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I ran a study at Harvard. I had a real finding. It’s sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished, and the story of why is a better illustration of what’s wrong with research than the finding itself. But the finding is good, so first, here’s that.

I measured the achievement kind of passion — the drive to get better at something and win at it. This is the thing competition researchers treat as the engine under workplace success, and I’ve been fascinated by the topic for decades.

So I gave the standard competitiveness scale to 58 autistic women and compared their scores to the published averages for men and women. The autistic women scored significantly higher than neurotypical women. And they were statistically indistinguishable from neurotypical men. On the trait that predicts who will win at work, autistic women don’t look like other women. They look like men.

It’s 58 successful women and a borrowed comparison group, so it’s not bulletproof. But research on autistic women is so sparse that 58 of them is a flood.

The women who’d tell you the most about competitiveness don’t spend their time filling out surveys for the love of science. So the research that exists runs mostly on a convenience sample: mothers who bring their autistic kids in for free services. And those mothers usually aren’t even tested directly — there’s a questionnaire researchers fill out about the mother, from watching her, to decide whether she’s probably autistic too.

This is because revealing to a mom that she’s autistic, when she came in about her child, is the kind of thing clinicians will do almost anything to avoid. It’s the same reason a kid gets tested and walks out labeled ADHD, not autistic, when those are the same thing with amounts of stigma. The field would rather fill out a checklist about a woman than tell her what’s on it.

I had access to the women the field rarely reaches: successful women who already know they’re autistic. So I proposed a participatory study, where the subjects help decide what gets asked — the forward-thinking, subject-centered method everyone praises. We asked the women what they wanted the research to be about. They were close to unanimous. They wanted to talk about trauma. They wanted it on the record that most autistic women had traumatic childhoods — something the research already shows and no one will say to the mothers themselves, because no one wants to offend them.

The IRB would not approve the trauma questions. The ethics board whose entire function is protecting research subjects decided that asking autistic women about their trauma would be too traumatizing for them.

So we agreed on a new set of questions and published a paper. But still, I had this clean little finding about competitiveness, and there was nowhere to put it. Harvard’s school of education said competitiveness wasn’t their field. The business school, didn’t want research that says autistic women are as competitive as men, when professors have built careers on telling successful women they are not as competitive as men.

So my data sat. For years. It’s still sitting.

What finally changed wasn’t the finding. I used to think universities owned research because they owned the methods. Then I realized that the methods were just the gatekeeping that AI is crashing.

The finding didn’t become less true because nobody published it. The women didn’t become less right because the IRB wouldn’t let them talk about trauma. And the data didn’t stop existing because it belonged to no department.

So here it is. Imperfect. Unpublished. Belonging to no field. Which is still more than the people who study autistic women for a living have managed to learn from the women themselves.

The post I have data showing only autistic women are as competitive as men. No one would publish it. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

The World Cup is in Boston, and I live in the middle of the city, so I spent two weeks surrounded by Scottish people. Boston has a literal law against happy hour and a nightlife notorious for being lame. So it made sense that the Scots, who go to bars the way we go to Starbucks, drank all the beer in the city. There were beer delivery trucks lining the streets to keep up.

The Scotts so clearly love their country and their team and each other, and they were having the time of their lives. I watched them wave their flag and wear their flag. And every day they wore kilts that encoded their Scottish family lineage — except for the drinking kilts, which are the ones it’s okay to spill on.

I was in my own city, enjoying their bagpipes, and drinking songs, and endless energy for fun.

But I felt like an outsider watching people who knew exactly where they were from, and I don’t feel that myself, even in my own city.

In the US you’re expected to say where your family is from. It’s a national pastime — everyone is from somewhere else and proud to name it. I remember when my kids first ran into this. I told them we’re Jewish, that after the Spanish Inquisition my family went to Eastern Europe and their dad’s family went to South America. “But what country?” they kept asking. “You have to say a country!”

There isn’t one. I can trace my DNA almost entirely to a small area where Poland and Latvia and Ukraine meet, and my family moved from shtetl to shtetl across it for generations. But those are all places that hated Jews. You can’t say you’re from a place that spent centuries trying to be rid of you.

And I’ll never feel from the US either. Every Jewish person I know has a passport and knows, somewhere in the back of their mind, that the people who didn’t get out of Germany in time were the ones who assumed they were safe. Every Jewish person I know is also exhausted and stressed by what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, which means the one place that was supposed to be the answer to all of this is its own source of dread. It is hard to feel part of something when belonging in one direction makes you precarious in every other.

So I watched the Scots and understood, with more force than I expected, that I could never be that, but also that I don’t actually want to be. The Scottish joy is the joy of the class clown: this will be fine, everyone will laugh, nothing bad happens to me. You can only move through the world that way if the world has agreed in advance to find you charming. If those same men had been Black, drunk in the street at 10:30 in the morning, they would have been arrested.

Their ease is not available to everyone, and I am not built for it. Jews can barely manage a party on Purim, when getting drunk is the instruction. It’s not our style. We are restrained where the Scots are gregarious, careful where they are careless. But I think it’s okay. What I was actually feeling amidst the fun, was how strongly I belong to something after all.

Not a country. A diaspora. I belong to a people defined precisely by not being from anywhere — held together not by a flag or a hillside but by the shared knowledge of having been moved along, over and over, and having carried the thing with us anyway. I feel it every time I can tell someone is Jewish: a small click of recognition, a guess at the family behind them, a culture I already know the shape of.

I didn’t know how much I felt this until I stood next to people who are not from the US — where everyone is displaced – but from Scotland where their tie to their place is everything.

Belonging means saying who you’re with and who you’re not. The Scots draw that line around a country. I draw it around a people scattered across all of them. I loved watching the Scots but I would not trade. One of the best things I did with two decades of raising my kids was try to give them this — not a country to be from, but a people to be of, so that wherever they end up standing, a few feet from someone else’s flag, they’ll know exactly who they are.

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