I’ve never felt like a good woman: ADHD and femininity

In this episode, a complex conversation about ADHD, femininity, gender, and why talking about the hard stuff is important.

Cate sits down with Rae Jacobson, host of Understood.org’s Hyperfocus podcast, journalist, and a producer on this show. They talk about something they’ve both struggled to name: the collision between ADHD, femininity, and gender expression. They dig into what it felt like to watch other girls “get it.” The tidiness. The calm. The effortlessness. All things that executive dysfunction made feel out of reach. 

They talk about the pressure to be nurturing, organized, and endlessly available — and what happens when your brain doesn’t cooperate with any of it. And they look at the research on outcomes for women and girls with ADHD.

• Watch: The “devastating” findings of a decades-long ADHD study

• Watch: Head, heart, hormones: Why women’s ADHD care should treat the whole person

Rae Jacobson: People talk about ADHD diagnosis like wave of the wand and you’re better now. Congratulations! You’re not alone. And it is great not to be alone. However, it is like one tiny step on the very long path. And a lot of that path is figuring out how to kind of heal from some of the stuff that happens when you don’t understand what’s going on and things are just hard.

Layer that on top of undoing all of this very complicated messaging we get about femininity and how that intersects with ADHD and you end up with a pretty tall order.

Cate Osborn: That’s Rae Jacobson, host of the "Hyperfocus" podcast right here on Understood.org. Rae is also a journalist, a writer, ADHD expert, and a producer on this show. Today, Rae and I are sitting down to have something of a curious conversation about the intersection of ADHD and femininity. What it means to be a woman, to perform femininity, and what girlhood looks like when you grow up not feeling like you belong.

Hi, everybody, and welcome back to "Sorry, I Missed This," the show where we talk about all things ADHD, sex, intimacy, relationships, communication, and more. As always, it’s me, your host, Cate Osborn.

(03:45) The struggle of performing traditional feminine roles while managing ADHD.

Cate: Dear listener, I want you to know going into this episode that I struggled with this conversation. Not only did I struggle with it from a research and science perspective, but I also struggled with it because my own connection to my femininity, to my womanhood, has always been connected and enveloped and dare I say marred by my ADHD. I’ve never felt like a good woman. I’ve never felt like I was good at being a girl.

So much of the experience of girlhood and being a teenage girl felt so far away from what I was able to access with my own understanding of executive dysfunction, my own understanding of the way that I moved through the world. I think for a really long time I just kind of put my gender, my identity, my performance of all of that just kind of in the corner in a box and I let it grow cobwebs for a long time.

It wasn’t until adulthood when I started learning terms like gender-queer, gender-non-conforming, non-binary, demi-gender, all of these different things that I really started feeling like I had the opportunity to access questions about my own gender, my own femininity, what it means to be a woman in the world and how we define those things. As it happens, Rae is very interested in this topic from the same kind of perspective, the same sort of questions.

And so this episode of "Sorry, I Missed This" is a little bit different in so much as that it’s maybe a little esoteric, it’s maybe a bit more conversational and hypothetical. But what Rae and I ultimately came down to is the fact that I don’t think every episode of "Sorry, I Missed This" has to have an answer. And what I’m really proud of as I welcome you into this episode is the fact that I think I left this episode with more questions than answers.

I left with more uncertainty, with more intrigue in how my understanding of myself is going to evolve as we move forward. So, with all of that being said, this is kind of a weird one, this is kind of a unique one, but it’s also one that I’m really interested in because I think it touches on something that a lot of us have had trouble naming, have had trouble accessing.

And so I’m very excited to welcome you to this conversation about femininity, about womanhood, and about the complexities of dealing with all of that with ADHD. Rae, I’m super excited to talk to you today.

Rae: I’m super excited to talk to you always, dude.

Cate: This is a topic that you’ve been interested in for a long time, and I am wondering why.

