Girls just wanna have…a diagnosis….

Good article on Autism Awareness Centre blog about how lacking the criteria and attention given female autists — High Functioning Girls With Autism Often Go Undiagnosed — it shows that even in the most basic of laboratory research things are skewed male (please do not assume that I am okay with lab testing on animals, I am not, just showing this for the point):

An eye-opening program on CBC radio this past week highlighted a little known discrepancy in the scientific world: 80% of the lab rats and mice used in research are male. This means that women are underrepresented as a whole in scientific research, a fact that can have major health repercussions when it comes to the development of treatments and medications. This gender discrepancy is mirrored in the field of autism. The diagnosis ratio to date has been one girl with autism to every ten boys — with the greatest gap in numbers being for those who are high functioning. Most diagnostic assessments are based on research with boys with autism and seem likely to be biased toward behaviours typically seen in these boys. It is becoming clear that we really don’t know if autism affects mainly boys (as has been the assumption), or if aspects of autism in girls are simply distinct and harder to recognize.

This is unacceptable. Gender parity in testing should have been the norm decades ago, but it is high time that girls and women who have been diagnosed are given the ability to influence the criteria for diagnosing female autistics.

I am weary with the lack of effort in fixing or improving these statistics.

What is becoming clear is that we need to put more money and research into gender specific studies of autism and other disabilities. As Jeffrey Mogil, neuroscientist and pain specialist at McGill University has said about the gender discrepancy in health research as a whole:

“If the clinical population is overwhelmingly [female] , it seems to me we have an ethical duty to study female biology.”

Justice demands that this be corrected. It’s 2016 afterall.