ADHD & Women: Juggling Family, Work, Short Attention Spans

Brenda Daverin had a problem. Unable to focus on her job, she'd start spacing out, losing track of time, work tasks, and even conversations she was a part of. By 2006, when Daverin was 38, both she and her boss had had enough. "I received a formal verbal warning about my performance that led me to consult a psychiatrist," she says. Her diagnosis: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Daverin may not seem like a typical ADHD patient. But the truth is, ADHD can look a lot different than what you might expect. Instead of focusing on young, wildly uncontrollable boys, doctors and researchers are beginning to recognize that both genders and all ages can be affected by this disorder—and that women face special challenges that can make it difficult for them to be diagnosed and treated.

Girls gone mild

For a long time after ADHD was first identified in the 1970s, diagnoses and research focused on the little boy who bounces off walls, does poorly in school, and constantly disrupts the rest of his class.

"You had these boys who were aggressive and difficult to manage and those were the ones being brought into clinics initially. The research was done on clinic populations. And the diagnostic manuals were all based on that research," says Ellen Littman, Ph.D., co-author of the book Understanding Girls with ADHD and one of the first psychologists to start focusing on gender differences with the disorder. "It wasn't even until 1980 that we started to accept that you could have ADHD without the hyperactive component."

And that's a big deal for women with ADHD, most of whom, according to experts like Littman, don't display that classic hyperactive behavior. Instead, Littman says, women and girls are most likely to be inattentive. The daydreamers. The space cadets. The little girls who making eye contact with the teacher, but whose minds are 1,000 miles away.

To make things more complicated, experts say young girls often have elaborate systems that allow them to compensate and still do well in school. "A girl with ADHD will stay up very late into the night, re-do homework, have parents help her. She turns in good work and looks bright. But what we don't see is the effort she puts in," says Patricia Quinn, M.D., director of the National Center for Girls and Women with ADHD.

The result has been that girls often don't get the help they need; what's going on with them doesn't look like what their parents and teachers have come to expect from ADHD. Twenty-five years ago, Littman says, it wasn't unusual to see 10 boys diagnosed for every 1 girl. But the situation is improving. Today, now that doctors and researchers know that inattentiveness, and not hyperactivity, is the key characteristic of the disorder, those numbers are closer to equal, "which is what you'd expect for something that isn't a sex-linked disease," Quinn says.