The Lost Girls of Autism: where have they been? where are they now?
Talk by Dr Gina Rippon, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive NeuroImaging, Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment, Aston University, Birmingham.
Part of our understanding of autism has been that it is, characteristically, a male problem, typified by the Rain Man type figure of an aloof, socially awkward loner, with strange obsessions, bizarre skills, and strange patterns of behaviour.
Everything about autism has been affected by this unchallenged belief. This includes the stereotyping of who is autistic (“if you Google it, it’s all about boys”); the loading of the diagnostic tests with a male template of ‘typical’ autism; a thirty year ‘men-only’ focus in brain imaging studies of the autistic brain, resulting in a biased evidence base that was only telling half the story. Autistic women have been missed because no-one was looking for them.
But in the last decade or so, the male spotlight has been challenged. Autistic women have found their voice and have alerted the autism world and the autism research community to their presence. A new picture of autism is emerging which is giving us a better understanding of what it is like to be autistic.
Professor Gina Rippon is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging at the Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment, Aston University.
Her research has involved state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as autism. Her current research interests explore the under-recognition of autism in women and girls, especially in neuroscience research. Her new book on this topic: The Lost Girls of Autism (UK)/Off the Spectrum (US) was released in April 2025. She also explores the use of neuroscience techniques to investigate social processes, especially those associated with sex/gender differences in the human brain.
She is an outspoken critic of ’neurotrash’, the populist (mis)use of neuroscience research to (mis)represent our understanding of brain-behaviour links, particularly on the topic of sex/gender differences. Her book on such topics, ‘The Gendered Brain’, published by Bodley Head and Penguin Random House, came out in the UK in 2019.
She is a passionate supporter of initiatives to address the under-representation of women in all spheres of influence, especially science. Under the heading “Mind the Gender Gap”, she offers a neuroscience-informed approach to diversity and inclusivity initiatives in a wide range of business and political organisations.