ADHD is a potent source of burnout for women in work environments that fail to accommodate them.

Many adults struggle to manage their work responsibilities while coping with their ADHD symptoms, and the limited support they receive is fucking unfair.

Neurodivergence is a protected characteristic under the 2010 Equality Act, so although they may not be acting like it, your employers have a legal duty of care to make sure that they are doing their best to remove any barriers women with ADHD may be facing.

Beth Thomas is a neurodiversity specialist and workplace trainer who helps organisations improve employee retention and performance, and has expressed concerns about the lack of support managers offer employees with ADHD, warning that burnout is a significant risk.

“In 2024, the CIPD published a report called ‘Neuro Inclusion at Work’, and over 50% of managers don’t know how to support neurodivergent employees. How wild is that?” she says. “I’ve worked with people who have been signed off work for more than a year with burnout because they’ve reached the tipping point and could not cope anymore, largely because the environments were not built to adequately support and nurture their strengths and support their challenges.’’

People with ADHD tend to excel in certain areas and particularly struggle in others – this is compared to neurotypical individuals, who tend to have a more balanced skill set.

For people with ADHD, the significant gaps between strengths and weaknesses can be referred to as a ‘spiky’ personality profile.

Beth emphasises the benefits of a ‘strengths-based approach’ to accommodate ‘spiky’ profiles.

‘’It can help teams become far more productive. Studies have cited up to double the net revenue for leading companies with robust inclusion programmes,” she says. “This is factual evidence to confirm that inclusive, diverse working environments perform better and see better profits.’’

Organisations that should be making every effort to champion the strengths of their ADHD employees, ideally out of the kindness of their hearts (can you imagine!), should at least be doing so for the sake of protecting their precious profits.

Beth reels off some of the most common strengths of ADHD traits.

‘’Adaptability, flexible thinking, creativity, pattern recognition skills, and hyperempathy. Hyperempathy can be seen as a criticism in some environments, but in others,” she says. “It can allow people to connect with each other and make people feel seen, heard and valued, which is gold dust. You can’t always teach things like that.’’

Clearly, understanding ADHD isn’t just the taxing tick-box exercise your boss has been ordered to complete. 

Beth draws on her own experience of having ADHD to point out the role of gender stereotypes in affecting people’s perceptions. 

‘’ADHD is not gender discriminatory, so it does not have any difference in terms of how it presents. It is a neuro-developmental difference that affects absolutely every single gender. The way we are often conditioned to perceive some of these features, in my view, is due to gender conditioning,” she says. “When I was younger, I was a tomboy. Bossy, annoying, irritable, demanding, dramatic, hypersensitive, because I had features of hyperactivity and impulsivity, but because I was a girl, that is how they were interpreted.’’

She compares this interpretation to that of a man.

“If a male presenting employee is very outspoken and strong in terms of how their personality comes across, they look confident. They’re strong, strategic and confident. If a female-presenting individual has the same characteristics, they might suddenly be bossy, bitchy, or inconvenient,” she says. “I think that women with ADHD constitute a marginalised group. They are struggling with an enormous amount of cognitive load, with significantly less executive functioning capacity.”

The intersection of gender stereotypes and ADHD is causing inexcusable inequalities for women who remain misrepresented in the workplace. 

Acceptance, understanding and respect are the bare minimum for organisations and employers who are still escaping accountability for the damage their negligence causes.

Exhaustion, low confidence, and so many unanswered questions for ADHD women who are left to fend for themselves mean they may seek private support.

Becca Brighty is an ADHD coach who didn’t receive her diagnosis until adulthood and has suffered multiple experiences of severe burnout.

She has used what she’s learnt to found ‘ADHD impact’, which delivers one-to-one coaching to help people maximise the benefits of their ADHD in their work, adopting the same ‘strengths-based approach’ that Beth mentioned.

‘’I didn’t know I was experiencing it at the time, I thought I was just going crazy. I couldn’t cope with anything,” she says. “Noise became unbearable, people asking me things was really stressful, I would jump if somebody came into a room. Everything was too much.’’

Since her diagnosis, Becca shared the best piece of advice that helped her to not only recover from burnout but see her business and personal life begin to flourish, all whilst raising her first child.

‘’The main thing that’s going to help anyone with ADHD is to be confident in their knowledge and their understanding of their own brain and being comfortable enough to advocate for themselves,” she says. “For example, I don’t have an issue now at all saying that a room with harsh lighting is a big problem for me. So if I go into a room with big windows where I know it’s not going to be dark, I don’t have an issue saying, ‘Is it all right we turn off the lights?’ Five years ago, I would never have done that. I’d rather just suffer, whereas now I think, ‘But I’m a person too’. I think having that confidence to just be comfortable to be yourself is probably the biggest thing that anybody can do.’’

There are ways that women can be forced to ‘cope’ with their ADHD in the workplace.

‘’I think women do feel extra pressure to appear responsible and organised. I think a woman with ADHD who struggles with organisation would probably be viewed differently from a man. My husband, for example, is a CEO, and he is just absolutely chaotic. He’s like an absolute whirlwind. I don’t think a woman could get away with what he can,” she says. ‘’I think a woman is expected to be more in control, more caring, more giving and someone who looks after people.”

A survey conducted by Ctrl+Shift Magazine found that 69.5% of readers feel more responsible than their male colleagues for maintaining harmony, being agreeable, or managing relationships at work.

Becca explains what that extra responsibility can mean for someone with ADHD.

‘’For many ADHD women, they assume the answer is they feel they simply need to work extra hard, and I’ve had burnout at least two times because I was working so much harder to meet the demands of cognitive functions. You can only give so much energy, eventually you are just going to burn out,” she says.

Beth and Becca both referred to the ‘cognitive load’ and ‘demands of cognitive functions’, which are especially debilitating for women with ADHD.

Liz Mulhall, a work psychologist for NeuroFlourish, supports neurodivergent wellbeing through practical, evidence-informed workplace psychology.

There is a real cost of the cognitive load that women with ADHD can suffer:

‘’There’s often a lot of overwork with ADHD as overcompensation for executive functions. It links to women not wanting to be perceived as lazy at work. There’s often this integration between our identity and our work, and a fear associated with it, as well as questioning your own self-worth, which can contribute to burnout,” she says.

There are other traits that can contribute to burnout.

‘’It might be in the form of taking on too much responsibility for things, which can become a crushing expectation. Another trait is hyperfocus; people with ADHD just wanna know everything about a topic, which can lead to overconsumption driven by curiosity. People can end up in rabbit holes for days,” she says. “I would say it’s worse than typical burnout in that executive functioning becomes really tricky, so some of the basics can be really hard. People might be able to get on with their job and do what’s required, but then really struggle with socialising or anything outside of work, and so there becomes this sole focus on work.’’

Imagine being so bogged down in your job that time with friends and family ends up being sacrificed. 

This is the harsh reality that women with ADHD are facing.

Cognitive overload, gender stereotypes and employers ignoring the strengths-based approach for people with ‘spiky’ work personality profiles- it’s more than enough for a shit-storm of stress to start brewing.

It’s a recipe for burnout with ignorant organisations as the head chefs and ADHD women footing the bill.

It’s crucial to remember that the individual is not to blame here. With so many systemic and societal forces at play, we must critique outwardly as much as we search for answers internally.

Whilst people like Beth, Becca and Liz help educate organisations and empower individuals, it’s clear that we should make every effort we can to better understand ourselves and our peers.

And yes, that includes understanding Becca’s hectic CEO husband – we all have the right to work in our own whirlwind way, after all.