The Feminisation of Pain
Tell a doctor you are in pain, the question that follows should be about your body. For women, it is often about your mind. Could it be stress? Is it anxiety?
What she describes as physical is received as emotional.
What she reports as severe is filed as anxious.
And what she needs treated is instead reassured, calmed, or sent home.
This is not the same thing as just being dismissed. It is more specific, and more revealing. Her pain is being feminised - read as a feature of her psychology rather than a signal from her tissue.
This reflex has a long history and a measurable cost. It shapes who gets studied, who gets believed, and who gets treated. In this article, we will explore how the gender-pain gap is formed in society, and how this normalisation of pain in women creates a societal bias that ultimately harms the immediate and long-term psychological and physical health of womankind.
Hysterical Women, and Being Told to “Get Pregnant” to Treat Endometriosis
The idea that women's suffering is really emotional in origin is not new. It is one of the oldest ideas in medicine.
The word "hysteria" was coined from the Greek for uterus. Ancient physicians believed in a "wandering womb" - a restless organ that migrated around the body, producing physical and mental ailments, wherever it went (1). The prescribed cure was marriage or pregnancy to “anchor the womb” in place and cure our ailments. Women labelled hysterical were not treated as patients with a pathology. Instead, they were subjected to exorcism, or confined.
The anatomy was wrong, but the assumption underneath it stayed for centuries: that when a woman is in pain, the cause is more likely to be found in her emotional or reproductive nature than in discrete, treatable conditions. Hysteria became a catch-all, absorbing everything from epilepsy to grief, to chronic pain. This is not dissimilar to the finding that today, 79% with endometriosis have been told to “get pregnant” by doctors as treatment. Women as young as 17 years old. It’s an obvious parallel to the wandering womb theory (2).
Hysteria was not fully retired from formal psychiatric classification until as recently as 1980 (1). But it still exists, just with different vocabulary.
Have you ever realised that men who deal with pain are ‘brave’ or ‘stoic’, whereas women are ‘weak’ and ‘emotional’?
Getting Prescribed Sedatives over Pain Medication
Apologies in advance, as these findings are going to annoy you.
A recent 2024 paper has unveiled that female patients are less likely to be prescribed pain-relief medication than men, even when they are experiencing equivalent pain levels. This is at every pain level, in every age category (3).
They saw that female patients’ pain scores are less likely to be recorded by nurses, and they spend longer in the emergency department than male patients. For black women, this is even more significant.
In the past, women have been found to be more likely to be prescribed sedatives for pain, while men get pain medication - as our pain is seen as emotional, not physical (4).
Women are also 7 times more likely to be sent home mid-heart attack (5).
The Normalisation of Pain in Women: When Period Pain is “Common Sense”, Not a Concern.
Period pain is the one pain where feminisation is so complete it barely registers as a bias at all, because it has been fully absorbed into “common sense”.
Period pain (also called dysmenorrhoea) affects 71% of women under 25 (6). It is a leading cause of school absence, and it is linked to disrupted sleep, poorer concentration, and reduced academic performance (6). Yet, the cultural script is that it is simply the price of a female body: ordinary, expected, and to be endured.
First the pain is normalised - it is just part of being a woman. Normalisation breeds concealment - you are taught to hide your period, to manage quietly, to not make a fuss. Concealment produces invisibility. And invisible suffering does not get researched, does not get funded, and does not get treated.
Normalising menstrual pain, one recent analysis argues, is a form of testimonial injustice: it strips a woman of the standing to be believed when her pain is genuinely alarming, because the category "period pain" has already been marked as unremarkable (7). It teaches clinicians to downgrade her report. Worse, it teaches her to downgrade it herself (7). She learns to wonder whether she is overreacting before she has even reached the door.
This is the feminisation of pain in its purest form. Not a single dismissive doctor, but an entire culture agreeing in advance that a certain kind of female suffering does not count.
Research into Pain Focused on Men. In Women, it Might be Different
For most of its history, pain research was conducted on males. The assumption was that pain works the same way in everybody, so the male body could stand in for all bodies.
