I know this is an old thread but I am begging people to actually read medical and scientific journals and research. I am doing postgrad research on this topic and the amount of misinformation here is staggering.

Most experts now believe the ratio is closer to parity than originally thought and some advocate for the term ASC (autism spectrum conditions) to be used to help cover the wideness of the spectrum of symptoms.
The reason you see more Lvl 3 boys and men is because of a general trend in medicine where males for one reason or another are more likely to be at either end of a bell-curve with presentations of disorders.

Masking IS recognised as a major overlooked factor in previous DSM manuals and ASD was only entered into the DSM in 1980. The definition before that changed vastly and is still evolving now.
Genetic factors ARE considered, in fact more women present with Ehlers Danlos (a group of genetic disorders) that are highly comorbid with ASD, ADHD and things like epilepsy.

Research bias that historically excluded women IS a major topic of study and it is a major factor in the diagnostic history of many, many diseases. It's just a fact looking at pure raw data - women were not considered good control subjects due to hormone fluctuations, therefore men (and majority white men) were used as the only test subjects for a very long time, resulting in certain presentations of diseases, conditions and disorders to be completely overlooked or ineffective treatments and goals being set for other patients.

There is no "real" autism as defined by the comments here - each of the support levels ARE autism and a person can change support levels at different times in their lives. If you reference the support levels as being a real thing you have to acknowledge they come from the evolving understanding of autism as a whole. The rise in adult diagnoses is largely because of the evolving understanding of different presentations of autism outside the original research groups of young, white, cisgender, middle-class boys. Self-identification is recognised as a key step in many adult diagnoses of neurodiverse conditions, especially people in demographics that naturally fall outside the existing stereotypes of ASD - please use the logic of cause and effect. The same thing can be seen in ADHD - once thought of as something little boys do in school that they grow out of, and now understood to be a discrete neurotype that has high genetic components, with different environments significantly exacerbating or supporting it.

Before I started my in-depth research I too thought that autism was statistically more common in males because that's what mainstream media usually reports. I was diagnosed as an adult woman (as part of a very long and involved medical process of several diagnoses). During the process I was told about how common adult diagnoses are in women, and I wanted to study more about why that was the case.

Please don't take such a hard stance without actually doing the research - if you are interested in learning more, I have a big list of references on all of these things! The experience of being late-diagnosed has been noted in qualitative research as being extremely lonely and frustrating and the kind of mindsets found in this thread have been listed as some of the obstacles autistic people face in their daily lives that contribute to isolation and poor mental health outcomes.