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

I ran a study at Harvard and published a paper. But my best finding is sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished. So I’m embarking on a furtive rescue mission. To start, here’s the finding:

I measured the achievement kind of passion — the drive to get better at something and win. This is the thing competition researchers treat as the engine behind 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.

I get that 58 successful women and a borrowed comparison group, is not bulletproof. But research on autistic women is so sparse that 58 is a flood.

Women who’d tell you the most about competitiveness don’t spend their time filling out surveys for the love of science. So most research comes from mothers who bring their autistic kids in for free services. Those mothers aren’t 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 is the kind of thing clinicians will do almost anything to avoid. It’s like when a kid gets tested and walks out labeled ADHD, not autistic, even though it’s likely both are true. Getting real-time information about autism is nearly impossible because the conversation involves too much stress and conflict. (I’m the only one who is excited to give you that information.)

Anyway, I had access to a rare group in research: successful women who already know they’re autistic. I proposed a participatory study, where the subjects help decide on questions — the forward-thinking, subject-centered method everyone praises. The women 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 women 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 toothless questions blah blah published paper blah blah.

But still, I had this clean little finding about competitiveness, and there was nowhere to put it. Harvard’s school of education said it wasn’t their field. The business school didn’t want research that says autistic women are as competitive as men, because professors 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 are just the gates that AI is now 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 have managed to learn from the women themselves.