There's a lot around the internet these days about how autism/autistic people are changing the world, followed by a long list of techie types who are obviously exceptionally gifted but aren't necessarily disabled per se.
Autism is a disability. It involves serious impairment in one or more area of living: school, work, socializing. Being bad with women (but fine with other men) doesn't count, especially in men in their teens and early twenties, who can't be expected to know anything about women yet.
These lists of famous autistic types tend to be high tech types.
They also happen to be all men.
My impression is that autistic people, both sexes, are just as likely to be artsy types as techie types. (For comparison, exceptionally gifted boys in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) tended to be Investigative types in the Holland Code system, but exceptionally gifted girls in the same study were evenly divided between Investigative, Artistic, and Social.)
For comparison, here is a list of famous autistic women:
Mostly artsy types and animal researchers, with one volunteer autism researcher. Kind of girly, no?
And lots of poverty. Very feminine, that.
August, 2012