Rae: It’s partly because — I don’t know about you, but — I catch on the things that are rooted in my life. And one of the first things that I remember really clearly understanding after I got diagnosed with ADHD was why being a girl felt so much harder. Much of my early experience of ADHD was feeling like I was just looking around and watching people do things that I could see all the parts and the ways that they got there, and I just couldn’t get it myself.

I couldn’t catch whatever wave they were on. When I got the diagnosis, realizing as they read down this list of things that if you really apply them to this other list of unspoken requirements of girlhood at that time anyway, were like anathema. It was like two things that, you know, you’re not paying attention, you’re not the best listener, you’re not the person who’s keeping your room clean, you’re not going to be put together. I could go on and on and on.

It felt so clear to me that those things were just going in two different directions. But then on top of that, as I got older and I got into feminism and more of the theoretical stuff that you would sort of approach this with and the idea that gender is this performance, I started to realize that there’s also failures in what we expect of a feminist woman. You have to be competent, you have to be on top of it, you got to shine beyond all shining because otherwise people are going to say, well she’s just a girl.

There was so much of that that I could kind of see from this really removed place of post — diagnosis that I had just been swimming in before. And it was something that kind of kicked me off on years of study and interest. And it’s also something that as the conversation gets more rightfully complicated, is still something I feel like we don’t really address well.

(07:20) The subtle social performances and domestic expectations that conflict with ADHD.

Cate: I’m really curious about that performance aspect of femininity. It’s something that I really struggle with because I don’t feel like a girl. And immediately then it’s like, okay, well now we’re jumping into conversations around being non-binary or gender-non-conforming or gender-queer whatever. But I’ve just sort of felt like me, right? I’ve just always sort of felt like Cate. And so when confronted with this idea of femininity, I don’t know where I fit into the equation.

Rae: When I say performance, I mean there are these things that we as a society tend to associate with femininity. And they’re much more than the physical, right? I’ll admit there were times in my life where I’d be like, wow I wish my nail polish wasn’t cracked and then I remembered to shave my legs. All these things that are coming from that. But I’m more thinking about there are these subtle things, like within relationships.

Like this show, you talk about relationships all the time. And we frequently talk about the person in the female role in the partnership taking on the planning, taking on the remembering, taking on the emotional labor. There are these kind of subtleties within friendships, right? Where you’re intended to be the one who’s more present, who’s more focused, who’s more there, who can show up in all these ways.

And they’re things that everybody experiences. I don’t want to completely relegate this to womanhood, but this is something that is a really big problem for the way that we talk about women and ADHD. Because you have those things, you have all the performance pieces, and then you have the fact that it is never going to be a simple conversation. And it shouldn’t be.

Cate: That is so true to my experience and the messaging that I’ve been taught. I spent a really long time feeling like a bad wife, like a bad partner, like I wasn’t able to uphold my end of the relationship. And it wasn’t until I started deconstructing like, well what is my end? Where did I come up with this idea of my end supposing to be these things? That I started to realize a lot of this has to do with this version of femininity that had just sort of been handed to me.

Rae: I think this is kind of what you end up seeing over and over and over in the research and in the reports that people give. Is like even if you can zoom out and be like, okay, these are the messages that I took in without even realizing it and now I need to deal with that, the overlay of ADHD in that makes that a really complicated intersection. Because ADHD challenges a lot of those things directly.

In some ways, there’s one school of thought that I’m very interested in which finds that really liberating, which is like if this sort of makes a lot of those circuits not circuit-like they’re not sparking the way that they’re supposed to, supposed to — then is that a way to move away from this very traditional gendered experience and into something that feels more real, more natural, more me?

Figuring out how to deal with where that meets neuro-diversity is a really important part of, for me anyway, the healing process of dealing with who you are as a woman with ADHD. Because that carries a lot of weight and it can carry a lot of hurt too.

(12:15) The sensory and societal hurdles girls face, including the pressure of motherhood.

