Too Many Neurodivergent Women Are Still Falling Through The Cracks
You might have heard of the ‘lost’ generation of women who are discovering their neurodivergence later in life. It’s probably more like three generations, given that most women born before the 1990s would have flown under the diagnostic radar.
The medical profession is also playing catch up. Even now, people assigned female at birth are on average older when diagnosed with autism and ADHD.
The immediate explanation is diagnostic criteria skewed towards traits typically associated with boys. But it goes much deeper. The diagnostic criteria both feeds and is fed by prevailing ideas of what neurodivergence looks like.
This institutionalised ignorance ripples through society: if parents, teachers and community workers don’t have an accurate reference point for what autism and ADHD look like, they are less likely to recognise it in girls who are then less likely to get anywhere near a professional to assess it. The narrow idea of autism and ADHD is thus preserved.
It means girls and women are still being denied valuable knowledge that is key to understanding themselves. They are continuing to be lost.
