Course curriculum
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Lesson Handouts
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Video
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Post Test
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Evaluation
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About this course
- $175.00
- 4 lessons
- 5.5 hours of video content
Are your clients exhausted from coping strategies that no longer work? Have they collected diagnoses — depression, anxiety, BPD, PTSD — but never quite fit the treatment? They may be neurodivergent, and you may not have been trained to see it.
Autism and ADHD in women and AFAB individuals have been systematically missed for decades. Diagnostic criteria were built on research conducted almost exclusively with male subjects, leaving generations of women and AFAB people misdiagnosed, undertreated, and wondering why they have to work so much harder than everyone else just to get through the day. As clinicians, we inherited that blind spot — and our clients are paying the cost.
This 5.5-hour course was recorded live on September 28, 2026.
Through didactic content, case vignettes, and lived experience perspectives, you will develop the clinical skills to recognize how ADHD and autism actually present in women and AFAB clients — not through a male-normed lens, but as they show up in your office: as chronic burnout, relentless people-pleasing, social exhaustion, and a lifetime of being told they're "too sensitive" or "not quite autistic enough."
Guest Speaker: G. Hofer, LPC, CCTP-II. G brings in their own lived experience to expand understanding of the intersection of ADHD and autism (AuDHD) and gender diversity.
If you need accommodations, please contact me at [email protected].
Instructor
Cathy Hanville, LCSW
Cathy Hanville, LCSW (they/she)
Cathy lives and works at the intersection of gender diversity and neurodivergence. A gender queer ADHDer with a passion for parts work. Licensed in both CA and PA and an EMDRIA Consultant and CE provider. Currently co-authoring a book with Christine MacInnis, LMFT, on using EMDR and parts work for autistic and ADHDers to be published by Norton in 2027.
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Learning Objectives
1. Identify at least three ways in which ADHD and autism present differently in women and individuals assigned female at birth (AFAB) compared to male-normed diagnostic criteria.
2. Recognize and name a minimum of four masking, camouflaging, or compensatory behavioral strategies commonly used by neurodivergent individuals.
3. Correctly differentiate neurodivergent presentations from at least three co-occurring or misattributed diagnoses.
4. Identify at least three areas in which delayed diagnosis of autism or ADHD in adulthood contributes to adverse outcomes.
5. Identify at least three ways in which perimenopause and menopause differentially affect women with ADHD and autism.
Workshop Agenda
Workshop Agenda
Why Misdiagnosis and Underdiagnosis Occur and the Consequences of It
History of ADHD and autism diagnostic criteria and their male-centric research foundations
How presentations often look different in women and AFAB individuals due to socialization.
Challenges in obtaining a diagnosis
Effects of not being diagnosed until adulthood.
Masking, Camouflaging, and ‘High Functioning.’
What is masking?
Common masking strategies for women?
How masking fools clinicians.
Clinical Myths
Hormonal Influence
ADHD in Women — What We Were Trained to Miss
ADHD in women: internalized presentations.
Common misdiagnoses
How do hormones affect ADHD?
Lived experience Video
Autism in Women — Subtle, Social, and Systemically Overlooked
Criteria for diagnosis
How autism shows up in women
Autistic burnout
Assessment Tools
AuDHD and AFAB presentations
Autism and ADHD: how that shows up
How AFAB clients may present differently
Lived experience Video
Differential Diagnosis Without Pathologizing
Trauma and neurodivergence: overlap vs interaction
How ND traits get framed as:
Avoidance
Resistance
Emotional immaturity
Avoiding diagnostic overshadowing
Asking better questions:
Developmental history
Energy cost of coping
What happens when demands drop?
Case Examples
All The Details
This activity is approved for professional continuing education by:
Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program: Missed, Masked, and Misunderstood- ADHD and Autism in Women and AFAB People # 6798 is approved by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program to be offered by Cathy Hanville, LCSW, as an individual course. Individual courses, not providers, are approved at the course level. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit.
ACE course approval period: 10/29/26-10/29/28
Social workers completing this course receive 5.5 clinical continuing education credits.
ASWB is accepted widely for Social Workers, but you must verify that your specific license accepts this approval. This is a course-specific approval for those who live in NJ.
You must watch the entire course, fill out the evaluation, and pass the post-test with a 75% grade to get CE's. You can take the test multiple times.
You will have access to this course for 180 days.
Cancellation/Refund Policy
No refunds will be given for this online course. If you have a hardship and cannot complete the course in time, please contact me, and I can assess whether an extension is possible.