Recently, King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London launched a project called the Measuring Adult ADHD and Menstruation (MAAM) study. This is the first of its kind to officially investigate “whether menstrual cycle hormonal changes make symptoms worse for women with ADHD”. If you think it sounds a little late to address that often-reported connection, well, researchers agree with you. They say that ADHD among women is often “overlooked” in studies about the condition. And in May, Helen Minnis, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Glasgow, released a study which opened by saying, “It is now well recognised that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in females has been historically underrecognised, underdiagnosed and undertreated”. The paper also noted that “the long-term consequences of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in females remain underrecognised” and that its co-occurrence with multiple other conditions is “understudied” in women. Her findings showed that girls with ADHD are more likely to go on to have adult multimorbidity, or having two or more long-term conditions. Girls with ADHD who grew up in socioeconomic deprivation were likelier again to face multimorbidity. Is there an ADHD diagnosis gap between men and women? The gender gap in ADHD diagnoses appears to wane with age. While more boys receive ADHD diagnoses than girls, by the time women reach adulthood, the figures seem to become more even. But that might not paint the whole picture. On average, ADHD appears to be diagnosed in women years later than it is in men, even when symptoms appear at the same age. This leaves a typical diagnostic window of 16.3 to 28.6 years old for females, compared to 11.2 to 22.7 for males. The longer ADHD remains undiagnosed and untreated, the poorer people’s outcomes may be. Women’s later ADHD diagnoses have been linked to a greater risk of anxiety, depression, self-harm, alcohol use, drug use, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anti-anxiety and antidepressant prescriptions, teenage pregnancy, and school absences. Additionally, ADHD is less likely to be diagnosed in females than males overall. According to University College London, men’s proportion of ADHD diagnoses in the UK was 74.3 per 10,000 compared with 20 per 10,000 women between 2000 and 2018. And a Welsh study found that men are more likely than women to be prescribed ADHD medication, while women with ADHD tended to be prescribed antidepressant medications before diagnosis. Many experts think ADHD is under-diagnosed in the UK in general, too, regardless of gender. Research from 204 countries suggests that ADHD prevalence is typically about 5.4% among children, while a meta-analysis found this figure is roughly 3.3% for adults. And while demand for ADHD diagnoses really has risen in the UK, authors of a 2026 paper said that “administrative prevalence was 2.5% in boys and 0.7% in girls, and 0.7% in men and 0.2% in women” – way under expected rates, and even lower than what the stats suggest is likely for females. A lot of ADHD research is based on male data One paper, which mentioned that women and girls are underrepresented in ADHD research, said females may be “left out of the ADHD narrative” due to gaps in our understanding of the condition. Another study noted that “Early research predominantly focused on males, thereby potentially overlooking the specific characteristics of ADHD in females” – of the cases used to form official diagnostic ADHD criteria in the past, for instance, only 21% were those of women and girls. Prof Minnis also said, “There’s a lot of speculation about whether girls mask [hide ADHD symptoms to get by more easily in society] more. “It may just be that the research tools, the story that the clinical measures that we use to diagnose ADHD, just were perhaps not really designed to be thinking about girls, so we need to be better at identifying ADHD in girls at a younger age.” Related... It Turns Out ADHD Could Make You Far More Likely To Face Constipation Experts Argue We've Missed A Major ADHD Issue In Women For Too Long Psychiatrist Says Women With ADHD Are Likelier To Have 'Risky' Condition