Gina Rippon
Saturday 3rd May, 6:30pm
The history of autism is male. It is time for women and girls to enter the spotlight. When autistic girls meet clinicians, they are often misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, personality disorders, or are missed altogether.
Autism’s ‘male spotlight’ means we are only now starting to redress this profound injustice.
Join us in welcoming Professor Gina Rippon to discuss her latest book The Lost Girls of Autism, an eye-opening account of the ways in which science has failed autistic women for years and how new research is beginning to turn the tide.
Professor Gina Rippon is Professor Emeritus of Cognitive NeuroImaging at Aston University in the UK. Her research involves the use of state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders such as autism, profiling different patterns of brain activity in autistic children and adults.
Her current research explores the under-recognition of autism in women and girls, especially in neuroscience research. Her new book on this topic The Lost Girls of Autism is released in April 2025.
The Poly, Falmouth
£8 + Poly fund
The Lost Girls of Autism: How Science Failed Autistic Women – and the New Research
The history of autism is male. It is time for women and girls to enter the spotlight. When autistic girls meet clinicians, they are often misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression, personality disorders, or are missed altogether.
Autism’s ‘male spotlight’ means we are only now starting to redress this profound injustice. In The Lost Girls of Autism, renowned brain scientist Gina Rippon delves into the emerging science of female autism, asking why it has been systematically ignored for so long. Generations of researchers, convinced autism was a male problem, simply didn’t bother looking for it in women.
But it is now becoming increasingly clear that many autistic women and girls do not fit the traditional, male, model of autism. Instead, they camouflage and mask, hiding their autistic traits to accommodate a society that shuns them. Urgent and insightful, this is a searching examination of how sexism has biased our understanding of autism.
Informed by the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, The Lost Girls of Autism is a clarion call for society to recognize the full spectrum of autistic experience.