Wampum

Autism and the Gender Gap

by Dwight Meredith

The autism gender gap has been much in the news lately. Boys are about four times as likely to be autistic as girls. That is a huge disparity. Although Newsweek recently ran a cover story suggesting that autistic behaviors are a manifestation of extreme normal male brain functioning, no one really knows why autistics are mostly male.

I want to discuss a different autism gender gap. It gets much less publicity. While most autistics are male, an overwhelming majority of the people working with autistic kids are female.

Several years ago, the Autism Society of America held its annual conference here in Atlanta. Deb and I attended (we asked the grandparents to come visit for the week and baby sit so that we could attend. One night, we even ate dinner together, by ourselves, at a restaurant that did not have a mascot. That was a notable event, much savored and fondly remembered).

One session at the conference was held in the grand ballroom of the hotel. At one point, I stood and surveyed the audience. Well over a thousand people filled the room. I could locate fewer than 75 men. That disparity in gender of the attendees was much greater than the gender gap for autistics.

Where were all of the men?

One reason for that gender gap is that the autism conference draws people interested in autism for professional reasons. Those attendees include special education teachers and various other professionals who work with autistic kids.

Special education teachers, speech therapists, occupational therapists and others who choose to work with autistic kids are almost always women. There are exceptions to that rule of course. Oliver of the Liquid List is a paraprofessional working with an autistic eleven year old.

I once spoke to the head of a residential school for autistics. He ran a school with 94 employees. He and two custodians were men, the remaining employees were women.

That comports with my experience. This is the sixth year Bobby has attended public school. Each and every one of his teachers, paraprofessionals, speech therapists and occupational therapists has been a woman.

In some ways, that is not surprising. Public school special education teachers self select. They volunteer for a job that does not pay particularly well. They choose to work with kids who may not yet be toilet trained and may not yet be able to speak. They choose to work with kids known for their titanic, and completely unpredictable, tantrums. They choose to work with kids who have trouble expressing anything, much less gratitude. They choose to work with kids whose desperate parents lean on them for guidance, support and expertise. They choose to work with kids whose progress may be measured in the smallest of increments. Not many men choose that particular career path.

Bobby’s first teacher is a perfect example. I do not have permission to use her name and so will not do so. When Bobby entered her class, she was a middle aged woman working only with full spectrum autistic kids. She had a bad knee and would have knee replacement surgery the next year.

One of her (and our) goals with Bobby was to teach him to make eye contact and to play interactively. Every day, in pain, she would get down on the floor with a ball about two feet away from Bobby. She would roll the ball to Bobby while asking for him to look at her. She would then ask that he roll it back to her.

Bobby would ignore her completely, refuse to look at her and refuse to roll the ball. Each time, the teacher would reach over, take Bobby’s hands in hers and move his hands to roll the ball back. Over and over she went through the routine. Each time, she had to use the hand-over-hand method to make Bobby go through the motions of rolling the ball.

Months went by with the teacher, ignoring her bad knee, eagerly getting down on the floor and asking Bobby for eye contact and interaction. She received no positive feedback from Bobby and no progress was discernable. Nonetheless, each day the teacher was sure that that would be the day of the breakthrough.

Every day her hope was dashed. She never showed the slightest anger, frustration or despair. Each morning brought renewed patience, determination and hope. She was always sure that a breakthrough was imminent. Her optimism carried me through that period.

After a few months of rolling the ball every day, Bobby peeked at her when she asked for eye contact. A little while later, after many more tries, he began to reach for the ball and then await her hand-over-hand to roll it back. Still later, he would actually look at her while he rolled the ball back on his own. He would then wait for the ball to return.

She had broken through the autism, gotten eye contact and engaged in interactive play. Now, I know that that does not seem like a particularly big deal. A toddler looked at his teacher and rolled a ball. It was admittedly a small step. For us though, it was not the distance traveled but the direction that was important.

Bobby making eye contact and rolling the ball back is one of the events by which I mark the end of the period in which Bobby was falling deeper into the well of autism and the beginning of the time in which he has been slowly crawling out. It is impossible for me to adequately express my gratitude to that public school teacher.

I am not sure that I would have had her patience and determination working with my own son. It is hard to imagine how anyone could choose to do that for other people’s kids.

Late one night, reflecting on Bobby’s teacher and all of her hard work, and wondering how any person could give so much of herself with so little in return, a strange hypothesis formed in my head. Perhaps she was not a person at all. Perhaps she was an angel descended from heaven at God’s instructions to help save my son. It was just a stray thought of the type one has in the middle of the night. The funny thing was, though, I could not find a single piece of evidence to refute the hypothesis.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the autism conference ballroom was filled with women is that God chooses the feminine form for the angels sent to help special needs kids.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at October 23, 2003 10:54 AM | TrackBack