Recent research has seen that males and females might process pain differently in the nervous system. Here is just one of many examples:
In 2022, researchers studied spinal cord tissue from men and women, alongside male and female rats, and exposed it to BDNF - a protein that ramps up sensitivity to pain (3). In male tissue, human and rat, BDNF triggered the cascade that drives pain hypersensitivity. In female tissue, it did not (8). The same painful input was running through fundamentally different machinery depending on sex. When the researchers removed the ovaries from female rats, the male-type mechanism appeared, pointing to a hormonal basis for the difference (8).
This is feminisation at the level of science itself: the female body treated as a deviation from the standard rather than half of the subject. The UK's own Women's Health Strategy names this the "male as default" approach, and identifies it as having distorted research, clinical training, and the design of health services.
Moreover, sex-related differences in drug clearance mean that men and women process common pain relievers like ibuprofen and paracetamol differently, potentially altering how quickly and effectively the treatment works (9).
The takeaway
The feminisation of pain in women has been breeding for centuries and still, in modern society, ignored, dismissed and normalised. Men who deal with pain are ‘brave’ or ‘stoic’, whereas women are ‘weak’ and ‘emotional’. This isn’t just in societal discourse, but it’s seeped into research studies, clinician and healthcare provider decisions and in women’s minds themselves.
In 2010, the Declaration of Montreal affirmed access to pain management as a fundamental human right, without discrimination (adopted by delegates from around 130 countries). More than a decade on, women's pain is still filtered through societal bias and measured against research built on male bodies. Naming that is how it changes. Your pain was never the problem. The way it has been heard is.
References
1. Tasca, C., Rapetti, M., Carta, M.G. and Fadda, B. (2012). Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health. Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health, [online] 8(1), pp.110–119. doi:10.2174/1745017901208010110.
2. Endometriosis-uk.org. (2025). Endometriosis UK team up with Metro News to end the myth that pregnancy can ‘cure’ endometriosis. | Endometriosis UK. [online] Available at: https://www.endometriosis-uk.org/endometriosis-uk-team-metro-news-end-myth-pregnancy-can-cure-endometriosis [Accessed 24 Aug. 2026].
3. M. Guzikevits, T. Gordon-Hecker, D. Rekhtman, S. Salameh, S. Israel, M. Shayo, D. Gozal, A. Perry, A. Gileles-Hillel, & S. Choshen-Hillel, Sex bias in pain management decisions, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 121 (33) e2401331121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2401331121 (2024).
4. Calderone, K.L. The influence of gender on the frequency of pain and sedative medication administered to postoperative patients. Sex Roles 23, 713–725 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00289259
5. Pope JH, Aufderheide TP, Ruthazer R, Woolard RH, Feldman JA, Beshansky JR, Griffith JL, Selker HP. Missed diagnoses of acute cardiac ischemia in the emergency department. N Engl J Med. 2000 Apr 20;342(16):1163-70. doi: 10.1056/NEJM200004203421603. PMID: 10770981.
6. Laughey, W., Vincent, K., Iyer, S., Cobo, M. M., & Slater, R. (2025). Pain in women: bridging the gender pain gap. PAIN Reports, 10(3), e1276. https://doi.org/10.1097/PR9.0000000000001276
7. Wiggleton-Little J. "Just" a painful period: A philosophical perspective review of the dismissal of menstrual pain. Womens Health (Lond). 2024 Jan-Dec;20:17455057241255646. doi: 10.1177/17455057241255646. PMID: 38773901; PMCID: PMC11113068.
8. Dedek A, Xu J, Lorenzo LÉ, Godin AG, Kandegedara CM, Glavina G, Landrigan JA, Lombroso PJ, De Koninck Y, Tsai EC, Hildebrand ME. Sexual dimorphism in a neuronal mechanism of spinal hyperexcitability across rodent and human models of pathological pain. Brain. 2022 Apr 29;145(3):1124-1138. doi: 10.1093/brain/awab408. PMID: 35323848; PMCID: PMC9050559.
9. Soldin OP, Mattison DR. Sex differences in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. Clin Pharmacokinet. 2009;48(3):143-57. doi: 10.2165/00003088-200948030-00001. PMID: 19385708; PMCID: PMC3644551.
