The role of gender in the perception of autism symptom severity and future behavioral development

Philippine Geelhand,Bob Van Tiel,Mikhail Kissine,Olivier Klein,Philippe Bernard

doi:10.1186/s13229-019-0266-4

Abstract

BackgroundIncreasing attention is being paid to the higher prevalence of boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and to the implications of this ratio discrepancy on our understanding of autism in girls. One recent avenue of research has focused on caregiver’s concern, suggesting that autism might present differently in boys and girls. One unexplored factor related to concerns on child development is whether socio-cultural factors such as gender-related expectations influence the evaluation of symptom severity and predictions about future behavioral development.MethodsThe latter concerns were the focus of the present study and were explored by investigating laypeople’s judgment of the severity of autism symptoms using an online parent role-playing paradigm, in which participants were asked to rate vignettes depicting the behaviors of a child in different everyday life scenarios. The child’s gender and the severity of ASD symptoms were manipulated to examine the effect of gender on the perception of symptom severity.ResultsResults suggest that there are no gender differences in perceived symptom severity and associated degree of concern for 5-year-old boys and girls but that there is a gender difference in perceived future atypicality at 15 years old, with boys being rated as more likely to be perceived as atypical by their peers at that age than girls.ConclusionsInvestigating parent’s cognition about their child’s future behavioral development can provide additional information regarding delayed diagnosis of autistic girls.

Highlights

Increasing attention is being paid to the higher prevalence of boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and to the implications of this ratio discrepancy on our understanding of autism in girls
An imbalanced sex ratio already featured in Kanner’s [1] and Asperger’s [2] descriptions of autism and has proven a robust characteristic of research samples ever since with the most recent estimates suggesting a ratio of three males for one female diagnosed with autism [3]
Studies on the reliability of first-hand concerns suggest that parent observations can predict autism diagnosis [10, 11]

Summary

Introduction

Increasing attention is being paid to the higher prevalence of boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and to the implications of this ratio discrepancy on our understanding of autism in girls. One recent avenue of research has focused on caregiver’s concern, suggesting that autism might present differently in boys and girls. Research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is grounded in male-dominant samples. A male-biased understanding of autism has dramatic implications for autistic girls—perhaps even more so for Previous research strongly suggests that autism is more difficult to detect in girls (e.g., [4, 8]), but the underlying reasons for this difficulty remain unclear. A few studies have investigated whether potential differences in caregivers’ concern for autistic boys and girls

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion