Is There Really a Link Between Engineering and Autism?

Abstract

Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Scott, Bolton and Goodyear (1997) found that engineering was over-represented as an occupation among fathers of individuals with autism, in comparison to fathers of non-autistic individuals. We present further analyses of their data which suggest that while engineering is indeed more common than would be expected, so too are the occupations of medicine, science, and accounting. In addition, skilled and unskilled manual workers are less common as fathers than would be predicted. Moreover, our analyses indicate that accountancy and science may be as strongly associated with fathers of individuals with autism as is engineering. These results could be seen as being consistent with a link between parental occupation and incidence of autism. However, we also consider whether they might arise from a sampling bias, with generally 'less-professional' occupations being under-represented among Baron-Cohen and colleagues' sample.

Keywords

domain specificity folk physics folk psychology genetics parental occupation phenotype

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