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Huge Survey Shows Correlation Between Autistic Traits and STEM Jobs

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: November 4th, 2015, 6:00am UTC

Bruce66423 writes: A survey of more than 450,000 people in the UK has shown there is a significant correlation between a higher score on the Autism Quotient and being a scientist or engineer. AQ scores are also higher for men than for women. "On average, the male AQ score was 21.6, compared to a female score of 19.0. People work in a STEM-related job had an average AQ score of 21.9 compared to a score of 18.9 for individuals working in non-STEM jobs. This suggests autistic traits are linked to both sex and to having a lsquo;systems-thinkingrsquo; mind." A professor involved with the work said, "These may shed light on why we find males in the population on average have slightly more autistic traits than females do, and why fathers and grandfathers of children with autism are over-represented in STEM fields."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Huge+Survey+Shows+Correlation+Between+Autistic+Traits+and+STEM+Jobs%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1P8QMgc"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F11%2F04%2F0513208%2Fhuge-survey-shows-correlation-between-autistic-traits-and-stem-jobs%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/11/04/0513208/huge-survey-shows-correlation-between-autistic-traits-and-stem-jobs?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/11/04/0513208/huge-survey-shows-correlation-between-autistic-traits-and-stem-jobs?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/4Wy1rOT9I34" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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