I have data showing only autistic women are as competitive as men. No one would publish it.

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 It’s sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished, and the story of why is a better illustration of what’s wrong with research than the finding itself.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…