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 It’s sitting on Harvard’s server, unpublished, and the story of why is a better illustration of what’s wrong with research than the finding itself.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

The post In my neighborhood the Scots started the party at 10:30am. Every day. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Personality type is especially valuable for neurodivergent people because it systematizes things we find difficult to understand intuitively. The problem is that autism and ADHD make us nearly impossible to type correctly — including ourselves.

I kept wondering: if I’m really an ENTJ, why am I the world’s most failing ENTJ? Where is my Fortune 500 company to run? The breakthrough came when I stopped looking at what I was accomplishing and started looking at what I was trying to accomplish.

Now when coaching clients tell me their type, I usually see immediately that it’s wrong. I’m also smarter about typing my own neurodiverse family.

My kids loved Cards Against Humanity, so we played all the time. Nino used an X-acto knife to cut offensive words out of cards, and the cards he couldn’t salvage he saved. The kids assumed they’d get a box of cards when they turned 18. Instead, they got every confiscated card from every expansion pack, meticulously organized by topic. No one needs this. It’s an OCD project Nino invented for himself to assuage his need to sort and organize.

Once I separated autistic sorting from his larger goals, I could focus on his overriding belief that everything should have meaning and connect to people. That’s how I arrived at INFP.

In this week’s Personality Type Office Hours, I’ll show you how to work around the test by separating personality type from neurodivergence to identify core motivations. Join us Thursday, June 18 at 8pm ET. Paid subscribers only.

Here’s the link to become a paid subscriber if you aren’t already.

Here’s the link to the zoom session.

The post Is that your personality or your ADHD? appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Quilts from Gees Bend

People email me their result from my personality test, and I can tell from the way they write the email that the test result is wrong. Finally, I realized that a huge percentage of the people who find their way to me are autistic, and autism breaks the Myers Briggs test. It’s like I accidentally ran a fifteen year study on autism and personality type.

The test breaks because every question assumes you can see yourself, and seeing ourselves is the thing those of us with autism can’t do. Scientists call this deficit theory of mind.

Take introvert versus extrovert. It’s not about how social you are — it’s about what exhausts you. But I never want to go to a party, and once I’m there I don’t shut up. Am I an I or an E? The official tiebreaker is whether the party recharges you or drains you, and for autistic people the answer is always drained, because people hate us at parties.

J versus P is worse. A J needs things settled; a P keeps options open. But autistic executive function means we have no consistent relationship to settledness. I’m a J about my aspirations and a P about everything that requires getting off the sofa. I want things orderly when they’re my special interest and flexible when they’re someone else’s rules.

And underneath all the letter confusion is the real problem: personality type is an exercise in relativity. The test is asking whether you’re an extrovert relative to the entire universe — not relative to your loud family, not relative to corporate America where everyone performs extroversion. Answering requires holding the whole distribution of humanity in your head and locating yourself inside it, which is precisely the theory-of-mind work autism makes hard.

Another reason autism makes typing ourselves difficult is that autism is about extremes. Normal people are okay at most things. For example, they’re okay at school and okay at sports. But autistic people are uneven: very good at some stuff and terrible at others. See: spiked brain. But also see: Gees Bend Quilts. Because those quilts are have the same architecture as more typical quilts, but they have exagerrated, uneven proportions.

The same exaggeration happens within type. If ENTPs are generally funny, cheat on their spouses, and can’t hold down a job, an autistic ENTP has been married fifteen times or has never worked a day in their life. We’re not different from our type. We’re our type with the volume knob broken off. But there’s a reason that Gees Bend quilts are on US postage stamps: the uneven composition is a surprising and beautiful and a national treasure.

So autistic people are less predictable, yes, but that’s also the reason we need need type more than anyone. This’ll be the topic of my Personality Type Office Hours on Thurs. June 18 at 8pm ET. During that session we’ll also talk about the typing method I’ve landed on after fifteen years of correcting peoples’ scores scores; those wrong scores are where I get all my best material.

New personality type posts:

INFP: Your inability to self-edit is finally worth money

INFJs confuse being understood with being loved

How to talk so an ENTJ will listen

INTJs don’t hold grudges, they archive them

ENFP: I spent two days reading about the Song Dynasty instead of writing this post.

