Did you know that boys are 10 times more likely to be referred for an autism diagnosis than girls? Or that boys who are referred for an autism diagnosis are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed as autistic as are girls who have been referred? But this shouldn’t be surprising, as ‘autism is a male problem’, right? Almost every autism-related website, research paper or journal article tells us that autism occurs much more frequently in boys, on average about four times as often, although ratios of 15:1 have sometimes been quoted.
But suppose you were told that teachers, presented with identical vignettes of hypothetical children, are more likely to identify the child as autistic and in need of support if the child is called ‘Jack’ than if the child is called ‘Chloe’. That girls who are eventually…