Cate: I have felt that there were sort of parts of femininity that I just couldn’t access because of my neuro-divergence. I wanted to do the thing, I wanted to try, I wanted to play around with that gender expression and see what it felt felt like, but because of my executive functioning or whatever it might be, I didn’t have the key to that door. And I’m wondering, is that something that you’ve seen or that you’ve experienced?

Rae: I mean, yeah, of course you want to be able to do the things that you see around you. That’s a natural want. In these conversations where you’re like, oh I don’t want to denigrate girlhood. Like all those things where it’s like makeup and stuff. That stuff’s awesome. Enjoy it. That stuff’s supposed to be fun. And when it becomes a requirement that you can’t access, it gets a lot less fun.

There shouldn’t be this idea, I think, that the traditionally girl-associated things are bad or somehow less than. It’s because they felt mandatory that they are something that we don’t want to participate in. Last thing I want to do is something you told me I had to. So I feel like that’s kind of the trick of it, right? It’s the things where you either felt like you had to do it and you had no opt-out and you’re like, well I can’t do this and this feels bad and I don’t want to do this because it feels bad.

Or there’s these things where you’re like, wow it’d be nice to do that, and I can’t because, you know, I can’t follow up and I’m not going to look the way I’m supposed to and my house is never going to be clean like that. And these things all of these kind of associated things that can feel like a real well of embarrassment. A lot of the sort of requirements to entry to this idea of femininity that I had been presented and sold and told like this is the way of being.

They were just things that weren’t accessible to me or they didn’t work with my nervous system or sensory issues or whatever. And so I kind of just cut them. For me, foundation, like makeup, wearing foundation, I hate wearing foundation. I hate it. It makes me want to claw my skin off. And so I kind of went, okay, well then makeup is not accessible to me.

It took me a very long time to then be like, oh well I guess I could just try eyeliner and eyeshadow or whatever. But I see those same patterns kind of applied to the sort of larger concepts around feminism. Like I’m not a particularly nurturing person. I never wanted kids. And all I heard my whole life was like the best possible thing that you can be in the world is to be a mom.

I could not imagine myself as a mom. I couldn’t picture myself as a mom. The idea of having to deal with my own stuff and then also having kids. And so I would get told, well then you’re not ever going to really experience womanhood. You’re not going to experience the truest way of being a woman is to bring life into this world.

Rae: What you’re pointing out is that there are things that people tell you about what it means to be a woman. And sometimes it feels like when they tell you those things, they’re taking away who you believe you are. And that should matter more who you think you are than what people think you should be. It’s funny that people told you you should have kids. I did not have that experience.

I used to speak about having ADHD. I would go and — this was pre-people talking about it — and this guy got up and he was like, "I don’t want to offend you but do you think with your condition you could or should have a child?"

Cate: Oh my god.

Rae: And I didn’t know what to say and I said the first thing that came to my mind which was, "I have a dog now, and I didn’t think I could have a dog because I’ve killed a lot of cactuses. And the other day my dog ate a tampon, but she was fine. And so maybe I’m okay to have kids now." And he was just like, "What?" But I think this is kind of it, right? There’s no right way.

You’re never going to be right, right? Like you’re either too derelict to have the thing that everyone thinks you’re supposed to have or you shouldn’t do it. I think the thing that is the focus of a lot of this for me is like because we do not have a good way to talk about this. Because the experiences of everyone who identifies as woman are so varied and so vast, as are the experiences of people who have ADHD, it’s not a topic that we have a good way to discuss because it is so individualized.

And that’s important, that’s an important part of it. But in some ways, the fact that this is something that is really hard to discuss means that we don’t then get to talk about how the concept of femininity and being in a female body interacts with ADHD overall. Which ends up looking like no medications tested on women, nothing for us around our periods, nothing that really looks at the experiences that we actually go through. I do feel like that trickles up basically into all of this other stuff.

(18:25) The "Berkeley Girls Study" and the significant mental health risks for women with ADHD.

