just a handful of girls included almost as an afterthought. So think about what that actually means: the entire blueprint for what autism “looks like,” the checklist clinicians were trained on for decades, was built almost entirely off the male experience. That’s not a small oversight; that’s the whole foundation being skewed from the start.

And because of that, there just wasn’t the data on how autism shows up in women for decades, and it’s honestly only quite recently that we’ve started to see more research being done on autism in females specifically (late 2000’s if we are being realistic). So clinicians were working off an incomplete picture the whole time, and women were falling through the gaps because of it, not because they weren’t autistic, but because nobody had properly studied what autism in a woman actually looks like.

On top of that, autism manifests differently in women a lot of the time, and that makes it harder to spot using criteria that were never designed with women in mind in the first place. And then you’ve got the social layer on top of that, because women are so often raised and conditioned to mask better, to accommodate, to smooth things over, to be the people pleaser in the room. That’s not a personality trait; that’s socialisation. Girls are taught from a painfully young age to fit in, to not make a fuss, to adapt themselves to whatever’s around them, and if you’re autistic, that conditioning can turn into a lifetime of masking so well that even you don’t clock what’s actually going on underneath it.

So you end up with this perfect storm: criteria built on boys, a genuine difference in how autism presents in women, and then years and years of being taught to mask it on top. No wonder so many women don’t get diagnosed until their thirties, forties, sometimes later, after years of feeling like something was off and never quite being able to name it.

If any of this sounds like you, I want to say clearly, there is nothing wrong with you for not knowing sooner. The system wasn’t built to see you. If you’re sitting with that right now, wondering what to do with it, that’s exactly the kind of thing I work through with people at High Tide Counselling – feel free to reach out here.

Please note: I’m a counsellor; I’m not trained or able to make any kind of diagnosis – however, if this is something you are seeking, I can signpost you on to someone who can. The above is not clinical advice.