Roxana Tascu is a business psychologist and ADHD coach who works with professionals across the tech and creative sectors, helping them build sustainable ways of working around how their brain performs best.
Discover more of Roxana’s work at www.adhd-advantage.com, or connect with her on Instagram @RoxanaTascu
By the time many women in tech start wondering whether something deeper is going on, they already look highly competent from the outside.
They are shipping strong work, holding complexity well, communicating thoughtfully and building reputations as the reliable person in the team. The problem is not performance, the problem is the invisible cost underneath it.
I see this constantly in my work as a business psychologist and ADHD coach with women across engineering, product, data and technical delivery roles. The story is rarely “I don’t think I’m good enough”, it is much more precise than that. They know they are capable, they can see the evidence in their output, their promotions and the trust they hold in the team. What they cannot explain is why delivering that same level of work seems to require so much more cognitive effort than it appears to cost everyone else.
The extra effort hides in places that rarely get named. It is the Slack message read four times before sending. The meeting prep that takes twice as long as it should because without the runway the brain will not activate cleanly. The internal monitoring required to stay composed in standups, stakeholder meetings and sprint reviews. The work completed late at night because that was the first moment it finally felt cognitively possible. From the outside, it can look like diligence and professionalism, but from the inside, it often feels like the exhausting work of manufacturing consistency.
This is one of the most common ways ADHD shows up in women working in high performance technical environments. Women are far more likely to present without the visible hyperactivity that historically triggered recognition and diagnosis. What shows up instead is a mind running at full speed behind a still face. The output remains high, but it is often powered by compensation. More checking, more preparation, more overbuilding, more self-monitoring and more effortful transitions between tasks. The issue is not capability, the issue is that the brain is generating performance through cognitive overcompensation rather than through the conditions it actually needs to activate sustainably.
In tech, this often goes unnoticed because the environment rewards the visible behaviours that compensation creates. Detail orientation, thoughtful communication, high reliability, polished stakeholder management and rigorous quality control are all commercially valuable. The woman who triple checks before deployment, over prepares for every sprint review and mentally rehearses difficult conversations can easily be labelled as simply conscientious or high performing. What nobody sees is that the same visible output may be costing her two or three times the cognitive energy of the people around her.
This is where the conversation is so often misnamed as imposter syndrome. But imposter syndrome says “I feel like a fraud despite my competence”, but that is not what many women with ADHD are actually describing. They are not confused about whether they are good at their job, they know they are, but what they are accurately tracking is the cost. They know how much invisible labour is sitting underneath work that looks effortless to everyone else. The problem is not a lack of confidence, it is a lack of framework for why the gap between capability and effort exists.
For many women, the missing framework is partly the result of how late the ADHD conversation tends to arrive. Research consistently shows that women are significantly more likely to be misdiagnosed before receiving an accurate ADHD diagnosis, most commonly with anxiety or depression. In many cases, what was being treated as anxiety was not a separate condition at all, it was the exhaust fume of an ADHD brain spending years performing in environments that required calm, linear consistency without ever explaining why those conditions felt so disproportionately expensive.
Tech can intensify that mismatch. The work itself often suits the brain beautifully, with systems thinking, deep dives, rapid problem solving, pattern recognition and intellectually stimulating challenges. But the surrounding expectations can quietly amplify the cost. Constant context switching across Slack, tickets, meetings and documentation, the expectation of polished certainty, and the social pressure to look composed in fast moving teams. There is an unspoken reality that women are still often read more critically in technical spaces. The work is rarely the problem, the friction usually lives in the conditions around how the work is expected to happen.
What often gets missed is that the brain performs best when the work creates enough mental traction, whether through complexity, time pressure, novelty or emotional relevance. Once that becomes visible, the gap between your competence and your exhaustion stops looking like a confidence issue and starts revealing itself as an activation design issue instead.
The compensation was real, the output was real, the exhaustion was real. None of it was character, it was a highly capable brain operating without the right conditions. That is not a confidence problem. It is a design problem, and design problems, unlike character problems, can actually be solved.
