Autism on Women and Girls

¶ … Autism on Women and Girls and Their Education

Autism was first recognized as a disorder in 1943. Since then, there has been an explosion of interest in autism and an explosion in the number of people diagnosed with this disorder: 1 in 150 people are said to have some form of autism. They range from intelligent, high-functioning individuals to the severely retarded. In low-functioning children, the salient features are a lack of language and other social communication, including imaginative play. Symptoms often include repetitive or ritualistic behavior and a lack of imaginative play.

The onset of autism is actually in infancy or early childhood, and usually the symptoms are noted before the child is thirty months old. Typically, parents seek medical advice when they notice that their child is not developing like the other children of the same age, and particularly in language and other social communication. The family physician or another qualified specialist listens to anecdotal reports of family members and then makes a formal diagnosis by interviewing and observing the child as he or she performs a set of about twenty behaviors. Significantly, the same test is given to girls as to boys.

However, one peculiar finding of researchers is that, invariably, more males than females are diagnosed with autism. For young children, the ratio is 4 to 1: that is, four males are diagnosed with autism for every diagnosed female. In severe forms of autism, however, the ratio of males to females is nearly the same. This finding leads researchers to believe that young girls actually do have autism, but they are able to mask their symptoms and are not diagnosed. What this means is that these girls are not being treated. Although researchers may disagree about which treatments are most effective, they all believe that treatment must begin immediately upon the diagnosis, and the earlier the better. Obviously, the effect of autism on women and girls and their education must also be huge. Furthermore, more research may be needed on different ways to interview and observe these girls so their peculiar symptoms are revealed.

Once the cause of autism is found, the cure will be found as well. Meanwhile, it is not surprising that parents of children with autism would like to blame autism on an environmental factor. If this were true, a cause would be found and then a cure. But if an environmental cause does exist, it would be very complex and there would be as many girls with autism as there are boys. Most likely, the cause of autism is genetic, and perhaps some genetic mutation rather than genetic inheritance. For now, however, the cause of autism remains a mystery

The objective of this proposal is to assess the effects of autism on girls and women and their education. The eight female subjects will be grouped. Group A will include four female subjects who had been diagnosed with autism when they were very young, and Group B. would include four female subjects who were skipped over and not diagnosed with autism until a later age. The full treatment and education records would be available for each subject.

There will be a total of four sessions, one subject from Group A and one subject from Group B. In each session.

For gathering the data here, a quantitative approach would not be appropriate since quantitative data may be misleading. A good example is a recent study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in which the rates of autism in 8-year-old children were compared by states. New Jersey had the highest proportion of children with autism: 16.8 boys out of 1000 boys and 4 out of 1000 girls. Results in Alabama, on the other hand, showed much lower results: 5 boys with autism out of every 1000 boys. For the girls the ratio was 1.4 girls with autism out of 1000 girls. One might conclude that something about the predominantly urban environment of New Jersey produced these high rates of autism. But that was not the case. What mattered here was that New Jersey has a larger number of educated and competent adults, who recognized that their children were not developing like other children of the same age, and who took them to a physician for testing.