I think a very useful term here is Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP) - subclinical ASD - you have significantly more of the traits than the average person does, but they are not strong enough or not disabling enough to merit a clinical diagnosis of ASD.
BAP is very common among (1) STEM professionals, (2) close blood relatives of people with clinical ASD (if you have a child or sibling with an ASD diagnosis, then if you yourself don’t have ASD, odds are high you have some degree of BAP), (3) people with other psychiatric diagnoses (especially those known to have a lot of overlap with ASD, e.g. ADHD, personality disorders, PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, the schizophrenia spectrum), (4) certain LGBT subgroups (especially transgender people) - all of whom have heightened odds not just of having BAP / subclinical ASD, but clinical ASD too
Like ASD, BAP skews male, but women can have it too. (The average man is a little bit more autistic than the average woman.) Also, autistic traits are positively correlated between romantic partners, so a woman in a relationship with a man with BAP or ASD is more likely to have some degree of BAP herself (as well as being more likely to have clinical ASD)
BAP itself is a matter of degree… autistic traits is a continuum and we are all somewhere on it (actually a one-dimensional continuum is a simplification, it is a multidimensional construct-but a useful simplification) - and clinicians draw a line at some point (they don’t all draw it at the same place, and its location varies across time and space and culture and even clinical subcultures) and if you are on one side of that line you have clinical ASD, if you are on the other you don’t-if you are on the non-clinical side of the line, but nearing it, you have BAP… but “nearing” it subdivides into people who are closer and people who are further away