When I first started telling people that I was going through the process of being evaluated for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), I was consistently met with the same responses.
“You don’t really seem like the type to have it.”
“I’m surprised, you’re not disruptive or anything.”
“My brother has ADHD, and I don’t think you do.”
I’m not in any way blaming these people for thinking this. In fact, I myself was shocked when my parents first brought the subject up to me. At that time, I had a vague understanding of what ADHD was, and it had never even crossed my mind that it was a possibility for me.
The reason others close to me and I were surprised by my diagnosis is because most of the symptoms I exhibit are not the “traditional” ones associated with ADHD. Even though many of the people who suffer from ADHD have the same symptoms as me, they’re the ones that are least talked about.
My own symptoms align most with the symptoms of other women and girls, and the fact that these are the parts of ADHD that are talked about the least is not a pattern formed by coincidence.
Many factors contribute to the extreme ratio of undiagnosed women with ADHD, but the main one began decades before ADHD was a common diagnosis: gender inequality.
Gender bias in the medical field is just one of the many effects of sexism, and it has had an enormously negative effect on the diagnosis of women and women’s health care for decades. The amount of undiagnosed and misdiagnosed women with any form of medical disorder stems from the underrepresentation of women in medical trials.
The exclusion of women in medical studies can be traced back to the 1970s when men were still viewed as the dominant gender and very few women had any involvement in the medical field at all. Then, it was believed that Caucasian males accounted for the “normal” population for studies to be done on, and the results of these studies were generalized for women.
Although tremendous advancements in women being included in clinical trials have been made, this problem has not gone away and doesn’t seem to be anytime soon. In 2021, almost 80% of participants in phase one of clinical trials are male, and only 22% of participants are female.
This process of generalization in studies has done more harm to women’s health than most people realize. Of course, men are also crucial to medical studies, but if all of the information we have surrounding medical and drug research is based on trials run mostly by men and on men, women’s health and diagnoses are constantly at risk.
It is crucial to understand the biological differences between sexes when performing studies that are based on a person’s physical and mental health. There is infinitely more information surrounding the underdiagnosis of women and girls with ADHD—too much more to put into this article. Read my next article on this subject to learn more about this incredibly problematic issue and why the tremendously high percentage of women with undiagnosed ADHD needs to be accounted for.
