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Jul 22, 2026
What If You Were Never the Problem?
What If You Were Never the Problem?
00:00
19:11
Transcript
0:01
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Fem Factor podcast. Today's guest is Portia Hunt, and this conversation is about ADHD, burnout, and what work looks like when the world is built for a different kind of brain.
0:12
We talk about why so many women get diagnosed late, how workplace culture quietly drains neurodivergent people, and how to spot those warning signs before you say yes to a role. Here's Portia. Thank you for having me.
0:26
Yes, for me, it was the concept of tipping points, bright, capable people who functioned well for years until something changed that made it impossible for them to continue compensating, and it has nothing to do with your intelligence, your hard work, your competence.
0:42
And for women, this is often when they finally receive a diagnosis of ADHD or other- or some other atypical neurology.
0:50
When I was diagnosed with ADHD at 34, so much of my experience suddenly made sense, including why certain work environments had depleted me much faster than anyone else, it seemed.
1:02
For example, 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.
1:15
And everything you're hearing is equally compelling, and you may end up very well f- informed about everything happening around you, but your work might not get done.
1:24
Yes, that's true, and you don't have to have a diagnosis. You don't even have to be neurodivergent to struggle in an environment where everything is competing for your attention.
1:33
I would walk down the hallway where absolutely everything was made of glass, and as I would walk to the kitchen for lunch, for example, everyone's head would pop up just because I had walked past them, and it-- I'm like, "That has nothing to do with your, uh, your ability to focus."
1:50
That's just too much visual and auditory information for anyone. I called it the panopticon. This was not a popular opinion.
1:57
And some people love it, but it's important for the employer to understand that it's really not gonna work for everyone. I could talk about this for a very long time.
2:06
Women generally have a tendency to mask very effectively.
2:11
Masking is hiding your neurodivergent traits in order to fit into your environment, and there's a very particular type of cognitive, mental, emotional exhaustion that goes along with that that can really creep up on you.
2:23
And the masking can be so effective and learned so early on for girls and AFAB, assigned female at birth, children that even healthcare providers miss it. Many women are diagnosed with ADHD in their 40s.
2:36
There are women getting autism diagnoses in their 70s, and it has everything to do with the messaging that we get that you have to, uh, you have to perform, hmm, neurotypicality.
2:50
So, uh, and the presentation in women tends to be more emotional dysregulation or dissociation.
2:58
Uh, a lot of little girls will, will be described as daydreaming, which looks very different from, uh, the hyperactivity that we associate it with in little boys.
3:07
And with many, as with many conditions, the diagnostic criteria were built around the male presentation, which means that boys historically have been three times as likely to be diagnosed in childhood than, than girls.
3:19
Yeah. Uh, girls, we might put this in somewhere here or there.
3:23
So girls with ADHD are much more likely to internalize their symptoms as character flaws and defects, rather than neurological differences that can be accommodated.
3:33
They're much more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or depression, and many women spend years being treated for anxiety and depression before it occurs to anyone to think about ADHD.
3:43
Boy, I, I- Yeah, no, um, it, l- I, I think it looks, it looks the same sometimes because of the tendency to drift off and dissociate and the, the difficulty of maintaining focus and forcing yourself into executive function when it's harder for you than, than for other people.
4:03
And it's, it's just kind of a, a set of hardships that can look like anxiety and depression. Yes, if you're not running around in circles around your desk, uh, you must not have ADHD.
4:13
And a lot of times the comments that little girls will get are that they're too sensitive or that they have an overactive imagination or that they're lazy and, uh, this, it's all just part of a, a package of a misunderstood neurotype.
4:29
Mm. Okay, let's hit pause for one second. Hmm.
4:32
That is a really interesting question and one that I hope gets more traction in the coming years as we become, as we start catching up to how many girls and women are living with ADHD and other atypical neurotypes.
4:46
Um, we do need to make workplaces and learning environments that are, uh, more suitable for girls and women and other people with ADHD to do their best work.
4:57
So if you imagine a little girl who gets di- diagnosed early, not 'cause she's disrupting the classroom, but because she noticed she was working twice-- someone noticed she would wor- was working twice as hard as everyone else just to keep up.
5:10
She gets the support that actually fits into how her brain works. She learns that her intensity is an asset, and she goes into adulthood knowing that she, what she needs and being confident in asking for it.
5:22
She doesn't spend her 30s unraveling the damage of her 20s and, uh, if I'd been diagnosed at eight instead of 34, I wouldn't have spent so many years thinking that I wasn't working hard enough. I... Yes.
5:34
I would've had the language for my experience.
5:37
I would've known that the way I think, the, the pattern recognition, the hyperfocus, the seeing what others miss was not a flaw to be managed, but actually a thing I'd eventually, uh, build a career around. Oh, yes.
5:51
Off the cuff, on fire. If girls with ADHD are identified and supported early on, we won't lose them to shame spirals and burnout.
6:00
We get researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, and doctors, leaders who know how to use the way their brain works instead of spending their best years fighting it. Right. That's right. Yeah.
6:11
I would love to put together a list of, of brilliant people who did or probably had ADHD. I'm sure it would be fascinating.