ENFJs get sidetracked by rewards

The post Personality type posts + how autism breaks the test appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Chairs (1970) Tom Berg 

This is a guest post from a college senior I coached.

When my parents divorced, my mom more or less kept my younger brother and my dad more or less kept me. We each saw the other parent, but never very much and never for very long. My brother and I only saw one another every other weekend for the better part of four years.

I didn’t think anything of the fact that my brother and I were split up. I didn’t think anything of the fact that I went to work with my dad every day, even on weekends. As far as I knew, this was just how families worked.

It wasn’t until Penelope explained autism that my family started to make sense.

From a young age I knew there was something different about the way I responded to situations compared to most people around me. “Autism” was a word that carried a lot of stigma when I was growing up, so when Penelope first suggested it explained some of my behavior, I resisted.

The idea itself wasn’t new. Autism didn’t reveal something about me that I didn’t already know. What it gave me was a vocabulary and a body of knowledge for understanding things I had sensed for years but couldn’t explain.

My dad originally sent me to work with Penelope because he wanted me to understand the workplace. She helped me do that. But she also helped me understand my dad.

I had already accepted that I was naturally weird. What I hadn’t realized was that the same explanation applied to my parents, my brother, and many of the family dynamics I had spent my life taking for granted.

Nobody had ever told me my family was unusual, probably because we didn’t socialize much as a family. Once I understood autism, though, so many things clicked into place.

As I got older, my dad and I drank almost all the time. I thought it was nice because we were watching baseball together. Looking back, I can see that we never really learned how to talk to each other. We could sit together for hours watching a game, but whenever we had to talk about something important, we fought.

Learning about autism didn’t make me blame my family less. It made me understand them better.

The relationships that changed the most were the ones with my mom and my brother.

Before, I loved them, but I didn’t put much effort into showing it. I told myself that meant the relationships weren’t very important to me. Looking back, I think something else was happening. Distance was easier than trying.

Learning that all of us were struggling with some version of the same thing made me more empathetic. For the first time, I stopped seeing myself as the only person who had been hurt by our family dynamics.

Since then, both relationships have changed a lot.

Even though I live across the country, my mom and I spend a few hours every week watching TV together remotely. I tutor my younger brother in math and English twice a week.

I used to understand our family in terms of IQ. I went with my dad because we were smart and my brother went with my mom because they weren’t.

I believed that for years.

Now I watch my brother play the drums and realize how wrong I was. Autism doesn’t distribute strengths evenly. My brother can do things I can’t do. We all have minds that spike in different places.

For a long time I thought understanding my family meant ranking everyone. Now I think understanding them means paying attention.

I know the state of my family relationships was never entirely my fault. We were all shaped by the same family system and by our own autistic ways of connecting.

But I want to take responsibility for the part I can control.

I don’t want to work weekends the way my dad did. When I have kids, I want to spend my time watching them grow up. I want to be present. I want to be a good husband and father instead of always choosing what’s emotionally easiest in the moment.

Understanding autism didn’t change me, but it changed what I think is possible for me.

The post My dad hired Penelope to coach me. Here’s what happened. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Z tells me the list of things I can never write about — just to be sure I don’t forget. I am surprised he’s doing it at our local coffee shop where anyone could hear. The last one is, “Don’t tell people Nino left us because he didn’t want to raise two autistic kids.”

“Wait. What? You’ve never said that to me before.”

“Forget it. Everyone already knows. I just thought the list needed more things or you wouldn’t remember.”

I look around to see if the people in the coffee shop are nodding. I think the real reason Z is concerned about what I write is that his friends read my blog — they never would have except that Duke has my first book in their library, and Z made the mistake of telling them, which only mattered because the cover is Six Sex Scenes.

When the kids were little the New York Times interviewed me about why I thought it was okay to write about my kids on my blog. The article turned out to be about how moms were ruining their kids’ lives by putting everything online. At the time I chalked the piece up to the NYT being too old to keep up with my amazing forward-thinkingness.

The article was on the front page. The picture of me was in our rented house in Madison where there was no furniture because I spent so much money landscaping the yard. We had all the birthdays in the yard that year in the small garden toward the back. When the kids asked where the old plants were going, I said they were dying. When I traveled on a kid’s birthday, I told the kid it was a different day.

The quotes from me are about how by the time kids grow up they won’t care about what’s online because everything will be online. I was so sure of myself when I had little kids. Now I see the reporter, Leslie Kaufman, is an obituary writer.

Z has to make sure I remember the list of forbidden topics because he thinks I forget about boundaries when I write. So I pay for our coffee even though he has way more money than I do after the Uber settlement. I need to function like a parent with boundaries, and money is my only way.

Z asks us to dress up for his birthday. I tell Nino he needs to show up for the kids or I’ll regret letting him back into our lives. He reminds me that I used to tell the kids their birthday was a different day when I had to travel.

Still, he shows up to the birthday decidedly dressy. Then I notice they’re clothes he took from his dead dad’s apartment. I tell him, “Thank you for trying.”

Our building is turning into short-term rentals, so I have to move, fast, before the kids think I got evicted. That’s the thing about a crisis — if you move on your own volition, you have something lined up with time to spare and it looks like it’s not a crisis.

I had a crisis trying to make all that look like it was happening. The place I got is a block from Nino’s apartment and there’s a garden in the back, so it looks very intentional.

Z told me he thinks I’m not making enough money to support myself.

I told him not to worry, I have a webinar tonight.

He said: “What is a webinar? Is that Zoom?”

He’s right that I need to focus on work. But the garden was just sitting there. So I moved all my plants from three other gardens I’d made around Boston and I got it looking really nice.

Z told me I have a problem with gardens and a problem with evictions, and this is going to be the fusion of those if I’m not careful. Also, he said, “It’s probably stealing when you take plants from a garden you already made. And you’ve been sneaking into the garden when you tell us you’re working.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you going outside again. In the dark. Just like you used to. You have to cut yourself off.”

I say nothing.

I didn’t think it mattered what day their birthday was if they didn’t know the difference. I still don’t, really. I’m already keeping each kid’s list of things I can’t write. In exchange, I get to keep Nino — he’s not the best dad, but he’s the only person who will let me write anything. I need a way to keep bad boundaries and still build something that matters.

The post Boundary setting for people who hate boundaries appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

My first sense that recent college grads are in hell is when I realized the job hunt process is totally broken. Kids use AI to write their resumes, screen ads, and fill out applications. Meanwhile, AI is sorting resumes for companies, and the AI sorters prefer AI-written resumes, so kids are sending out thousands of applications before getting a single interview.

Duolingo received 10,000 applications for one internship and pulled the listing weeks before the deadline. TikTok said they hire the first good resume that comes through, so apply fast. Think about the explosion of college applications that happened with the Common App. That’s what AI did to job hunting.

But this doesn’t explain why recent college grads have higher unemployment than the overall workforce.

The first jobs AI squashed were entry-level jobs in fields like writing, teaching, and research, and roles that measure corporate productivity: low-level accounting, marketing analytics, and consulting. Internships followed, because what’s the point of an intern pipeline when there are no entry-level jobs at the end of it?

The hottest startup out of Stanford right now is Extern, a platform where Fortune 500 companies list projects for kids to do from home, using AI to simulate a job they’re not getting paid for. It’s the apocalyptic version of the gig economy.

But young people were already working from home before AI ate the entry-level jobs. And working from home is where careers go to stall because the entire learning curve of early careers depended on proximity to people you can annoy — people who eventually take you under wing so you stop irritating them. That apprenticeship is gone. There is no remote version of it.

People-skills jobs are not going anywhere. But people skills are defined by the specific culture of a specific office, and younger workers have never been to an office. And kids can’t learn these skills from professors who went into academia specifically to avoid having to learn corporate ropes.

I got an email from Extern recently. The pitch was about personal branding — how you build it by attaching yourself to a big company name, which you can do by working for them for free. I was struck by how this hijacks what personal branding used to mean: being known for your new ideas. Now it means borrowed credibility from companies that won’t hire you.

The person who sent the email included her LinkedIn profile. When I clicked it, I got an error message. I told my son and he said: “Mom, we hate LinkedIn. We do it because this is a crisis and we will play by any rules in order to be employed.”

This is not the internet with reckless Gen X subverting everything they can. Gen Z grew up in Covid. They don’t want a revolution — they want an office. They want someone to let them inside an institution and show them how work works.

Gen Z doesn’t need to worry about AI taking jobs because they didn’t even have those jobs. The real problem for new college grads is the disappearance of mentoring.

Young workers used to learn by being physically near older workers: overhearing meetings, asking inappropriate questions, watching how decisions got made. In one of my first jobs, I agreed to be the CEO’s beach volleyball partner just to get more time around him. That led to him funding my startup. Today remote work removes the proximity we need for knowledge transfer.

So now parents hire coaches, pull strings for internships, and pay for simulated work experiences because companies stopped providing an initiation into adult working life.

The post The career killer for Gen Z isn’t AI. It’s remote work. appeared first on Penelope Trunk Careers Blog.

Dance scene from Bande a part by Godard (1964)

When Z was young, I overheard Nino saying he doesn’t like playing Candy Land. And Z said, “Dad, I’m the kid and you’re the dad, so you have to play games that are boring to you because you’re not the kid.”

When the kids were little, they’d ask Nino why he left us, and he’d always say it was because of me: “Your mom is impossible to get along with.” But now that the kids are grown up, Nino spends almost all his free time with me.

Now Nino and I are at the art museum which I used to go to with the kids and now I only go to with Nino. I’m not sure if this is because the kids are not interested. The gift shop is my favorite part of any museum because it’s a way to spend money to make life better. I tell Nino we should pick out a puzzle to do with Natalie.

“Why?”

”Because she doesn’t like watching movies with us but she will do a puzzle.”

“If she doesn’t want to be with us, just let her. It’s her decision.”

I buy the puzzle. But I know I won’t be able to get Nino to do it tonight. He has his heart set on Godard.

We are watching the 100 most influential films according to 200 directors. Nino wanted the critics’ list — he went to film school with too many of the directors to trust them. I like the directors’ list because they vote for films that influenced their process.

Nino gives in when he sees that a bunch of Godard films made it to the top of both lists. But after three movies I started feeling like Godard’s idea of exploring women was mostly finding stylish ways to brutalize them.

Nino is crushed by my disdain for Godard, so I watch more. Then I need a break and we walk through the Boston Common. My new apartment is three blocks from the Common and one block from Nino. Z says we’re doing a slow-motion return to marriage and in a few years we’ll be living in the same apartment.

The hardest part about being close to Nino is his inability to be close to the kids. I should have pushed harder when the stakes were board games. Then maybe he’d have practice making compromises as an act of love.

On our walk I bring up the latest version of this conflict because all conflict goes so slowly with Nino that I can’t sit still. I tell Nino he has to go to Peru with Z because Z is paying for the trip, and it’s a heritage thing.

Nino says, “Uh huh.”

“Is that a yes? Can you add tone of voice so I can understand?”

He says,“Let’s just keep walking,”

I interrupt his thinking. “This is not a question of is it fair to not go with him. It’s a question of do you want to experience life with your kids.”

I am stupid for pushing because now he’s in question mode. “How will Z plan a trip? How will he pay for it? When will we figure out the date because I have to use vacation time.”

“So you’re worried the trip will be a hard for you? I mean, what about when we took two toddlers across country and we had no money and no place to stay? Are you worried a trip to Peru will be harder than the hardest family trip we ever had?”

He thinks. Then he says, “Emotionally hard. I would have to call my family and figure out how to connect with them.”

We turn back to walk home. I am so pissed. “Let’s just admit that I have done all your emotional connecting for your whole life and the problem is I’m not going to Peru.”

Nino says, “That’s not fair. And it’s not helping.”

Actually, debating him does help me. But only in the short term. So I say, “Let’s go home and finish the movie.”

“But you don’t like the movie.”

“I like that I don’t have to mediate the relationship between you and Godard.”

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