“Open plan offices are designed for spontaneous collaboration and for visibility. But for an ADHD brain, it's basically a brightly lit indoor rave with 17 DJs and you and your laptop in the middle of it.”
Portia Hunt is a mixed-methods researcher who studies how people experience complex systems, including the modern workplace. Her work identifies patterns that shape burnout, communication, and career sustainability, particularly for neurodivergent professionals. She coaches women with ADHD and created a free Job Description Evaluator that flags language that may signal environments where masking becomes a full-time job—check it out!
TAKEAWAYS
Masking Since Girlhood
Masking is the act of hiding your neurodivergent traits to fit into your environment. Over time, it can create a unique kind of cognitive and emotional exhaustion that often builds so gradually you don’t realize how depleted you’ve become.
Effective masking is learned so early in life for many girls that even healthcare providers can miss it. Today, many women are receiving ADHD diagnoses in their 40s, and much of that delay stems from the pressure to appear and perform neurotypically.
As with many medical conditions, the diagnostic criteria for ADHD were originally developed around how it presents in boys and men. In women, ADHD often looks different, with symptoms that may include emotional dysregulation or dissociation rather than the more overt hyperactivity many people associate with the condition.
Girls with ADHD are also far more likely to internalize their struggles as personal flaws instead of recognizing them as neurological differences that can be understood and accommodated. They're also much more likely to be misdiagnosed with anxiety or depression.
What a World with Proper Diagnoses Looks Like
InInstead of being told she’s too sensitive, has too big of an imagination, or just isn’t trying hard enough, a girl diagnosed early learns something entirely different: that her intensity is a strength. She grows up understanding what her brain needs, advocating for herself with confidence, and building a life around how she works best. She doesn’t spend her thirties untangling the damage of her twenties or wondering why effort never seemed to be enough.
She has the language to understand that the way she thinks—her pattern recognition, her ability to hyperfocus, her instinct for seeing what others miss—isn’t a flaw to overcome. It’s a set of strengths she can build a career and a life around.
When girls with ADHD are identified and supported early, we don’t lose them to shame, burnout, or years of self-doubt. We gain researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, physicians, and leaders who know how to harness the way their brains work instead of spending years fighting against it.
