Leader and MindFor decades, autistic women and girls have had to play "diagnostic bingo" before getting their true diagnosis. As new neuroscience offers a fresh understanding of the condition, the time for change is now 2 April 2025 Maskot/Getty ImagesIf you are having a heart attack, you had better hope you are a man. Women are 50 per cent more likely than men to be misdiagnosed when having a heart attack. The main reason? Stereotypes: we tend to think of heart attacks as a man thing.Autism, too, has long been seen as a condition predominantly affecting men. As with heart attacks, this perception is widely held by the public and often portrayed in cultural characterisations of autism. But it is also a self-propagating belief that has affected scientific research for decades. The more that autism researchers