Throughout its history, autism has been conceptualized as a mostly male condition. Although gender/sex differences in autism diagnosis are shrinking, public recognition of this shift may be lagging for various reasons. For example, even today, the rare media depictions of autistic adults (many are of autistic children and adolescents, usually boys) disproportionately focus on autistic men. Insofar as these depictions inform societal impressions, a masculinization hypothesis suggests that both autistic men and autistic women may be construed as having more masculine qualities than their non-autistic counterparts. In this talk, Andrew Todd will report findings from a new and ongoing line of research that are better accommodated by an alternative de-gendering hypothesis: In multiple experiments using a combination of direct and indirect methodological approaches, autistic adults were construed as having fewer gender-consistent traits than neurotypical and neurotype-unspecified adults. Furthermore, this de-gendering pattern had downstream implications that align with dehumanizing experiences commonly reported by autistic adults—that they’re viewed by others both as machine-like (i.e., mechanistic dehumanization) and as more childlike (i.e., infantilization) than their chronological age dictates. These mechanized and infantilized impressions of autistic women and men, which were not fully reducible to general negativity toward autism specifically or toward neurodivergence or disability more broadly, were evident (albeit more weakly) even among autistic participants.

Andrew Todd (BA, Michigan State; MS & PhD, Northwestern) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. Much of his research falls into two general themes: (1) antecedents and consequences of perspective taking and mental-state reasoning, and (2) mental representations of people with different combinations of social identities.

Allison Earl hosts.