Autism test for women

This autism test for women is a free online self-observation questionnaire of 24 statements, with no sign-up required. It focuses on social camouflaging: copying social codes, preparing sentences in advance, monitoring yourself during a conversation. It does not replace an assessment by a health professional. The reference measure of camouflaging, the CAT-Q, was published by Hull and colleagues in 2019.

This questionnaire is not restricted to women and asks nothing about your gender. The angle comes from the history of identification: early descriptions were built on male profiles spotted in childhood, which left quieter presentations out of view. Camouflaging also concerns men and non-binary people, and no statement here assumes a particular body, a domestic role or motherhood.

Social camouflaging covers the strategies that make interaction difficulties less visible: watching people who look at ease and borrowing their gestures, preparing conversation topics in advance, smiling at a hint you did not catch, checking your posture and intonation while you speak. Hull and colleagues described these strategies in 2017 from the accounts of autistic adults themselves.

Compensating works, and that is precisely the problem: it makes the way you function invisible without making it comfortable. The cost is paid afterwards, as a long recovery need, deliberate withdrawal after socially heavy periods, sometimes lasting exhaustion after months at a demanding pace. Lai and colleagues measured this phenomenon in 2017 in autistic adults of both sexes.

The questionnaire explores four axes. Camouflaging covers imitation of social codes, prepared sentences and self-monitoring during interaction. Energy cost covers the recovery needed afterwards and the withdrawal that goes with it. Deep interests covers the intensity and duration of your interests and a need for predictability that is hard to see from outside. Hidden sensory discomfort covers the gap between what you actually feel and what you show other people.

In 2016 Bargiela, Steward and Mandy published a qualitative study of women identified late in life, describing years spent looking for an explanation and difficulties repeatedly attributed to other causes. What those accounts share is not an absence of traits but their invisibility to the people around them, and the fact that a fallback explanation had usually been found for every difficulty.

Each answer is worth zero to four points, multiplied by a weight of one to three. Eight statements are reversed, which limits answers given on autopilot. The total is scaled to one hundred and placed in one of four bands. The weights and thresholds were set by the Brain Quiz editorial team. They come from no population calibration and carry no normative value at all.

The 24 statements were written for Brain Quiz from the literature on camouflaging and compensation. No published scale is reproduced, in whole or in part: reproduction rights for the CAT-Q are not established for commercial use, and drawing inspiration from a scale does not entitle anyone to claim it as a source. The references listed document the field, not the origin of the statements.

A high score does not say that you are an autistic person. It says your answers describe a sustained and costly effort to adjust, which can have other origins: social anxiety, a demanding work environment, past experience of rejection. If your first question is how spectrum traits show up day to day, the adult questionnaire is the more direct starting point (/en/tests/adult-autism).

The questionnaire takes about seven minutes. It is free, available online, and requires no account and no email address to see your result. It is intended for people aged sixteen and over. Your answers are used to calculate your score and the breakdown by axis; the Privacy page sets out what is kept, for how long and who can access it. You can go back to a previous statement at any point, and nothing is published or shared without an action from you.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, measuring camouflaging with a questionnaire assumes you are aware of it, whereas some of these strategies become automatic over the years. Second, a low score may mean you do not compensate, or that you cannot see yourself compensating. Our guide on camouflaging goes into this in detail (/en/guides/autism-in-women-masking), and the guide on the term Asperger explains a vocabulary that is still widely used (/en/guides/asperger-terminology).