Female Autism Phenotypes Investigated at Different Levels of Language and Developmental Abilities.

Lemons et al. (2015) looked at big data sets of people with autism who could talk.

They asked: do girls and boys score the same on thinking, daily-living, and social tests?

They split the groups by who could speak and who could not.

For kids who could talk, girls sometimes scored lower than boys.

For kids who could not talk, girls and boys looked the same.

The differences were not the same in every data set, so the picture is messy.

Laposa et al. (2017) saw no girl-boy gap in toddlers starting early-intervention.

The toddlers were younger and pre-verbal, so the null result matches the "no talk" group here.

Backer van Ommeren et al. (2017) later showed girls with ASD had better back-and-forth play than boys, hinting girls can look more social even when their test scores dip.

Li et al. (2024) added brain scans: only girls with ASD had extra network wiring, giving a neural reason for the uneven profiles we see on tests.

When a verbal girl with ASD sits in your office, do not trust a single IQ or adaptive score alone.

Compare her to other girls, not just the male norm.

If she seems "borderline," probe social reciprocity and daily living skills more deeply, and consider the higher chance of missed diagnosis shown by Rutherford et al. (2016).