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Interestingly there might be deep reasons why men are more prone to autism and aspergers

Actually - it turns out that diagnosis presents differently in girls/women and that many (high functioning, although that term has been dropped from the DSM-V, I still use it to differentiate the set of people who have enough social communication skills to 'pass') ASD women get misdiagnosed, or go undiagnosed.

There is some legitimate debate in the medical community if there is a biological basis for the difference in expression of the symptoms in autism in women, or if it comes form the fact that society, when faced with a non-socially-conforming female puts into place a social training regime that would make most intensive behavioral invention programs jealous, which works to lower the observable impact of the symptoms. As in most things, it's probably a bit of column A and a bit of column B.

Since we don't know what causes Autism, it's difficult to say how prevalent it is in women. It's worth noting that the prevalence of diagnosed cases in women has increased over the years though, which absent a causal factor to increase its expression in women suggests that we are still coming to grips with the different symptoms in women.

Some background reading for those interested:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.autism.org.uk/about...

Source: I'm the father of a newly diagnosed ASD daughter, and research is how I deal with life. Please, if you have a child, male or female, and you suspect ASD, get them tested. If it's significant enough that you suspect it, it's also impacting their lives.

My daughter was diagnosed years late because her pediatrician mistook the symptoms for shyness, and it wasn't until she was seen and tested by a specialist that we got the correct diagnosis.

Min

Article quoted below. Clearly a woman wrote this. An angry disgruntled woman.

Men are greatly overrepresented in the highest-paying industries. Software and hardware tech industries pay the most and have over twice as many males than females. ...

Well, obsession with computers is stereotypically an attractor for people who are autistic (or at least Asperger's)*, antisocial, or obsessive-compulsive (or all of the above). Since autism is overwhelmingly a syndrome affecting males*, this is not surprising.

(and, while being antisocial is something I suppose could be either male or female, in females our society strongly disapproves of it, while in males being antisocial is considered "rugged individualism.")

*Citation: https://autism-help.org/interv... "OBSESSIVE USE OF COMPUTERS BY AUTISTIC CHILDREN... for Autism or Asperger's syndrome, a child can become obsessed with computers..."
https://forums.psychcentral.com/attention-deficit-disorder-add-adhd/275768-computer-rules-hidden-danger-children-adhd-autism.html "As you may have noticed, children with a disorder that falls on the autism spectrum seem to have an intense love of computers."

**citation: http://www.autism.org.uk/about...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4164392/

A couple of points...

How about, to start, that all sexual abuse and harassment will be considered strictly unacceptable?

Newsflash: it's considered unacceptable by most people. However, *considering* something unacceptable, and it actually *being* unacceptable are two very different things. It's not like when Wile E. Coyote runs off the end of a cliff, looks down, and the law of gravity "considers it unacceptable that he's standing in the middle of the air", and takes action to prohibit it. Social conventions are not the same things as the laws of physics.

For example, the kinds of things that Linus Torvalds has said on mailing lists is stuff that would get any employee of a company instantly fired. Yet in his arrogance he thinks that because he's some super-duper-important OSS guru guy that the same code of conduct doesn't apply to him, which is a pretty disgusting way to think.

Except... it demonstrably does not, in fact, apply to him. When he is making pronouncements from the throne, he isn't an employee, he's a king, and short of armed insurrection, it's almost impossible to involuntarily remove a king from power.

So yeah, for the foundation, how about stopping harassment and abuse?

"Patches welcome".

You can engineer social systems, and you can even engineer emergent properties into social systems, if you have a deep understanding of what you are doing. But the problem with feedback mechanisms in social constructs is that the feedback designed to correct the aberrant behaviour from the normative baseline within any design, is that the feedback has to be non-ignorable. It has to take away something that the person or persons receiving the feedback value, as a punitive measure, and (as studies on gambling addition and slot machine design have shown), it has to have intermittent positive reinforcement that is valued by the recipient as well.

So at this point, you might as well be saying "how about stopping terrorism?", since we've been just as ineffective at that.

As for Autisim Spectrum stuff, I believe that it is very common among all people in this world, male, female, black, white, yellow, green.

This is, at best, a speculative statement, since study after study has shown autism to be more prevalent in males than females:

http://www.autism.org.uk/about...

I don't think that necessarily has any bearing upon whether a person would treat others badly.

No, but it certainly increases the perception by non-autistic persons that they are being treated badly by autistic persons. It doesn't matter whether or not they are actually being treated badly, if it's their perception that they are. Objective facts will not change subjective perceptions.

I notice a lot of Japanese dramas have characters who often are in the autistic spectrum and those characters actually make the dramas more interesting and are almost always depicted as being exceptional in more than one way, often with incredible gifts and ability to influence people positively.

Autistic savants comprise only about 10% of those with autism. They tend to make for interesting stories for those without autism, since savants occur in the non-autist population a less than 10 times that rate -- less than 1%. Thus, it's no surprise that they appear more in fiction than they do in reality.

While they may be interesting, realize that 9 out of 10 people with autism will therefore not be savants, and if that's not your expectation, the expectation needs to be adjusted, since the myth "all people with autism have savant abilities in some area" is harmful, and is based primarily in an expectation that the universe has a built-in inherent fairness.

https://www.autism.com/underst...

One of the things I've read about is that individuals with Aspergers may have different than normal levels of oxytocin

http://www.autism.org.uk/livin...

85% of autistic people are unemployed, though most are willing and able to work.

http://www.autism.org.uk/living-with-autism/employment.aspx

Apparently you didn't notice estimates for 2006, which the National Autistic Society verifies as being 1:100 - somewhat higher than your 36:10000. In fact, how the hell did you get that number from the NAS, when the NAS' own figures (Estimated prevalence rate in the UK, given in the paper linked to above) are stated as being current and a replacement for the 1997 figures you cite.

However, you also managed to miss this little gem from the Autism Research Center at Cambridge University.

Sorry if I sound a little annoyed, but if you're going to question my figures, you need to do better than decade-old discredited reports. I don't mind people challenging my views - I enjoy the intellectual challenge - but I do object to put-downs that are out-of-date, based on flawed methods and demonstrate a lack of site-searching skills. Please! Even in D&D, I'm at a high enough level that the DM has to give the monsters PhDs in physics and advanced library science. (Ever been attacked by a goblin wielding a +20 Shakespere of Doom?)