Dr. Yath Ramesh

but the gender gap still exists with age.

So for the zero to 18 age group, for every two boys, there is one girl that gets diagnosed with ADHD.

That gap sort of narrows, you know, as you get older, up until around 34 to 44, where it's around one and a half boys to one girl.

45 plus, it's almost even.

And really interestingly, at 65 plus, if you look at the total number of ADHD diagnoses, more women are being diagnosed than men at that age group in that last year.

So why is this the case?

So overall, I'd say it's probably because we have actually, I mean, I've got to be direct about this.

We've let women down in both the diagnostic stage of ADHD, but also in the support that we offer them.

So let's look at the diagnostic stage here.

So at the diagnostic stage, we're looking in childhood for very clear symptoms of an impairment in school and the home environment or other environments with hyperactivity or inattention.

Who's most likely to get picked up at that stage?

It's more likely to be hyperactive boys.

And why is that the case?

Well, first of all, let's look at inattention in girls.

So girls are more likely to develop emotional maturity and make efforts to conform to social norms during their childhood.

So that invites itself for masking to start taking place.

So here, I'm talking about the girls who may struggle with being able to complete their work with making mistakes all the time, but then going through it three or four times before they ever submit it, so no one ever finds them out.

The girls who sit through lessons and have no idea about what the teacher has actually gone through in terms of material, but then overprepare for subsequent lessons by studying at home.

In these situations, it's really difficult for these girls to get a diagnosis of ADHD because they've masked so well.

But then if we progress things, there's an opportunity not only for us to miss the diagnosis, but there's an opportunity to misdiagnose ADHD.