Simon Baron-Cohen has a justified reputation as one of the world's leading authorities on autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). He is not only a prodigiously productive and imaginative researcher, but also a brilliant popularizer, who has done as much as anyone to communicate the clinical and scientific understanding of autism to the world at large. This is not, however, without its hazards, the most striking of which is the Freudian slip of seeing the world beyond the clinic through clinical eyes.

In The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain (2003), he argued that people with ASD, most of whom are male, were like men only more so. His reasons for suggesting this are tenuous to say the least but the argument goes as follows. One of the most striking features of autism is a “mind-blindness” that is expressed in an inability to see things from another's point of view, and consequently, to tap into, or empathize with their emotions. Many autists, however, will have preserved, or even enhanced, abilities to engage with the physical world, particularly in the sphere of logical reasoning about it. While they feel utterly at sea in social situations, they are at home in the world of facts and logic and material objects. Isn't that just like a man, who may be good at maths and not notice that you are on the verge of tears?