Men and women don’t experience pain the same way. Give someone an electric shock; bind a tourniquet tighter and tighter around their leg; submerge their hand in icy water; prick them with a pin: Researchers have done it all, and they’ve found — across years and hundreds of studies — that the same stimuli provoke greater pain responses in women. Women, in other words, are more sensitive to pain than men. They report feeling it more in just about every way: more intensely, more often, for a longer time. They grapple with more headaches, more painful gut conditions, more pain in their backs and pelvises and bones and, research suggests, virtually every other part of their bodies. Of the hundreds of millions of chronic pain patients around the world, they comprise roughly 70 percent. And underlying those striking disparities, studies are finding, is a still more extensive web of differences connected to both gender and biological sex that help shape how pain manifests, and how badly it hurts. Distinct types of cells appear to be involved in processing pain in each sex. Sex hormones have been shown to exacerbate or dampen it. Disparate stress levels, gender roles and even the ways men and women tend to think about their own pain all seem to influence how hard it hits. The list goes on — and likely keeps going on far beyond what research has so far uncovered.
