Why Do Clever Girls Do “Dumb” Jobs?

Has anyone ever said something so insulting to you that you were left seething with rage? The worst insults, the ones that really cut you to the quick, are the ones that deep down, you know might have a kernel of truth to them, like:

“See! That’s why you need to study hard at school, so you don’t end up doing that job.”

It happened to me when I was working as cabin crew, cleaning up a mess in the first-class cabin. A female passenger leaned across the aisle to her young son and said loudly: “See! That’s why you need to study hard at school, so you don’t end up doing that job.”

Ouch. I could have cried. My life was being used as a cautionary tale; Timmy better work hard at school or he’d end up…shock horror…working as a trolley dolly! The truth is, being cabin crew was without doubt the best job I’ve ever had. Even more fun than my current role as an ADHD researcher. I’ve travelled the world, partied in every city on earth, and gotten paid to do it. But there’s no doubt it’s one of those jobs that certain people still look down on, calling you a glorified waitress in the sky. As much as I loved my jet-setting years, something was always nagging at me, preying on my mind: I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not living up to my potential. Or put simply: I’m working a so-called ‘dumb job.’

Now that I’m researching the careers and educational experiences of women with ADHD, it turns out this experience of working in a role below one’s academic qualification is by no means unusual. Research shows that some women with ADHD, despite having genuine academic prowess and often being categorised as ‘gifted‘ in school, go on to earn less than their peers over the course of their working lives and find themselves in subordinate rather than senior roles (Jangmo et al., 2019; Schreuer & Dorot, 2017). The many women I have interviewed in the course of my research had one thing in common when it came to such career trajectories: a similar sense of lingering shame and regret or a feeling of ‘not being where you should be.’

But recently, through the course of my research, I have stumbled on some insights that may help ADHDers frame their career struggles in a different light. Maybe we were never meant to work regular jobs in the first place? So many creative and talented women with ADHD were funnelled into conventional roles based on their academic potential, when in fact the ADHD brain may be better suited to careers that are more flexible, more free, and involving some element of physical work. ADHD women frequently need to disengage from the more cerebral aspects of their jobs and get out of their own heads. The problem is that there is still so much societal stigma around roles that are seen as more ‘blue collar’—framed, incorrectly, as things an intelligent person simply wouldn’t do. And this is where a lifetime of trying to squeeze yourself into roles that just aren’t suited to an ADHD brain can begin.

In Western culture, particularly in the United States, people are so defined by what they do for a living that the first question at any social gathering is almost always: So, what do you do? People measure their entire worth by how impressive the answer to that question sounds when in reality, people end up in certain jobs for a whole host of reasons that have nothing to do with self-actualisation.

In my research, a pattern has emerged of women who deliberately choose what one of my participants called ‘easy, dumb jobs’—but I want to be clear: There is no such thing as a dumb job. Every role has value, and every person doing it has worth. That phrase belonged to my participant, not to me, and I use it here only because it captures something real about how these women felt society was judging them. These women were making a conscious and, I’d argue, rather clever choice: working in roles with lower cognitive demand in order to free up the mental bandwidth to fully engage with the enriching activities outside of work that truly lit them up. These were roles that, by conventional measures, looked like underachievement, but were actually a form of self-preservation and creative liberation.

What strikes me most, looking across all of this, is the urgent need to disconnect what we do from who we are. To free ourselves from the weight of what we should be doing, and start paying attention to what actually brings us joy. For women with ADHD, that might not look like a corner office. It might look like cabin crew. It might look like something the world calls a dumb job. But if it gives you the freedom, the flexibility, and the headspace to live a life that feels fully yours, maybe it’s the smartest choice you’ll ever make.