Cate: And it’s so interesting because ahead of this episode I read a bunch of truly fascinating studies. And a lot of them were about identity and masking. And there was a very common phenomenon throughout a lot of these studies where they would look at young girls with ADHD. And they would basically be like, hey, how do you feel about yourself?

Over and over and over again what we would see is that they felt like they had to hide parts of themselves. They felt like they weren’t allowed to be the version of themselves that they actually are because that version is bad or wrong or somehow flawed in terms of the messaging that they were getting around what is a good student, what is a good young woman, that kind of stuff. And hold on, I’m going to be indulgent and read a section of this because I think it’s important.

This is from "Identity work among girls with ADHD: Struggling with me and I, impression management and social camouflaging in school" is the name of the study. "There is limited research on how people with ADHD perceive, describe, and construct their identities. The diagnosis may be seen as something external to distance oneself from, but also something to identify with, a means of self-understanding and be proud of. An ADHD diagnosis may create a separation within one’s identity, with an ambivalence between constantly adjusting to social expectations and demands while simultaneously striving to accept oneself."

Like, well that’s right on the money.

Rae: There’s a lot of that. And those studies are really, they’re validating. But to the question of where does this go, the study that I am obsessed with — and I think you probably know about this, but this is a bedrock thing for a lot of the stuff that we talk about that I work on — is the "Berkeley Girls Study." Do you know about this one?

Cate: Yeah.

Rae: So, for listeners, these researchers at UC Berkeley ran a summer camp where they followed girls with ADHD for, I think it was 20 years. And the findings were shocking. Vastly higher rates, especially for girls with combined type, of suicidality, of self-harm, of eating disorders, of depression — like long-term harms like joblessness. A remarkable plethora of negative outcomes. These numbers differed vastly from the numbers that they associate with boys for these outcomes.

That is really serious because that’s not for no reason. It’s not that girls just have worse ADHD and so we have worse experiences. Being a girl, the femininity piece of it has a big role to play in this. And that is a complicated thing. And the guy who ran the study, Stephen Hinshaw, who is terrific, wrote a book called "The Triple Bind." It’s a little old now, a little bit dated.

But in it he sort of followed up on some of this research and talked about how girls with ADHD face a thing called the triple bind, which is basically look good, be good, be calm and present and there for everyone and also make it look effortless. Like these three things that you have to hold on to, otherwise the negative consequences, the feedback that you get can be overwhelmingly difficult to manage.

When I think about this conversation, like the study that you’re talking about, yeah, we’re all navigating this and it’s not like it just evaporates once you see it either.

(22:30) The ongoing work of deconstructing gender norms and ADHD messaging.

Cate: We talk a lot about women with ADHD. Like five years ago we didn’t have this conversation, now we have it constantly. Which is amazing. High five on that. But what’s after "you’re not alone"? It is fascinating that you say that because that is squarely and solely where I am swimming around right now. Is because my content started out as ADHD explainers, right?

A lot of that was because so many people were getting diagnosed during the pandemic and we were striving to understand and figure it out. But now we have that information. We know. So what do you do next? What is the next thing? And for a lot of people, I think that there is a deconstruction of everything that we have been taught about ourselves.

And now we have to figure out for ourselves what are our actual standards? What are our actual values? And how do those fit in or not fit in with the identities that we have constructed and the narratives that we have built around our worth and what we are bringing to the table? I look at these studies that are looking at the differentials in diagnosis between men and women and how diagnosis changes the self — acceptance and the understanding and all of this stuff.

I think it’s really valuable but I also think that you’re right, I don’t think that the conversation is nearly as simple. I think there’s so much really difficult nuance to unpack. And it’s like I genuinely don’t know where to start. I don’t know what the advice is.

Rae: I don’t either. But I think part of it is — I know I keep going back to this, so I’m sorry for being a circular — but circle away. This isn’t how we talk about ADHD. We don’t talk about this part of it. I think it was three years ago we found out that ADHD makes you five times more likely to have postpartum depression. That information would have been really helpful to me before I had a kid.

