King's College London

A new study from King’s Business School, which looked at whether childhood ADHD predicted whether people became self-employed business owners in adulthood, has challenged the idea that ADHD is universally linked to entrepreneurial careers.

Researchers found no direct relationship between ADHD and entrepreneurship overall. Instead, childhood ADHD was rather associated with higher rates of entrepreneurship among men with high intelligence, but lower rates among women, regardless of intelligence.

Men with both ADHD and high intelligence showed the highest predicted likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs in the sample of over 4,100 adults in the USA. Women with ADHD showed the lowest predicted likelihood of entrepreneurial entry of any group studied.

ADHD is often linked with entrepreneurial strengths such as creativity, risk-taking and a drive for independence. But the evidence has never been straightforward.

This study found that the apparent entrepreneurial advantage is concentrated among highly intelligent men with ADHD, while women with ADHD are less likely to enter entrepreneurship. When those patterns are averaged together, the overall link all but disappears.

The authors argue that intelligence can help some people with ADHD manage the cognitive demands of entrepreneurship, such as planning, problem-solving and working under uncertainty. However, gender stereotypes mean unequal access to legitimacy, support, networks and resources for men and women.

For men with ADHD, entrepreneurial traits such as decisiveness and appetite for novelty may be interpreted positively. For women with ADHD, the same behaviours may be judged more harshly or compounded by wider barriers facing women entrepreneurs.

The findings suggest that strength-based accounts of ADHD in entrepreneurship need to be more carefully qualified. ADHD may be an entrepreneurial asset for some people, but it can also be a liability when social and structural barriers prevent people from using their strengths.

Dr Mi (Kelly) Hoang Tran, Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and lead-author of the study, said:

“For years the field has gone back and forth on whether ADHD helps or hinders entrepreneurs. Our data show why the answer kept changing: the association is positive for men and negative for women, so the two cancel out on average. Once you separate them, the picture becomes much sharper: men with both ADHD and high intelligence were the most likely of any group to become entrepreneurs, while women with ADHD were the least likely, whatever their ability.”

The researchers say entrepreneurship support should do more to recognise the different barriers facing neurodivergent founders. This could include bias-awareness training for investors and evaluators, mentoring for women with ADHD, and practical support around executive-function skills such as planning, time management and impulse control.

The study also points to the importance of moving beyond one-size-fits-all narratives about neurodiversity at work. Inclusive entrepreneurship depends not only on recognising individual strengths, but also on removing the social and structural barriers that prevent those strengths from translating into opportunity.

The paper, Who benefits from ADHD in entrepreneurship? Intelligence and gender as critical boundary conditions, is authored by Dr Mi Hoang Tran (Rensselaer Lally School of Management), Dr Wei Yu (Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management at the National University of Singapore), Professor Johan Wiklund (Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University) and Professor Ute Stephan (King’s Business School, King’s College London). It is published in Applied Psychology.

The study uses longitudinal data from 4,128 individuals in the United States, tracking childhood ADHD and later occupational choices over a 28-year period.