Activity vs lived experience and why closing the gap matters for every woman in your organisation.

Back to the Maritime industry conversation this week and a connection I have been sitting with since the impactful Spinnaker Maritime People & Culture Conference.

There was a session on the programme I sadly didn't get to hear - “The Neurodivergent Advantage “, but the title alone, and the conversations happening around it, stayed with me.

The premise: That neurodivergence brings unique skills and perspectives, and that the industry has more to gain than it realises by championing inclusion and shifting how it thinks about different kinds of minds.

I agree with that entirely. And it made me think about something that sits right alongside it,  and is almost never mentioned in the same breath.

Menopause. And specifically, ADHD.

A connection worth understanding

ADHD sits firmly within the neurodivergent umbrella -  alongside autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia and others. It is estimated that between 15 and 20% of the global population shows some form of neurodivergence.

For years, ADHD in women was chronically underdiagnosed. It presented differently. It was masked. It was read as anxiety, or sensitivity or simply not being quite organised enough.

Then perimenopause arrived and for many women, everything shifted.

Emerging research suggests that women with ADHD may experience perimenopause significantly earlier than their neurotypical peers. A 2025 population-based study of over 5,000 women found that perimenopausal symptoms were most pronounced in women with ADHD between the ages of 35 and 39 - compared to 45 to 49 in women without ADHD. The researchers described this as suggesting an onset of perimenopause up to ten years earlier. This is one study, and the research in this area is still developing, but the signal is striking, and it deserves attention.

What the data also shows is that over half of women with ADHD - 54% experience debilitating symptoms during perimenopause, compared to around one third of women without ADHD. 

And perhaps most significantly for anyone working in HR or people leadership: A large survey found that the vast majority of women who received a first ADHD diagnosis did so during the perimenopause and menopause years.

These are not women who suddenly developed a new condition. These are women whose existing neurological differences were, for the first time, no longer manageable because the hormonal scaffolding that had been quietly supporting them was gone.

What this looks like at work

Research shows that the perimenopausal window is when ADHD tends to be most disruptive, with the most pronounced shifts in memory, brain fog and feeling overwhelmed.

In practice, in a workplace and particularly in a high-performance, male-dominated environment like maritime or energy, this can look like:

A woman who has always been sharp, decisive, and reliable suddenly finds that the strategies she has relied on for years are no longer working. Forgetting things she would never have forgotten. Struggling to filter and prioritise under pressure. Experiencing emotional responses she cannot easily explain. Managing all of this quietly, because she has learned over a long career, what is safe to show and what is not.

One woman described daily heart palpitations, an inability to stay focused, and eventually losing her job spending ten years not knowing what was happening, only discovering it was ADHD when her daughter was diagnosed.

That is a systemic gap.

Activity vs lived experience - again

Anne Hayes, Director of Sectors and Standards Development at BSI, said something in a BBC Radio London interview that I keep returning to. She described the opportunity to create "an environment where people feel they can stay in work for as long as they want, rather than as long as they feel their body is dictating to them."

That is what this is really about.

In many organisations, there is now activity around both neurodiversity and menopause. Policies. Awareness sessions. Inclusion strategies.

And yet the women navigating both may be the least visible of all. Because they are often the ones who have spent an entire career becoming expert at not being seen to struggle.

The activity says: we have this covered. The lived experience says: I would never bring this here.

What happens when women are supported

I recently completed an 8-week programme with a group of leaders in Norway. The results were measurable across every area we tracked; Sleep, energy, mental clarity, emotional regulation, stress capacity, physical vitality, and leadership presence.

Sleep showed the largest shift, improving by over three points on a ten-point scale. Energy and stress capacity both rose by two points. Leadership presence, which was already strong at the start, strengthened further.

What the data reflects is not a group of women who needed rescuing. It reflects what becomes possible when capable, experienced women are given the right tools, structure, and a space where their experience is named and taken seriously.

The results did not surprise me. The speed at which things shifted did.

An invitation to consider

The neurodivergent advantage conversation in maritime is growing and that genuinely matters. The next step, I believe, is to bring menopause into that same conversation. To ask not just how we accommodate different kinds of minds, but how we support the hormonal transitions that can fundamentally change how those minds function.

The women are already there in the room, at the table, managing more than anyone around them knows.

What would it take to make staying feel worth it - on their terms, not their body's?

Torild Boe Stokes | Founder, Pause Effect