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

Abstract

Background 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. 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. Methods The 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. Results Results 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. Conclusions Investigating parent’s cognition about their child’s future behavioral development can provide additional information regarding delayed diagnosis of autistic girls.

Recognition of Girls on the Autism Spectrum by Primary School Educators: An Experimental Study

“…Research investigating the discrepancy in prevalence rates of diagnosed autism in males and females has suggested that there is a bias against females with the condition [Lai et al, 2015;Geelhand et al, 2019]. Our findings support this suggestion.…”

“…population [Geelhand et al, 2019]. It is possible that this is due to an expectancy bias among respondents.…”

“…Based on previous qualitative [Bargiela et al, 2016] and experimental [Geelhand et al, 2019] findings we predicted a gender stereotyping effect (Hypothesis 1): we anticipated that educators would rate a male child as more likely to be autistic than a female child, even if both children are described in a vignette as having identical autism-related characteristics. To our surprise, we found only partial support for this hypothesis, since there was an interaction, suggesting that a gender stereotyping effect operates for the female phenotype, but not the male phenotype.…”

“…A recent experimental study offers some support for the idea that gender stereotypes might influence the perception of autistic characteristics [Geelhand, Bernard, Klein, Van Tiel, & Kissine, 2019]. Members of the general public read written descriptions of autisticlike behaviors in fictional 5-year-old children, and rated how "worrying" they considered these behaviors to be, and how indicative they were of future atypicality in adolescence.…”

Autism Spectrum Disorders in Mali: Parental concerns about child developmental milestones and late diagnostic age

“…First, even with higher ASD prevalence in both sexes, core ASD symptomology are easily presentable in males, and females are too good in camou aging their symptoms, which may result in sex differences in parental concerns after age 5 years [45][46][47][48][49][50]. Second, females experienced less unusual stereotyped and repetitive behaviors than males due to genetic (Y chromosome) and hormonal factors (fetal testosterone) and they have an increased prevalence of internalizing problems [47,51]. Third, females were found to receive lower scores than males particularly on modules 2 and 3 of the Childhood Autism Rating Scale scores (CARS) [52].…”