> there is a 3-to-1 male-to-female ratio in autism prevalence

There is a 3-to-1 ratio in diagnostic prevalence. From the article you linked: "There appears to be a diagnostic gender bias, meaning that girls who meet criteria for ASD are at disproportionate risk of not receiving a clinical diagnosis."

There are multiple theories for this difference: genetics, environment, ...; but also gender bias in diagnosis. eg. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/14/thousands-of...

I know that there is at least some speculation that autism in women is under diagnosed v men. Does this paper account for that?

Edit: yeah, that’s the conclusion of the analysis. I wonder if there is still more to be found there (ie if it is still closer to 1:1).

My unresearched pet theory is that, at least in mammals, males are risk-takers, do stupid things, and are where the genome gets to try new things, because they're more "disposable" when propagating a species.

It's not just mammals and I wouldn't frame it as them being disposable when propagating the species.

There's a bigger payout at the right tail of the distribution for male genes. Male genes can sometimes have 1000 offspring. Female genes generally can't. Male genes are generally more likely to have 0 offspring. So male genes have less to lose and more to gain by taking risks, behavioral and biological risks. See also male variance hypothesis.

This varies by species and the pattern is likely stronger in more polygynous species and weaker in more monogamous species. See also sexual dimorphism. Human males take more behavioral risks on average and have higher mortality rates throughout life (not only from behavior).

I warn you though, this is a controversial subject because of some of its possible implications.

Also I should disclose that I'm not an expert, just a layperson interested in this and some related topics.

> I warn you though, this is a controversial subject because of some of its possible implications

I can imagine some of the implications people could come up with, but I'm curious which ones come to mind for you.

It gets into James Damore territory pretty quickly.

Autistic I knew were not risk takes. They were excessively risk adverse and fearful. I an talking about males.

I think it's their genes that have taken the risk, of being more of an outlier.

There was a time when society relegated women to pursuits that frequently deprived them of many opportunities to invent. Fortunately, society has changed.

This is definitely a large part of the picture but it's also possibly partly genetic when it comes to the science and tech fields. I'm talking about interest and not competence. Women tend to self select out of science and tech in richer societies where they have the freedom to do so, and self select into disciplines that serve the empathic personality better. There are persuasive studies on that topic.

A significant factor seems to be that the way (not only STEM) academia is currently organized means that women have to pick between a career or having any children (at ages favorable to childbearing):

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4522

And I kind of have the impression that the situation here actually got worse during the last decades?

I'm also talking about regular career choices (not academia) that only involve a three or four year undergraduate degree. Women self select out of technical pursuits (CS) and self select into more verbal or empathic areas (Law or Medicine, and an even more extreme example being liberal arts) even though such areas might entail even more study than CS. This self selection is magnified when women have more choice and freedom. Women in software is more common the more poor a country is.

I mean it's not only career choices where such gender differences manifest, we also see it in the choices that young children make. The burden of proof is on the camp that proposes that it's entirely sociological since the extant empirical evidence, along multiple independent lines, contradicts it.

Yes, I'm specifically talking of women loss after undergraduate level.

Agree that this is an issue

This theory doesn’t any hold scrutiny: some academic or academic-like fields are dominated by women despite having the same formal organization as the STEM ones.

I would guess that they were already dominated by women at the undergraduate level, perhaps even more so ?

We're still a society that treats women very differently.

For instance, women have to be just the right level of assertive. Too little, and you're not respected nor listened to, you're passed for promotions... Too much, and you're viewed as aggressive.

You have all those articles about women leaving tech - they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving.

We agree in full that women face these problems across tech and also in other industries.

However, this is not evidence of a uniquely bad problem in tech which can explain why tech has a gender disparity (which occurs primarily because women are self-selecting out of it before college) and other areas do not. Tech workers are far less blokey and much more aware/introspective of the issues than finance workers for example, actually the contrast is rather extreme speaking as someone who's worked in both industries, but it has less women proportionately than in finance which is contra to what your hypothesis would predict.

We also have to contend with the fact that women are underrepresented in tech (again due mostly to less women entering technical fields in college, even though they can easily do so if they wanted) across every developed country. Are we to say that chauvinism is such an extensive problem in tech across every single country, and that it's consistently more of a problem than in Law, Finance and almost every other field, and that we can't find a single exception to this in Scandinavia or one miscellaneous country?

I find that dubious and think a genetic explanation (i.e. genetics influencing group means in interests/passions) is a far better fit to the available data, especially since such differences show up at a very young age, across cultures, before significant socialization. Not to mention that these results fit with fairly mainstream science (evolutionary psychology).

This is not an attempt at a value judgement, prescription, or to diminish the very real issues that women face in the workplace (including the tech workplace). I'm just trying to get a descriptive answer to the question "what's the biggest factor behind tech having so few women?".

> they must have had the interest to get there, the opportunities, and yet they're leaving.

I see these as anecdotes. They're interesting and worthy of attention, but it's not good data that compares how many women and how many men are leaving tech when compared to other industries.

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I would really like to see a survey of 18 year old women who are enrolling into college, and straight up ask them why they didn't choose tech. My money is on them saying they have no interest, and not that they read some article about tech-unique chauvinism. I will await such results keenly.

I'm not denying the gender equality paradox, that in societies where women have the choice, they chose STEM less often.

I'm not denying a genetic factor either, because I can't disprove it.

What I'm arguing against is this "tabula rasa" at age 18. Women grow up with less female role models in STEM. A Barbie doll used to say "math is hard", which speaks volumes to how prevalent this message is. Sure, 18yo haven't seen the workplace yet, but they've seen how women are treated, how higher the bar is for them, how more criticism they get when they take a risk and fail, how often they'd be the only woman in the room... Going into STEM for a boy is being safe in a group of similar peers, going into STEM for a girl is harder, because all your life, you have to prove you're good despite being a girl, and because it's lonely.

My personal view is that both genetics and society matter here. I don't have a problem with genetics, but I do have one with society.

I think we are mostly in agreement. I agree that there are societal factors as well and that these are not good and we should work to address them.

Yeah, "fortunately" it's changed so now they can't have children and still don't invent things.

Men get far more patents - but as men also get far more engineering degrees, I don't think you need autism as an explanation.

You don't think that traits people associate with autism has anything to do with whether they choose to get an engineering degree?

It's true, but it can not be discussed and researched further because it is very upsetting to a lot of people. Also explains why men are better in chess. (I don't mean this from a misogynistic viewpoint: The majority of men will never invent anything or become good at chess, just like the majority of women)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis