I achieved a 1:1 in my BA and always maintained relatively high grades throughout my school years. However, I always felt that studying was challenging, particularly with subjects I was not so interested in, concentration and organisation always felt like a battle. I’ve always had quite bad time management, as well as ‘time blindness’, constantly having to stay up most nights towards deadlines and never learning from those mistakes. Although I recall struggling in school, I didnt ever have the context to understand that I was potentially struggling more so than others. The structure of the educational system and courses I undertook provided me with a degree of boundary around time which ultimately helped me to catch up. It wasn’t until after graduating from my BA that I sought a diagnosis. The change from a structured lifestyle with timetables to follow and deadlines to meet was when I began to really struggle, working freelance alongside a part-time job left me with a lot of free time, whilst I built up my contacts for freelance work. I grew up in Birmingham as the youngest daughter of married parents. I have two older brothers, both of which are dyslexic, one dyspraxic and the other currently seeking a diagnosis of ADHD. My Dad believes he has ADHD but never sought diagnosis. When I was 26 and approached my GP about a diagnosis he told me that “I would know if I had ADHD by now”, I corrected him, telling him that many women are misdiagnosed as having anxiety or other disorders and that I believed I had inattentive ADHD (formerly known as ADD) which is more common in women and not as easily identifiable as hyperactive ADHD. He referred me and I was diagnosed within 1.5 years. When I first approached my parents about my diagnosis there was doubtfulness around the idea which left me feeling unseen.
“Gender bias not only occurs in clinical settings but also in the perceptions of parents and teachers, which may impact the rate in which males and females are referred for treatment. Ohan and Visser (2009) asked parent and teacher participants to read a vignette describing a child displaying symptoms of ADHD. Vignettes did not differ, other than half of participants read a vignette describing a child with a male name and the other half read a vignette describing a child with a female name. Participants were then asked to rate their likeliness to recommend or seek services for the child described. Both teachers and parents were less likely to seek or recommend services for girls than boys in these vignettes.”(Attoe and Climie, 2023)
In hindsight I can see how they were in disbelief, as they also lacked a degree of context to know I was struggling. Girls who display typical ADHD behaviours such as impulsivity, hyperactivity, or disorganisation are more likely to be socially judged for not conforming to expected feminine norms. As a result, many girls with ADHD try hard tomask their symptoms in order to avoid negative social consequences (Waite et al., 2010, as cited in Attoe and Climie, 2023). Because I was also relatively high achieving it wouldn’t have seemed cause for concern.
Because my diagnosis is fairly recent, I am still on a journey of learning about ADHD and learning about myself. There are elements about me that I now have context for which make them make sense but also a lot to discover.
“ADHD is not the only disorder where women are underdiagnosed. Research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has found that women are commonly undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. This inaccurate diagnosis may be due to diagnostic criteria being developed primarily on the behavioral presentation of males” (Green et al., 2019, as cited in Attoe and Climie, 2023).
I’m aware that I am not an expert around neurodiverse learning differences. I have researched other learning differences within the umbrella term of neurodiversity but there is such a spectrum within neurodiversity that I could not claim to be knowledgeable about every disorder. I’m aware that as I am an insider within the research my analysis of student data may present bias.
References:
Attoe, D. E. & Climie, E. A. (2023) ‘Miss. Diagnosis: A Systematic Review of ADHD in Adult Women’, Journal of Attention Disorders, 27(7), pp. 645–657. doi: 10.1177/10870547231161533. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10173330/ (Accessed: 1 January 2025).
Lucas, L. (2024) ‘Interviewing colleagues and peers: reflections on being an “insider researcher”’, Centre for Health Psychology Blog, 23 April. Available at: https://sites.manchester.ac.uk/health-psychology/2024/04/23/interviewing-colleagues-and-peers-reflections-on-being-an-insider-researcher/ (Accessed: 31 November 2024).