Women suffer more pain than men across the whole body, major global study finds
Researchers looked at pain around the world and across the human lifespan, finding steepest rise happens before age 55
Women report suffering more pain than men, a major new global study has found.
That was true for all types of pain the researchers measured, and comes amid continuing concern about the gender pain gap, which means women are less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need.
Researchers from all over the world carried out “one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology to date”. Data was collected from more than 6 million people from 118 countries from 1990 to 2025, and included people from five years old to more than 100.
The research, published in Nature Medicine, looked at how pain, as the leading global cause of disability, was distributed both around the world and across the human lifespan.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/05/women-more-pain-than-men-global-studyOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
39 replies
I do think women's pain is under-treated, IUD insertion no pain meds, no anesthesia, a lot of GYN procedures that really hurt are done with no help.
The worst pain I have ever felt, though, is still migraine. Not childbirth (I did those unmedicated) not broken bones, migraine is by far the most intense pain I have ever felt and that is not specific to women, though more common in women.
My tattoo artist said men complain, women don't. Not that it hurts us less, we just don't complain. Cultural thing maybe. My husband does complain when his back hurts; I just wait it out. Though if it persisted I'd be more likely to go to the doctor than him.
So maybe some of it is self-inflicted, we don't tell anyone we are hurting, but for God's sake, my gynecologist is a woman she should know that shit hurts!
On the other hand, I get migraines, but they're not even in the top three worst pain I've even experienced. The worst I've ever experienced is a mystery pelvic pain (yes, I'm also female).
Until I hit menopause I had no idea that the pain level of a migraine could vary, I have them occasionally still (not many with the steady low dose MHT and no cycles), and mostly they are about like a hangover level of headache.
Before menopause, they were uniformly at an 11/10, vomiting, crying and such intense pain I got hallucinations. Like I have no idea how one can hurt that bad without it killing you. In labor, I literally thought "well, not as bad as a migraine anyway".
How did they factor in the expected lower reporting from men due to the culture of "suck it up" or "grin and bear it" that seems to be more prevalent among men than women for physical/mental pain?
Not that I entirely disagree with your point, but if we're going to talk about being put off of reporting, then how about centuries of women being dismissed by medical professionals?
I understand your counterpoint, however has that behavior led to more women not sharing their pain or being louder about their pain to get past the dismissiveness? Do both sexes just bottle it up?
I think both just bottle it up. Men because they are conditioned to be stoic and women because they are conditioned to not be a bother. Most women are in pain a few days every single month but how many women do you know that go around telling everyone about it?
Is that because it's not painful or because they think it would be embarrassing though?
They can only ask. Pain is inherently very subjective. eg:
https://xkcd.com/883/
Or standardize the pain scale. A 9 on the scale for me is significantly more pain than a 9 for my wife because I have both a high pain tolerance and threshold. I say 9 because I've never experienced what I'd consider a 10 (pain so intense I lose consciousness).
My vasectomy without anesthesia was a 9.5.
But our response to pain is largely learned.
It's not really possible because your hormones affect your subjective experience of pain. Things that are not painful at all during ovulation suddenly can feel extremely painful during menstruation.
Same, which can create problems. If I say my pain level is a six, that means I'm in a lot of pain. A doctor who doesn't know me would almost certainly assume otherwise.
Bro why did you do it without anesthesia? Mine with local anesthesia was already a whole ordeal I couldn't imagine making it through with out the pain relief.
Because the surgeon didn't believe me when I told him I have the redhead gene and am extremely tolerant to all anesthesia. For reference, it took 8mg of Versed (standard is 1-2) before I even felt it before a down the throat echo of my heart, and my last filling required so much lidocaine that it paralyzed half of my face.
He gave me a bunch of air shots, waited a few minutes, I wasn't numb, did it again for like 20 minutes and said, Well you have to be numb now, can you feel this," then made the incision. I told him I could feel that, but he just went right along.
I was too busy diverting the pain to stop him at that point. But honestly, he was so fast that I likely would have been in pain for longer if I had stopped him and made him give me more anesthesia.
But, I basically did a speed run of the pain, because my recovery was almost completely pain and swelling free.
My doctor didn't let the lidocaine settle on the first side.... I feel you. He shot the lidocaine in and immediately cut. Hurt horribly. He immediately said sorry.... but too late
They didn't, though they do mention pain is complicated to study specifically because diagnosing it necessarily relies on self reporting. This unfortunately makes it virtually impossible to account for that fact. If someone tells you they have some level of pain, there is very little to nothing you can do to know if they are over exaggeratjng, under exaggerating or doing neither.
A more accurate headline would be that women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain.
There is no difference between reporting and experiencing a high level of pain unless you believe women as a group lie or exaggerate about it.
I would recommend you educate yourself on the limitations of surveys in scientific research. Humans have subjective responses to survey questions. It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the results, without accusing anyone of lying or exaggerating. Understanding the experience of another person fully is impossible, and one of the core problems philosophers, scientists, and artists gave been wrestling with fot as long as humans have been sentient.
It is all the more reasonable to be skeptical of the ridiculous headlines from an outlet like the Guardian attaches to stories like these. It is stoking the flames of gender conflict to get clicks rather than providing any useful information.
If there’s something specific you’d like to address about my point feel free, because this just reads like “nuh-uh.” What evidence do you have that women, as a group, are more likely to over-report pain? What mechanism do you suggest would lead to women as a group over-reporting pain, since individual differences are flattened out in a sufficient sample size? Why is it consistent across 118 countries if it’s not something that is measurably occurring?
You accuse the Guardian of engaging in gender war clickbait while denying the findings of a scientific study? Doesn’t seem scientific to me.
