The link between autism and skills such as engineering, maths, physics and computing: a reply to Jarrold and Routh.

Abstract:

In the first edition of this journal, we published a paper reporting that fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were over-represented in the field of engineering (Baron-Cohen et al., 1997). This result was interpreted as providing supporting evidence for the folk-psychology/folk-physics theory of autism. After carrying out further analyses on the same data, Jarrold and Routh (1998) found that fathers of children with autism were also over-represented in accountancy and science. They suggested that these results could either provide additional support for the folk-psychology/folk-physics theory or be accounted for by an over-representation of professional amongst the fathers of children with autism. Here we present evidence that engineers are still over-represented among fathers of children with autism, even taking into account the professional bias.