We found out that medicines don’t work as well around your period. That hormones have a huge impact on how we function and feel and manage our lives. And all this stuff also is coming along side to me — and I’m very interested to hear your take on this side conversation that has popped up around ADHD about it being a mismatch with where you are.

If you could just get the right job, the right experience, the right thing, your ADHD symptoms would be either non-existent or an asset. And there is some truth in that. Some of those things are valuable. I have gotten very, like we do, locked in on the fact that that is a much, much trickier thing for women. Because our job never ends. At 3:45 today, we are going to finish this.

I’m going to go from sitting here talking to you to picking up my kid. And this is not just for people who have children, but motherhood’s work. Being a partner is work. Being a woman in the world is work. And we don’t get to just clock out and have a new job regardless of what our job-job is. And that is something that is completely under-discussed in this context.

Because I think, again, to the idea that people would like there to be a period to this experience, there’s not. These things unfold and you have to find different ways to deal with them all the time.

Cate: The thing that stresses me out is that when you sort of look at things like the "Berkeley Girls Study," and when you look at a lot of the studies around the lived experiences of women with ADHD, you kind of named it. We carry so much. And so much of that is stuff that is just handed to us. We just get told this is your thing. This is your thing to carry.

Being able to put some of that down, just set it down, say, "No, this isn’t actually for me. This isn’t my job to carry this." That can feel so scary and so subversive and can result in peer rejection and partner rejection and even having therapists like not know what to do with you when you are really eschewing these things and saying, "This isn’t how I can do it." "Well let’s fix you. Let’s make it so that you can."

And it’s like, "No, I don’t want to. I don’t want to have to deal with this. Don’t try and fix me into re-accepting these things that I have decided are not for me or not about me." And that idea of repair being towards accepting these things that we don’t want.

Rae: I think that’s kind of the crux of it, right? Is that this is something that is actual work and it’s hard and it’s something that is swimming upstream in every respect. This is something that a lot of people are working on all the time anyway. How do I deal with the messages that I got? And I’m not suggesting in any way that women are the only people who receive these messages.

They’re just different depending on who’s talking to you and where you’re coming from and the way you move through the world. But there is this piece though — and I’m going to tell this story that sounds off-topic, but I promise it will come back to it.

Cate: I trust you. I trust you.

Rae: I had a thing one time, it was an ADHD conference and this guy got up and told a story about he ran a place where it was supposedly a great place to work if you had ADHD. And this woman came to work there and she had a terrible allergy. And they moved heaven and earth to protect her from, you know, there were no peanuts anywhere, everything was careful and clear and they were so good about it and they did so much for her.

She had ADHD but she didn’t tell them. And she was screwing up and they couldn’t figure out what was going on, couldn’t figure out what was going on. Finally she broke down and said, "I have ADHD." And this guy in this story, the point of it in telling it in this venue was, "We couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t have just told us that. Obviously we’re accepting. Obviously we know all about ADHD, we could have done so much for her."

I would wonder if you hear the same thing that I heard in that story, which is, "Of course she didn’t tell you. You just moved heaven and earth so that she wouldn’t die from a peanut allergy. You really think she’s going to ask for something else?" Any person who’s experienced in the room who’s neuro-divergent or female was like, "Yeah, of course she didn’t say anything."

That thing, that thing of completely ignoring the other part of the experience where you’re supposed to not ask for too much. You’re supposed to not be too much or too difficult or need too much. Those messages are unbelievably powerful. And they’re really hard to root out. And that’s just one of the billions of messages that we get. That’s just one tiny piece of a huge iceberg.

Melting that is going to take a lifetime. And that’s not something that we can do without addressing it. And it’s not something that’s linear and it’s not something that’s easy, but it is something that’s part of the work of growing and healing. And so when you say, how do I go to where I want to go and not be fixed into being erased basically?

