WOMEN with autism may be missing out on vital support because commonly-used screening tools are geared to recognise typically male symptoms, Bournemouth University has discovered.

The BU study looked to see whether one popular screening tool was sensitive to some of the ways that autistic women differ from autistic men.

The tools are designed to show up ‘red flags’ that indicate the presence of autism so that people can be forwarded on to an expert for a full assessment.

However, the current ones in use are based on male presentations of autism because, for many years, the condition was believed to exclusively affect men said the university.

Dr Rachel Moseley, who co-authored the study, said: “There are a number of features, or ‘core symptoms’, that autistic people have in common – strengths such as intense focus and difficulties such as struggles with social communication.

“However, the way these core strengths and difficulties emerge in behaviour differs from person to person – and differs greatly between men and women.”

She said autistic women often seem to have slightly better social skills and less unusual interests. "They are especially good at hiding their autistic symptoms which helps them in everyday life but seems to have negative consequences; it can be exhausting, and has been linked to mental health problems and suicidality," she said.

The study found that none of these widely observed differences appeared between autistic men and women, which the authors believe reflects problems with commonly-used diagnostic studies and instruments.

Report co-author Dr Julie Kirkby said: “A really big problem in autism research is that we only include people who have been formally diagnosed with autism. However, because we diagnose people with tools that were designed on men and boys, we limit our samples from the start."

She believes there may be many people with the condition who don’t show the male examples of autistic behaviour in tests and therefore may not get through the screening process to get a full diagnosis.