The Lost Girls of Autism

The history of autism is male. It is time for women and girls to enter the spotlight.

When autistic girls meet clinicians, they are often misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, personality disorders, or are missed altogether. Autism’s ‘male spotlight’ means we are only now starting to redress this profound injustice.

In this UnMasked talk, renowned brain scientist Gina Rippon delves into the emerging science of female autism, asking why it has been systematically ignored for so long. Generations of researchers, convinced autism was a male problem, simply didn’t bother looking for it in women. But it is now becoming increasingly clear that many autistic women and girls do not fit the traditional, male, model of autism. Instead, they camouflage and mask, hiding their autistic traits to accommodate a society that shuns them. Urgent and insightful, this is a searching examination of how sexism has biased our understanding of autism.

Gina Rippon is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Birmingham. Her research involves state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques, investigating how the brain interacts with its world. She is an outspoken critic of outdated gender stereotypes in the field, and is the author of The Gendered Brain and The Lost Girls of Autism.