That’s a huge piece of this because if you can’t talk about it, you can’t even identify "I don’t want you to bring me back there. I don’t want to go to those places. I want to be able to figure out how to be myself." And you asked at the beginning the difference between a person who just happens to be in a female body and someone who is expressing womanhood, performing gender. To me, that’s the thing.

I feel like a lot of this is sort of solidifying the fact that I’ve always sort of felt non-binary something kind of thing. Because to me — and this is the only way I can figure out how to say this in a way that makes sense — but femininity feels like a neighbor that I have been trying to get to know for years. But I never catch them at the right time.

Cate: Totally reasonable.

Rae: I want to get to know this experience, right? I want to understand this thing. But I don’t feel like I connect with it. Like I don’t feel like it fits into anything. But at the same time, I also know that so much of the way that I move through the world is informed by this desire to be a good girl, right? And to not cause trouble and to not take up space.

And I hold all of these ideals about myself. And so I have this weirdly muddy, weirdly complex relationship with my gender. And people have asked me, they’re like, "Are you trans?" And I’m like, "No. No." But yeah, it’s just strange to me how much of my own experience is informed by these ideas and these versions of womanhood and femininity that I have internalized and learned and just sort of unquestioningly accepted for a really long time while at the same time feeling completely disconnected from it.

It’s like I don’t know how to put those two things together next to each other and then add ADHD on top of it and go figure that out. And so I just kind of go, now I just feel like me. I don’t know. And then I feel like that’s cheapening the conversation or weakening it.

Cate: I don’t know that it’s cheapening it. But it’s your experience. And I think it’s interesting that you say even as someone who doesn’t identify with femininity, where it’s passing by you and is living next door but is not you and you can’t live in that, you still feel those currents and you’re still in that water. And you still have to figure out how to interact with it, otherwise how do you function?

It’s there whether you want it or not. And it’s not in you but it is around you. And that’s a complicated thing. I want there to be a clean answer. I want there to be this "and you do this and this and this and then that way you" but that doesn’t that’s not a thing in the world. And so it’s this concept that you have to live with and explore and I think look at.

But it feels weird to admit that it’s like no, there is all of this other stuff that so many of us are carrying that we don’t acknowledge or address or talk about because there’s no good answer. So it’s like why bother talking about it? But that’s why I am excited to have this conversation because I think sometimes just naming it and imperfectly discussing it, maybe that’s where you get to the "and you’re not alone" part of it.

The other thing is I do think that people in the space of ADHD, it’s very advice-focused. It’s very "and here’s what you do." It’s either "you’re not alone" or advice, right? Like there’s not a lot of stuff that’s just talking about it. I hate being left with more questions because it doesn’t feel satisfying. But this is one where there isn’t. You just got to be like, yeah, that’s a thing. Cool. You’re going to live in it.

But not talking about it because the answers are not there is unsatisfactory isn’t the way to go either because I do genuinely — and this isn’t just Rae’s opinion but like this is backed up in research — if you don’t bring out the various ways in which the lack of this conversation makes it so that it’s harder to study women and it’s harder to talk about the things that we might need and it’s harder for therapists in the room to have this conversation because it’s messy and because there’s no advice necessarily to give or a change that can be made easily.

Even though it’s never going to be comfortable and it’s never going to be easy and it’s never going to be straightforward, thank you for listening. Anything mentioned in the episode will be linked in the show notes with more resources. Have a question, comment, or knee — story you’d like to share? Email us at sorryimissedthis@Understood.org This show is brought to you by Understood.org.

Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give. "Sorry, I Missed This" is produced by Jessamine Molli and edited by Jessie DiMartino. Video is produced by Calvin Knie, our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright.

Production support provided by Andrea Rector. Briana Berry is our production director, Neil Drumming is our editorial director. From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson. And I’m your host, Cate Osborn. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.

Rae: This is most like ADHD. I’m like trying to find the right browser tab and I’m just closing like Renaissance Fair costumes. Like what is happening?