Smart, capable women with ADHD may promise deadlines they fully intend to meet, then freeze, panic or give quick answers under pressure; expert Inbal Green says the pattern is often driven by overwhelm, shame, time blindness and fear of disappointing othersMaya Benita|You are sitting at your desk when an email from your boss appears: “What’s happening with the presentation you were supposed to send this morning?”Your heart starts pounding. You stare at the screen and quickly type: “Almost done, sending it soon.” There is only one problem: you have not prepared even a single slide.3 View gallery ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders (Photo: Shutterstock)That does not mean you are a bad employee. It does not mean you are lazy. And it does not necessarily mean you are a liar, at least not in the way most people understand lying. It may be part of one of the less-discussed patterns associated with ADHD: a small, almost automatic “fib,” often made under pressure, overwhelm, shame or fear of disappointing someone.“From the outside, it can look like avoidance, and if you look at it from the side, you could say: she lied,” says Inbal Green, an organizational consultant and business mentor who specializes in working with women with ADHD. “But in the world of ADHD, I don’t call it lying. It is a survival response. It happens when the brain experiences a threat, even if from the outside it looks like a simple question: Why were you late? When will it be ready? Why didn’t you do it?”ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders. A broad review published in 2021 estimated that about 2.58% of adults worldwide live with persistent ADHD, while the share of adults with symptomatic ADHD may reach about 6.76%, meaning hundreds of millions of people globally.But when it comes to women, the picture is more complicated. Boys are diagnosed far more often than girls in childhood, while in adulthood the ratio of diagnosed men and women moves closer to 1:1. A review focusing on ADHD in women noted that in childhood, roughly three boys are diagnosed for every girl, suggesting significant underdiagnosis among girls.“With boys, you often see more of the hyperactive or behavioral side,” Green says. “With women, it often appears more in the emotional world: emotional flooding, difficulty regulating emotion, daydreaming, inner chaos. A girl can look quiet, as if she is listening, so she is diagnosed less often.”Green, 42, is married and a mother of one. She has spent more than 17 years advising businesses, companies and entrepreneurs. She has worked with small startups and large companies, but in recent years she has found herself increasingly drawn to what happens behind the scenes for women who manage careers, businesses or homes and keep asking why the “small” things in life so often bring them down.“There are a million business consultants and a million organizational consultants,” she says, “but many of them simply do not understand how an ADHD brain works, and certainly not how a woman with ADHD works.”What, exactly, do they not understand?