Gender Differences in Nonverbal Communication Barriers Across Everyday Contexts

Background: Autistic adults report differences in how they use and interpret nonverbal communication. These differences can support communication, regulation, and connection, but they can become barriers when people judge them against conventional social norms. Gender may add to these barriers because people often expect social expression to look and sound a certain way and may respond negatively when communication does not match those expectations. Prior research has described communication barriers in health care, employment, relationships, and leisure, but less is known about whether these barriers differ by gender across everyday contexts. We examined whether gender was associated with self-reported nonverbal communication barriers across these contexts. We also examined whether age, autistic traits, and self-reported communication ability were associated with these barriers. Methods: Autistic adults ( N = 356) completed measures assessing nonverbal communication barriers across health care, employment, relationships, and leisure. Participants also reported their gender, age, autistic traits, and self-reported communication ability. We used principal component analyses to create context-specific composite scores. We examined gender group differences using analyses of variance and assessed associations among gender, age, autistic traits, self-reported communication ability, and nonverbal communication barriers using hierarchical linear regressions. Results: Transgender and gender-diverse adults reported the highest nonverbal communication barriers across contexts, followed by cisgender women and then cisgender men. Gender group differences were largest in relationships and health care. Barriers showed moderate to strong correlations across contexts. Gender remained significantly associated with barriers after we accounted for age, autistic traits, and self-reported communication ability. Conclusions: These findings support a relational understanding of autistic communication barriers because gender differences remained after we accounted for autistic traits and self-reported communication ability. Barriers may reflect how other people interpret and respond to autistic communication, rather than communication ability alone. The results also support the need to examine how gendered expectations influence autistic adults’ communication experiences across contexts.