Autistic Hedgehog

[“Students with autism gravitate toward STEM majors.”

And what about the other 66% of us?]

So this article has been floating around the autism tag for the past several days now. STEM majors, for those who don’t know, are science, technology, engineering and mathematics–you know, all those things Hollywood and “experts” like Simon Baron-Cohen seem to be convinced all autistics are good at.

The headline makes it sounds like this is HUGE news. But if one actually reads the article, one will see that the number is roughly 34% (autistics) versus roughly 23% (allistics) (see, Baron-Cohen, I rounded the numbers up and down! Whoo hoo, math genius, right here! *snort*). 

Thirty-four percent isn’t even half. It’s a minority of us. Where’s the study on what the rest of us like to do with ourselves? I mean, not that I think it’s going to come out of Simon Baron-Cohen (the co-author of this paper) because he seems to aim to study only topics that will confirm his pet hypotheses for him. 

What bothers me is how many people will see the headline, not actually read the article, and think they’ve learned something significant about autistics. You know they will. And then next thing you know one of us is sitting with the family at Thanksgiving and Auntie Esther is all “Why don’t you become a scientist? That’s what autistic people do. All the studies say so!” Blargh.