I have occasionally wondered if "often misdiagnosed as "your kid is lazy/stupid."" combined with "Confused and ashamed by their struggles, girls will internalize their inability to meet social expectations" results in schoolgirls doing statistically worse than schoolboys in (insert STEM field class that requires deep concentration). And not just failure when attempted, but also results in signing up for fashion textiles class instead of calculus knowing that calculus is "for boys" when in reality its pragmatically "for people without untreated ADD" which may at this time boil down to "for boys".

If (as a physics style thought experiment) the disease happens at the same rate in two populations, but is only diagnosed and treated in one population, then you'd naturally expect the untreated population to be, on average, somewhat less successful in attention-mandatory academics; math, sciences, computer programming... This would seem to be internally consistent, like a conspiracy theory, which is a heck of a long way from being proven in reality of course.

I'm not sure ADHD, as commonly diagnosed, usually presents as anything other than "being a boy in elementary school". I am sure that there are lots of people that actually have ADHD, but there are huge numbers of little boys that get labeled as ADHD because you're trying to make them sit in a chair and pay attention to quite boring material for 8 hours a day, with maybe a 15 minute break to get outside and run around - except they can't wrestle, play tackle football, or often do anything very strenuous that would burn off the excess energy.

I've known quite a few people who would snort adderall and other amphetamines-based analogs as a study drug - they reported being able to remember things better, and to get into a single-minded, grinding mindset that sounds a lot like what we programmers strive to achieve as flow. Various mathematicians (notably Erdos) have used amphetamines as a nootropic.

As a counter thought experiment, what if we are giving amphetamines to one subset of the population at a much higher rate than the other, and these drugs act as a force-multiplier for effort directed towards flow-dependent activities, like programming, science, and mathematics?

I don't doubt that ADHD exists so much as I suspect that it is wildly overdiagnosed in the U.S. Every other developed country has much, much lower rates of diagnosis than the U.S., but even in countries like France where there is a cultural inclination to find diagnoses or interventions other than an ADHD diagnosis, there are still ADHD diagnoses (at a rate that is a few percentage points of the US diagnosis rate).

The main treatment for ADHD is of course lifelong amphetamine prescriptions, and the US has a private pharmaceuticals industry very happy to market to insecure parents. And a general American insecurity about education that results in an astonishingly high proportion of elementary schoolers who get no or minimal recess at all.

The single biggest risk factors for an ADHD diagnosis are being male and being in the youngest quartile of your classroom. This is something we have managed to pathologize.