[red_admiral]

There is a theory by Simon Baron-Cohen that autistic people have "extremely male brains". I dislike this formulation myself - I think he's confusing the proxy for the root cause, which is that autistic people have extremely _systematising_ brains. (And yes, "autistic" and "nerd" are not synonyms, I know.)

But psychology does acknowledge that an interest in people vs systems/things is one of the most pronounced measurable and replicable sex differences; depending on who you ask this might apply to babies from the day they were born, as measured by the time they spend looking at a photo of a face vs. one of some building blocks.

(Note, the research is about _interests_, not _abilities_. Big difference.)

If you plot people on a people/things interests scale, you might see a male cluster, a female cluster, and if you zoomed in, a "nerd cluster" a bit beyond the normal male cluster.

Female nerds and women with autism do exist, and as far as I can tell, they fit in just fine into any "nerdspace" that does not single them out based on their sex/gender or act too sexist. (Personally, I find the label "extremely male brain" particularly uncharitable for women with autism.) But they are numerically a minority.