How to perform find and replace operations within a visual selection in Vim
How to find hidden processes and ports on Linux/Unix/Windows
How to add bash auto completion in Debian Linux
How to add cron job entry for acme.sh
How to Upgrade Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 LTS: A Complete Guide
How to Upgrade Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 LTS: A Complete Guide
How to configure AWS SES with Postfix MTA on Debian Linux
The repository ‘http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports Release’ no longer has a Release file.
How do I find out my timezone in Linux?
Linux Foundation and Industry Leaders Launch Akrites to Defend Critical Open Source Software Against AI-Enabled Cyber Threats - PR Newswire
Linux Foundation and Industry Leaders Launch Akrites to Defend Critical Open Source Software Against AI-Enabled Cyber Threats - PR Newswire
Linux Foundation and Industry Leaders Launch Akrites to Defend Critical Open Source Software Against AI-Enabled Cyber Threats - Linux Foundation
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 It’s sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished, and the story of why is a better illustration of what’s wrong with research than the finding itself.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 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.