Women do not experience less pain than men — they are simply treated that way. Across emergency rooms, clinics, medical schools and research labs, women’s pain is consistently underestimated, undertreated or dismissed outright. That isn’t a coincidence — it’s a scientific failure rooted in decades of male-dominated research. Biased clinical training and institutional neglect have profound consequences on women’s health.
The data is unambiguous. In one analysis by the National Library of Medicine of 21,851 emergency department records, women were less likely to receive pain medication than men, even when reporting the same level of pain.
In similar research from the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, datasets showed that nurses were 10% less likely to record women’s pain scores than men, and women — on average — spent 30 minutes longer in the emergency room before receiving care.
Additional research from the Proceedings of the National Academy on Sciences displayed this gender bias. When researchers presented clinicians with identical male and female patient charts, the clinicians consistently judged the female’s pain as less severe. These findings confirm what countless women already know about their medical experiences: their pain is viewed as less real, less urgent and less treatable.
The bias is not confined to the ER. In gynecological care — where women’s pain and perspectives should be taken most seriously — treatment is shockingly inadequate. According to the NIH, only 30% of physicians offer anesthesia for IUD insertion, despite 70% of women reporting moderate to severe pain with the insertion of this birth control device. Nearly 40% of clinics provide no pain relief at all, offering instead what can only be described as patronizing advice: “relax.”
Meanwhile, emergency medical services show the same pattern. The NIH revealed that EMS providers administer opioids significantly less often to women, and disproportionately undertreat Hispanic and Native American women, in particular.
Leslie Farland, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at the University of Arizona’s College of Public Health, studies how medical failures compound over time. “Historically, women’s health research has taken a back seat, so there’s still a lot we don’t know or don’t understand related to women’s pain because we haven’t invested in studying it,” Farland said. This lack of scientific investment has real implications for women who are suffering.
For women with endometriosis, a painful condition in which cells similar to the uterine lining grow outside of the uterus, Farland noted that there is an average seven-year delay between symptoms onset and diagnosis. “This delay means that women live for many years with their symptoms, which are most commonly pain-related and without treatment these symptoms can get worse,” Farland said.
Endometriosis is simply a condition that is undervalued by medicine and science. Despite its wide effect on the female population, there’s hardly any research on pain management or medications to help treat it. In fact, the only “solution” given by doctors is birth control — and many women experience severe side effects from hormonal birth control.
And that education is part of the problem. Farland recalled hearing that medical students receive just one lecture on endometriosis — a condition that impacts one in ten women. If pain conditions that primarily impact biologically female individuals are nearly absent from the curriculum, it’s no wonder physicians fail to recognize or treat them.
Women are not just left in pain, they are left without answers — science still isn’t built for them. Pre-clinical research on pain is overwhelmingly concluded from studies that only use male subjects. Then clinicians turn around and use that knowledge to treat women.
This is how women end up in clinics where their pain is misattributed to anxiety, stress or hormones. “There’s a long-standing idea that because we endure childbirth we’re meant to endure pain,” said Elizabeth Comen, breast oncologist expert and graduate of Harvard Medical School. These biases are not from individual bad doctors — they are baked into the infrastructure that shapes medical education.
Medicine prides itself on evidence-based practices. But when the evidence itself has excluded women for generations, the result is predictable: women receive worse care. It’s not because their pain is “unusual” or “mental,” but because the medical system they face is unscientific.
The gender pain gap in medicine is a research and curriculum failure, but it’s also a preventable failure. The medical community needs to place a higher emphasis on prioritizing their female patients’ pain.
Pain treatment must be provided adequately and impartially — anything less is simply unethical. Science has failed women. How long will clinicians continue to accept that failure?
