Do people in IT and tech jobs tend to have kids with ASD?

As I mentioned in the About section, my research interests are mostly focused on individuals with ASD in the technology sector. While I try to make the articles I post about on this site more well-rounded in scope, please indulge me an occasional tech-based article. After I geek out a little, I will try to go back to our regularly-scheduled general-interest articles. Oh, who am I kidding, as a grad student with 2 kids, I don’t have regularly-scheduled anything.

But I digress…

Title:

Are Autism Spectrum Conditions More Prevalent in an Information-Technology Region? A School-Based Study of Three Regions in the Netherlands

Discussion:

Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the co-authors of this paper, predicted in a previous paper that people who work in the tech industry are often talented systemizers, people who are driven to analyze how systems work, “and to predict, control, and build systems” (p. 735), and that they are more likely to have children with ASD. Therefore, if there is a relatively large amount of children with ASD in the same areas where there are a relatively large amount of people in high tech jobs (and statistically adjusting for other possible reasons for this connection), then this would be evidence that people in high tech jobs are more likely to have children with ASD.

So the design of this study is pretty interesting. They tested this theory by, essentially, contacting children from lots of different areas of the Netherlands and seeing if there is a higher incidence of ASD in the areas that have lots of high tech parents. They found this to be true.

What does this mean? I don’t know. This seems to be more about the children than the parents, but it did remind me that I need to read more of Baron-Cohen’s past work. He has a paper about the link between engineering and autism, as well as one about scientists and mathematicians. I will report back soon. =)

Reference:

Note (10/9/15): I had a conversation with my husband, an economist, about this paper and he noted that while Baron-Cohen has some very interesting ideas and papers, the sample sizes for his studies are really way too small and that he (Baron-Cohen) gives his results more weight than an economist or a statistician would. He is a psychologist, however, and they may have different standards. But I thought, as a researcher, this is something that warrants a side note. Now, this doesn’t mean that his results aren’t representative of the greater autism community. It just means that he hasn’t/researchers haven’t quite proven it, yet, at a statistical level.