Out of curiosity, would you also say this about a study with men and social isolation (another entirely self reported metric)? How skeptical would you be that they really feel isolated? If there’s a difference you should interrogate why.
paul wasn't saying they definitely feel less pain than they report; he was saying that this study can only measure their reported pain, not their actual pain. He does not need to give you the specific disproof you are looking for because he is not claiming the study's conclusion is definitely false, just that its methodology is not sufficient to prove its conclusion.
I have absolutely 0 evidence for that because I never made that claim at all. That would an incredibly dumb claim to make. You're arguing in bad faith on behalf of a divisive culture war and putting words in mouth.
I accuse the Guardian of engaging in click bait in general. That's a significant portion oF their business model.
This post is not the findings of a scientific study. It's a headline ans an entertainment article which is vaguely referencing an actual scientific study in an actual academic journal. That paper is titled "Global and regional reference curves for pain across the lifespan in 6.1 million individuals in 118 countries", not "Womrn Suffer More Pain Than Men..."
I never made any claims as to the "scientific" quality of this, and i'm really confused as to why you are suddenly focusi g so hard on the word "science". FYI- tossing the word "science" around is usually not very effective at convincing people you are right.
This is an oddly phrased question but I'll try to read between the lines at what you're getting at here. First of all, "loneliness" is a far more abstract concept to even try to measure, so any results will be even more subject to the limitations of surveys than pain. It would be far more accurate to state "X group reports loneliness at a higher rate than Y group" rather than staying "X group experiences more loneliness than Y". The whole point i'm making is that the word "experiences" is different from the word "reports".
"Male loneliness" is just "loneliness" with more gender war spin applied to it. Loneliness is increasing across all genders, age groups, and pretty much any other way you slice it in countries with broad access to the internet.
Or, you know, men as a group Underexaggaurate about it, which is literally the verbarim stated point of the comment I'm replying too. Did you even read the stuff you're replying too
Conversations move along, you’re the one that was trying to make a distinction between what women claim they experience and what they actually experience. And that’s what I responded to, since it would make no damn sense to take up something you said with the OC.
If you think what I wrote even remotely implies that women lie about their pain level as a group, then you have the reading comprehension of a child.
I wrote "Women report higher levels of pain" because I was (fucking obviously) rephrasing the actual headline in a more accurate rigorous way. The study was about self reported pain, so an accurate headline should use the word "reported" because that's what the study is about. It's not a study on actual pain experience, it's a study on self reported pain. That doesn't imply that anyone is lying about anything, much less that one specific group is, it's just basic accuracy and rigor, and I wrote "women" in the example headline because I was obviously rephrasing the orignal headline and the original headline used women. Also, you know, if, hypothetically both genders EXPERIENCE the same level of pain, BOTH women over exaggerating OR men underexagguraring would lead to higher reported pain by women, so writing that women report, but do not experience higher levels of pain doesn't actually give any implication whatsoever about which gender is the one misrepresening, it only implies that (at least) one group is, not which. And since the previous comment was specifically about men under reporting pain, I was obviously talking about the possibility of a split between actual and reported pain existing because of men misrepresenting it as a group, not women. So you jumping to the conclusion that I'm claiming women are lying about their pain levels is ridiculous and does not even remotely in any way whatsoever flow from anything I wrote.
For clarity, you’re saying it’s an insane reach to read this as claiming there is a mismatch between what women experience and what they report? The literal words you wrote that said ‘women report higher levels of pain across the board, rather than they experience higher levels of pain’? And you believe I’m the one that can’t read?
That is not what you claimed. You used the phrase "lying or exaggerating", implying a conscious intent to decieve.
Additionally, Devial was comparing the two headlines, not women, when using "report" vs "experience". They were not suggesting the title should highlight the gap between women's reported and experienced pain, but that a title highlighting the gap in reported pain between men and women is more accurate than one that highlights the gap in experienced pain.
Yes. Because with the context of
A) the top level comment
And
B) the fact that I was obviously literally just changing the word "suffer" to "report" in the original headline
And
C) the obvious fucking fact that "Women report higher levels of pain than men (but don't necessarily experience higher levels of pain)" is a logically equivalent statement to "men report lower levels of pain than women (but don't necessarily experience lower levels of pain)" and therefore includes no insinuation about which gender is misreporting
Yes, it's extremely fucking obvious to anyone who can read what I meant.
OK, so you don't care about context. Just looking for something inciting to jump on and make an ordeal out of.
Do better.
Sorry that pointing out there was a potential logical issue with your statement made you uncomfortable. I hope you’ll be OK.
Or men as a group lie and minimize their own discomfort?
Why jump immediately to the worst possible interpretation?
frankly, given our patriarchy and internalized misogyny it's far more likely the men are lying - or more precisely, deluding themselves - to protect their ego
How is ‘actually it’s men that lie as a group’ better than saying the same of women?
a) the other reply makes the point about men feeling internalized societal pressure to appear "tough"
b) you need to assess your biases that made you assume the OC was taking a shot at women, or even a shot at either gender. You jumped directly to the worst possible interpretation when there are many other ways to read the OC's intent
It isn't, but the point is that men likely do, because of societal pressure to be seen as tough, and unbothered by pain. Seriously, did you not even read the top level comment of this thread ?
Just a troll in the wild.
The more I learn about how periods and pregnancy can fuck up the body the more and more I'm certain women, in general, experience more pain than men on a regular basis.
The device that simulates period pain is something I feel all doctors should go through. If you know what that pain is like then I imagine you would listen more to your patients.
I'm fascinated by the existence of this device
Completely delusional to think they wouldnt. Women literally have built in monthly pain generator for the majority of their lives.
Explain the man cold, then.
Men have weaker immune systems. Which also means women tend to have more autoimmune conditions, leading to more chronic pain. Ouch.