When a child is diagnosed with autism, the diagnosis belongs to the child. The logistics rarely do.

Someone has to find the right specialist, navigate insurance, manage waiting lists, coordinate appointments, communicate with schools and attend therapy sessions. Usually that person is a parent, and in many families it is the mother. A research by Hartly et al. revealed that mothers spent significantly more time caring for their children or adolescents with autism spectrum disorders.

This is the overlooked infrastructure of autism care. Healthcare systems and venture investors tend to measure what happens inside the formal system: therapy hours, clinical capacity, reimbursement, outcomes. The unpaid work surrounding that system rarely shows up in the model.

That raises a question for healthcare investors: What happens when the formal care system grows faster than the infrastructure families need to navigate it?

The Market Is Growing. So Is the Gap Around It

Demand for autism services is rising. In 2025, the CDC reported that about 1 in 31 eight-year-olds (3.2%) had been identified with autism across the communities in its Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network.

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) sits at the center of that system. According to Mordor Intelligence, the global Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) market is projected to grow from $7.97 billion in 2025 to $8.33 billion in 2026 and reach $10.39 billion by 2031, representing a 4.51% CAGR over the 2026–2031 period. L.E.K. Consulting estimated in 2025 that the U.S. ABA market had reached roughly $25 billion to $35 billion or more, growing about 10% to 13% a year. L.E.K. also flagged workforce shortages, clinician turnover and access constraints as persistent challenges. 

Market growth, however, is not system efficiency. Adding clinical capacity does not remove the friction families face around it. A therapy appointment may last an hour; the coordination that makes it possible extends far beyond the clinic.

The Hidden Economics of Caregiving

The United States already runs on a massive unpaid caregiving economy. The 2025 Caregiving in the U.S. report from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimated that 63 million Americans, nearly one in four adults, provide ongoing care to an adult or child with a health condition or disability. Nearly seven in ten are employed sandwich generation caregivers and many report that caregiving disrupts their work and strains their finances.

The World Economic Forum established that care work has long been disproportionately shouldered by women. In the U.S., women make up roughly 75% of the workforce in paid care occupations, including childcare workers, home health aides, and nurses. Women also perform a disproportionate share of unpaid caregiving at home. As a result, investing in the care economy is, in many ways, an investment in women’s economic participation and wellbeing. The National Partnership for Women & Families estimated in 2025 that unpaid caregiving represents more than $1.1 trillion in annual economic value, with women providing about two-thirds of it. 

These figures cover family caregiving broadly, not autism specifically. For families navigating autism, the work includes coordinating ABA with speech and occupational therapy, managing school schedules, answering insurance requirements and reinforcing treatment at home. The system calls this "family involvement." Economically, it is labor.

Why This Is a Women's Health Issue

The maternal-health connection is not that autism is a women's health condition, as it is a neurodevelopmental condition. Rather, it is that the demands of autism caregiving can have significant consequences for the health, wellbeing, employment, and economic security of mothers who carry a substantial share of that care. Studies have shown that mothers of autistic children experienced higher levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Hajri (2025) also found that mothers of children with ASD experienced a slightly lower quality of life compared with fathers. 

For investors, more than a social observation, this points to an opportunity in autism care that extends beyond therapy to the infrastructure that makes care easier to access, coordinate and sustain.

The Investment Opportunity

Healthcare investors typically ask three questions when evaluating a market: Is there enough demand? Does reimbursement support the business model? And can providers scale to meet that demand?

Autism care requires a fourth question: Can families keep up as the system grows?

As more children enter autism care, parents, mothers especially, are often responsible for coordinating the complex routines that come with it. Meaning that the healthcare system is relying on a large amount of unpaid labor to keep care moving.

This may result in reduced work hours, loss of time and career opportunities. Families can also face additional financial pressure, while the demands of caregiving can affect parents' physical and emotional wellbeing. These costs do not stay within the household. They can affect employers through lost productivity and retention, providers through administrative burden, and health plans through fragmented and inefficient care.

This creates opportunities beyond the therapy itself. There is room for solutions that make the entire care journey easier to navigate: tools that simplify insurance administration for providers, platforms that coordinate care across multiple services, navigation services that help families find and access appropriate support, and employer solutions that help employees manage complex caregiving responsibilities without stepping away from work.

Each of these problems represents a different market and may have a different buyer. But together, they point to a broader opportunity: building infrastructure around autism care, not simply adding more therapy capacity.

Investors who focus only on the therapy transaction may miss the larger system that makes that transaction possible.

This is where autism care intersects with women's health, not because mothers are the patients, but because they are often doing the work that holds the care system together. When that work is unpaid and largely invisible, its economic and health consequences are easy to overlook. Building better autism-care infrastructure therefore has the potential to support not only children and providers, but also the parents, often mothers, who make care possible.