Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks by Jordynn Jack

Author:Jordynn Jack [Jack, Jordynn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Presenting Computer Geeks in Science

Popular characterizations of ASD as a condition affecting males, especially males with technological aptitudes, may have also influenced scientific theories beyond Baron-Cohen’s controversial theory. In particular, the male characters used to represent autism in popular discourse may influence what kinds of people are chosen for autism studies. In this section, I examine how studies of the neuroscience of autism may reflect the prominence of the male autistic character in the rhetorical culture. Neuroscientific studies of autism seek to identify differences in brain growth, activation, and function between the brains of those with autism and those without. In order to determine how notions of sex and gender inflect these studies, I examined thirty research articles published in 2010 that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine differences in brain activity and function among people with autism. Overall, this examination demonstrates that sex rarely figures as an important variable in studies of the autistic brain and that male brains tend to be taken as the default or standard. Male brains stand in for both normal and autistic brains, leaving female brains sidelined. This is all the more surprising given the tendency to promote sex differences between men’s and women’s brains in autism discourse and in neuroscience studies, as noted above. By occluding female brains in these studies, neuroscientists are in essence mapping the male autistic brain even as they purport to map the autistic brain. The male brain becomes the representative anecdote for these studies.

The first finding from my analysis is that only fourteen of the thirty studies included both male and female test subjects. The remaining sixteen studies used only male participants. In the mixed groups, female subjects were not always represented according to the 4:1 ratio estimated for autism. Eight of the fourteen studies included a proportion of female subjects approaching or exceeding the 4:1 ratio; others ranged from twenty-five to seven males for every female subject. Almost all the studies had small sample sizes, ranging from seven to forty-one individuals in the test group, so the number of female test subjects was often only one or two. Evidently, a sample size of only a handful of female autistics is unlikely to provide statistically significant indications of differences between male and female autistic brains.

Sex (or gender) also disappears from abstracts; in my sample only ten of thirty articles indicated the sex of participants in the abstracts, as opposed to the body of the article. This omission is important since many readers rely on abstracts to determine whether to read an article—or may only read the abstract. More thorough readers might look to the methods section of the article for details about how participants were selected, but only one of the articles included an explanation for the sex distribution of test subjects in the methods section. Roger Jou, Nancy Minshew, Matcheri Keshavan, and Antonio Hardan write that “the study was confined to right-handed males because the sample size was too small to accommodate for the statistical variability associated with handedness and gender.

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