'It's different for girls': Gender differences in the friendships and conflict of autistic and neurotypical adolescents.
Gender, not just diagnosis, drives how autistic teens make friends and fight, so tailor social interventions separately for girls and boys.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sedgewick et al. (2019) asked autistic and neurotypical teens about their friendships and fights. They compared girls to boys in each group. The team used interviews and questionnaires to learn how the teens saw their own social lives.
What they found
Autistic girls looked a lot like neurotypical girls in how they made friends. Both groups wanted close, talk-heavy friendships. Yet autistic girls hit more conflict and did not know how to fix it. Autistic boys, on the other hand, played and talked less overall and showed a different friendship style than any other group.
In short, gender mattered more than diagnosis for friendship goals, but diagnosis mattered for how well conflict was handled.
How this fits with other research
de Leeuw et al. (2024) extends this picture. Their nationwide Icelandic data show that autistic girls, even younger ones, have steeper peer problems than boys. The two studies agree: girls on the spectrum carry extra social weight early.
So et al. (2021) moves the same gender gap into emergency rooms. They found autistic girls in crisis show higher suicide risk and anxiety than autistic boys, lining up with Felicity’s view that girls’ social stress can turn inward.
O'Connor et al. (2024) synthesises lived-experience interviews. Autistic girls say stigma and a world not built for them drive their mental-health pain. This supports Felicity’s call for explicit conflict coaching, since failed friendships feed that stigma loop.
Simantov et al. (2024) seems to clash at first: they report no empathy gap between autistic and non-autistic teens. But they also show parents rate autistic teens lower than the teens rate themselves. Felicity used teen self-views, so the "conflict gap" may live more in teen perception than in raw empathy skill.
Why it matters
If you write social-skills goals, split them by gender. Give autistic girls scripts for handling gossip, jealousy, and rumour repair. Give autistic boys structured ways to initiate joint play and conversation. Update your intake forms: ask girls about friendship stress and ask boys about isolation. Don’t run the same social group for everyone; gender-specific coaching fits the evidence.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This mixed-methods study examined gender differences in the friendships and conflict experiences of autistic girls and boys relative to their neurotypical peers. In total, 102 adolescents (27 autistic girls, 26 autistic boys, 26 neurotypical girls, and 23 neurotypical boys), aged between 11 and 18 years completed the Friendship Qualities Scale, the Revised Peer Experiences Questionnaire and were interviewed about their friendships. Results demonstrated that in many ways, the friendships and social experiences of autistic girls are similar to those of neurotypical girls. Autistic girls, however, have significantly more social challenges than their neurotypical peers, experiencing more conflict and finding that conflict harder to manage successfully. Autistic boys showed quantitatively different friendship patterns to all other groups. There were consistent gender differences in the type of conflict which boys and girls experienced, regardless of diagnostic status. These findings suggest that gender, rather than diagnosis per se, plays a critical role in the way that autistic adolescents perceive and experience their social relationships.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2019 · doi:10.1177/1362361318794930