The Girl Gap: Why Autism Is Missed in Girls
About this episode
This episode explores why autism is often missed in girls, discussing the historical and scientific reasons behind this issue.
In this episode, I'm taking you inside one of the most important and under-recognized issues in autism: why girls are so consistently missed, often for years, sometimes for decades. I open with a story about a seven-year-old who loves cats, reads chapter books on her own, and holds it together all day at school, until she walks in the front door and falls apart. Her teachers say she's fine. Her parents know something is going on, but they don't have a name for it yet. I walk you through the brain science and the history that explains how this happened (almost all of the foundational autism research, going back to Leo Kanner's work in 1943, was conducted on boys, so the screening tools and diagnostic checklists were built on a mainly male picture), and more importantly, what autism actually looks like in girls once you know what to look for. I break down a landmark 2026 study published in the British Medical Journal that tracked nearly 2.7 million people in Sweden over 35 years and found that by age 20, the male-to-female ratio approaches 1 to 1, nearly equal. If autism occurs at roughly the same rate in girls and boys, why are girls being missed during the exact window when…
More episodes of Magnificent Minds: Demystifying Autism with Dr. Suzanne Goh, MD, BCBA
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