6:18
I've seen lists of historical figures who Uh, historians have inferred may have been autistic, and that's fascinating. Leonardo da Vinci, pretty much everyone thinks that he was autistic and gay and otherwise fantastic.
6:32
He probably had ADHD as well. Yes, ma'am. Yes, and when you do get a diagnosis later in life, you, you go through a little bit of a grieving process.
6:42
Like, wow, that kid could have had a much better time if somebody had understood her, or I could have asked early on for the conditions that I now know, uh, allow me to, to do my best work.
6:54
Well, having looked at my share of job descriptions recently, and being mid-career myself, I have picked up on a, a few patterns regarding what works for me and what doesn't, and what different neurotypes might experience differently in the workplace, and how those are coded in the JD.
7:14
Uh, so certain phrases in job descriptions can give you some clues as to how a workplace actually functions.
7:21
So I wrote an article recently for FemFactor in which I identified six patterns, phrases, signals, et cetera, that could indicate a risk of burnout.
7:31
For example, fast-paced environment could mean a lot of context switching and unpredictable shifting priorities, which is very cognitively expensive for someone with ADHD.
7:43
Another example is wearing many hats, which could mean that you have the opportunity to do a variety of, of different tasks and contribute in a variety of ways, or it might mean that roles are unclear or that the employer, or, or that the, the place is understaffed.
7:59
So, uh, undefined ownership of tasks is also very difficult, not just for neurodivergent people, but for anyone.
8:06
And any language indicating that you need a lot of resilience or a thick skin is meant to, in my experience, normalize pressure and a high-conflict culture.
8:17
I recently was interviewed by, uh, a place that told me, "We need someone in this role who is very resilient and ca- can take very direct feedback." And I inferred,
8:28
okay, you have somebody very mean in leadership who makes people quit. It is. That is, uh, that recruiter was, she may have saved me a lot of time.
8:37
Yes, and no JD and no interview process can tell you everything you need to know. But when you do see certain clusters of phrases, uh, it's not necessarily a deal breaker. Many hats is not necessarily a red flag.
8:54
It's just something that you should clarify, uh, tactfully if you do proceed to the interview process.
9:01
Another example is high visibility role, which might mean that your, that your inputs are very important at a high level, or it could also mean that you're expected to be always on.
9:13
I'm picturing my old boss with her BlackBerry at midnight.
9:16
I, I like to think that that, that lean in era is behind us, but when you see something like high visibility, it may mean that you are expected to be available more often than you would like to be, and it might also indicate that you'll be able, that you will be required to perform on the spot.
9:32
And there are a lot of very smart people out there who can answer questions better if they're given a moment to think.
9:40
For example, there are a lot of people out there who process things, process information in written form much faster than they can listen. So, and it can take a lot of time and effort to find out if that's true for you.
9:53
That's, that's, that's another piece of the puzzle is noticing what taxes you and what doesn't, and not automatically writing those things off as, uh, a deficiency in yourself.
10:04
Certainly, for my own job search, I built myself a very highly personalized JD reader that could filter things for certain keywords and indicators of a certain type of workplace or a certain type of work that would not, uh, be ideal for me.
10:23
And I later built a public-facing version of this tool on my coaching website at vireo-coaching.com that reads a job description for you and flags six patterns that tend to signal high cognitive load or burnout risk for neurodivergent people, and also surfaces any green flags, green signals, uh, things like explicit communication culture, flexible work, or protected focus time, and then it generates some suggested questions that you can ask during screening to clarify
10:58
any, any of the flags that, that may be raised. So that output give, gives you a conversation starter. Uh, the questions it generates are designed to help you get real information before you commit. Yeah.
11:09
Yeah, and, uh, some of it seems to be culturally linked to, I think we just have a higher tolerance for weirdness in men.
11:18
Little girls, meanwhile, are told, "You gotta smile more," whereas little boys, like, "Oh, he's strange. That's fine."
11:25
And in the workplace, women ha- there's a, a more of an expectation for women to be, to be pleasant, whereas there are very competent men who are strange or difficult or not friendly all the time.
11:38
Uh, it's just how they are. Right. It can be, and, uh, one thing that I would like us as a, uh, as a, as a whole to reconsider is our definition of professional.
11:52
S- at present, professionalism is often thought of as performing neurotypically. A lot of eye contact, linear communication, being visibly busy, and emotional regulation on demand, particularly for women.
12:05
None of that actually measures the quality of your work. So if we could redesign our criteria around outcome and impact, what did you find? What decision did it enable? What changed because of your work?
12:19
Uh, that would be the measure that, that actually matters. And then you can, you know, work from home and be as antisocial as you please, if that's where you do your best work, right?
12:27
We don't think of ADHD as hyperfocus. I think ADHD is actually, uh, a misnomer. It's not the Inability to focus so much as difficulty choosing your focus.
12:42
Your brain will often choose for you what to attach to, and, uh, that's where the difficulty comes in for a lot of people. Exactly. Yep, same. I never had trou- I was, um... My parents were told, but I, I...
