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Autist here. The people describing autism as "extreme maleness" never seem to account for the higher clumsiness, lower social masculinity, avoidance of horseplay and contact/team sports, and other signifiers of lower masculinity. It also relies on a stereotype of men as being much less emotional and much more logical than women.
When I was trying to figure out my place in the world, I discovered an idea I've been calling Triessentialism: that the best way to categorize the world seems to be the Physical, the Logical, and the Emotional. One of the biggest components was that men tend to be physically intuitive, women tend to be emotionally intuitive, and people with autism tend to be logically intuitive. The male:female skew of autism is 4:1, which is the simplest explanation why STEM careers have been filled with men at around that ratio until recently:
I have since postulated that autism is a neurological lessening of instinct, so people with autism have to figure the world out without a set of ready-made priors which harmonize into a sense of being a whole being. Thus the high instance of AGP, thus the seemingly high intelligence of having to exercise one's logical intuition to get through daily life, thus the autist's joy in the intellectual beauty of symbolic logics, simplified sorting mechanisms, and hobbies with built-in ontologies such as trainspotting and Pokemon games.
Is your contention that STEM careers have been filled almost entirely by autists until very recently, or do you also think that “logical intuition” is similarly biased towards men vis a vis women?
Good question! I’d contend that, since non-autistic men tend to be physically intuitive (I hesitate to reference the “shape rotators” meme but it fits here), their logic is more “gear-like” and related to the STEM fields than is that of the people who are intuitive in realms of motives, relationships, desires, priorities, and other carriers of emotive meaning.
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