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Different societal expectations for different genders

Societal and cultural rules and expectations differ depending on the gender assigned at birth.

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Social norms, being largely dictated by the societies we live in, will therefore have an influence on those autistic traits which are deemed ‘acceptable’ or ‘normal’ for different genders. Social communication and interaction, therefore, may be differently expressed (at least outwardly) in women and girls, children socialised as girls or people who identify as female. These biases inevitably cloud our traits and make us less easy to spot.

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Older girls and teenagers, have a greater need to ‘fit in’ with their peers and the social rules in general tend to be more complex and complicated than those for boys.

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Boys and men are often allowed to ‘get away with’ socially inappropriate behaviours – often applauded for doing so by their peers. Girls and women, on the other hand are rarely allowed the same privileges, and in the teenage girl’s world (not dissimilar to the film Mean Girls!) there is rarely any tolerance of doing anything different or behaving in any way considered unacceptable by the ‘girls in charge’.

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Girls and women learn to mask and camouflage

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Girls are acutely aware of these societal expectations from an early age, and are quick to mask any differences and camouflage themselves effectively. There seems to be a greater need and desire to ‘fit in’ or conform to expectations - not just in society, but also in the complex and confusing world of girls and women, where the hierarchy is different to that of boys, particularly in the teenage years.

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As young girls, we may well seem to be coping with and enjoying life. But by secondary school the difficulties will have definitely set in. In early childhood, girls’ autistic traits can appear similar to those of boys or they are wrongly attributed to typical developmental differences between girls and boys.

For example, autistic boys may have more familiar traits, such as an intense interest in dinosaurs, cars or science, while autistic girls may have preferences around play and activities that are dismissed as stereotypical ‘girl play’, such as dolls, horses or celebrities. A girl who is totally into her world of dolls may be seen as perfectly ‘typical’ but what may not be so obvious is the intensity of her interest which goes far beyond that. She may create complex life stories for her dolls. She may spend more time socialising with them, than with her peers. They may in fact be her best friends and given half a chance, she may invent highly imaginative worlds involving them.

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In an older schoolgirl, the skills she has already developed from her lifetime of ‘female studies’ enable her to fit in with, and hang out with, other girls of her age in a more natural looking way.

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Our skills of mimicry and camouflage may be so good, that family and teachers see nothing out of the ordinary at all. There is often a discrepancy between behaviour at school and at home. Teachers report that the girl is a ‘model student’, while at home her parents are reporting the complete opposite.

Sometimes this is misinterpreted as difficulties in the home environment when in fact what is really going on is that the girl is working so hard at school to mask, fit in and behave as she is expected to, that when she gets home, she is completely exhausted and verging on meltdown. Alternatively, by the time she gets home, she has no battery reserves left to even communicate with her family, so may retreat into her own world where she feels safe and able to be herself.

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Autistic girls often prefer to hang out with older children and adults, or they may be more comfortable in the company of boys, who tend to be rather more accepting and have far less challenging social rules. Spending more time with animals than humans is also a common coping mechanism to help address these differences in social skills.

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As adults, women are expected to be highly social and flexible - able to juggle careers, homes, social lives, children and families. We manage this by observing, learning and copying social skills particularly well in order to be able to better blend in. We continue to mask and camouflage remarkably well, thus hiding our autistic traits and difficulties.

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All this means that from the outside, our autistic traits are less observable, even if we are assessed for autism. Unless the assessor is knowledgeable about these differences, they will not be considered. Women themselves, become so used to masking that we often aren’t even aware they we are doing it. If we develop unhealthy adaptive mechanisms to hide our autistic traits, they can be further entangled amidst psychiatric illness such as eating disorders or obsessive- compulsive disorder, and professionals rarely look for the autistic wood between the neurotypical trees. 

But the story doesn’t end here. Much more research is being done to unravel these differences, so that autistic girls are not missed and not allowed to continue developing unhealthy and harmful coping strategies. Some autistic women have come up with really helpful lists of autistic traits and signs which are more commonly seen in girls and women, rather than the traditional lists based on boys and men. You can find links to these lists in the information section below.

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