12:55
My parents told me that, "Sometimes we would, when you were little, we would just go in and interrupt you because we thought she can't... It can't be good for her to focus this intensely for this long on one thing."
13:05
And nobody in the '80s would've thought that that was ADHD.
13:08
One thing that has come to mind for me a lot in the recent past is the idea of if someone had known, this little girl would've been treated with more compassion.
13:18
And the question that brings up for me is, do you need a diagnosis in order to be treated with compassion? I hope not.
13:26
So if any of this stuff rings a bell for you, a diagnosis can be helpful in terms of understanding your experience, but ask for what you need.
13:35
If you need a quiet place to work, you're not being, uh, entitled if, if you ask for accommodations that allow you to do your best work. Oh, very, it was very direct feedback.
13:44
I just read between the lines that very direct meant- Yeah, yeah... hostility. I read, I, like, the, the undercurrent there was like, "You're gonna have to put up with some hostile..." Yeah, nobody wants that. Wow.
13:58
That's an interesting question.
13:59
Um, there is absolutely some research behind this, and a lot of people with ADHD have what you might call a low filter communication style, thoughts that move really quickly from their brain out of their mouth without the usual social editing layer, which can read as blunt or inappropriate or too much, but that is a neurological difference e- essentially in impulse regulation.
14:26
So ADHD brains tend to value directness and auth- authenticity over social performance simply because for a lot of neuro- neurodivergent people, that- that's just simply exhausting.
14:36
They want to say what they mean, ask the question everyone else is thinking, and in the right environment, that's an enormous asset, and in the wrong environment, that can get you labeled as difficult. Mm-hmm.
14:46
We do it a lot. Mm. Wow. That's, that's a whole, that's a whole nother podcast in the making. Well, you know, someone can just read my portfolio if they're, they're that curious.
14:58
But what has been most interesting to me, uh, in my career is finding out when we're not asking the right question. This has come up a lot for me in my, uh...
15:10
I did a lot of, uh, research and writing for, for the United Nations Development Program, for example. And crap, I am drawing a blank. Okay. Here's one.
15:20
I was the principal investigator for a qualitative evaluation of a program in, um, Florida and Puerto Rico where people were given cash assistance after being hit by hurricanes.
15:32
And the client wanted to know how they had used the cash transfer, how they felt about the UI, and how it aided them in their recovery process along the timeline of, of the hurricane aftermath.
15:45
And after the first few interviews, it occurred to me to ask them for their adoption rates.
15:50
And when they showed me how many people had been offered the cash transfer relative to who had actually accepted it, there was... Something didn't make sense.
15:59
And that's, that's often for me where the, the most interesting part of the research, the biggest insights lie. People were being given cash when they desperately needed it, and they didn't take it. Why?
16:09
And as it turned out, the reason for the low uptake was that a lot of people thought that this banner ad that popped up in... that they used to manage their, their SNAP benefits was a scam. Hmm.
16:21
So I said, "You have a trust problem. That's not one of the research questions, but we need to surface that right away." And so that's one example.
16:29
Yes, I was variably told, uh, in different circumstances, "That's not an ask from the client." And to which my response was, "This client lacks imagination." And if you...
16:40
And my response was, "If these are the questions that you ask, this is the only information you're going to receive." This was large-scale survey research. And there...
16:49
One time when, um, usually when you design a survey, the things that you really, really want to know, uh, in an electronic survey, you mark it as mandatory. You can't skip this question. We really want you to answer it.
17:02
But for some rapid response assessment survey research that, that I had done, trying to move so that there's not a, a phantom guitar behind me.
17:10
The research that we were doing at the time was it was a remote survey in Ukraine right in the run-up to the Russian invasion.
17:19
And we had sent out a survey to assess perceptions of Russian aggression, of NATO, of the West, uh, et cetera.
17:27
And I said, "I don't know a whole lot about this region, but I have a feeling there would s- be some value in noticing who does not answer these questions."
17:38
And so I made a lot of those questions optional in the electronic survey, and there turned out to be a significant difference in who was willing to weigh in and who was not.
17:49
Anyone living along the border with Russia or who identified as ethnically Russian, uh, was not, they were not as forthcoming about their opinions about a Russian invasion or what they thought of NATO.
18:03
And that's another example of reading between the lines, especially if you're in a situation where there's a sensitive issue and you, and you want people to be frank.
18:11
There are ways to make your survey questions safe to answer, unless you're in Russia, in which case don't answer those survey questions unless you want a knock on your door. [laughs] Get it. Cool. I am. I am.
18:22
So my, my website is vireo-coaching.com. Well, what, what really helped me was doing a year-long ADHD coach training.
18:32
But if you don't wanna spend that much time digging into the subject matter, there are a lot of really good publications out there, and I, I have them linked in a resources section on my website.
18:43
And I'm telling you that because I can't remember the name of... Okay. ADDitude. ADDitude is the flagship publication for ADHD science and strategies. It's, uh, extensive and very reputable. Thank you.
18:56
I think what I'd like to do next is, and this is as much for, um, myself as for everyone else, is to in advance design an anti-burnout kit for my next job. Yes, I sure will. Thank you, Rachel. Buh-bye
FemmeFactor
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