Research suggests women often report more frequent and intense pain, with higher rates of chronic pain conditions, influenced by hormones, genetics, and social factors, while men may have a higher threshold for detecting pain but different pain experiences. Biological factors, like hormones, create different pain pathways, but cultural expectations (boys "tough it out") also affect reporting, making it complex to compare pain levels directly.
More recent studies using virtual human technology have demonstrated that females are considered to have greater intensity and unpleasantness of pain than males and are more likely to be recommended for opioid treatment as evaluated by healthcare professionals and students.
While results have at times been conflicting, what we are learning is that females consistently show lower pain thresholds and increased pain following a painful stimulus than males. This doesn't mean women are weaker than men or their pain isn't real, but they feel pain more intensely than men.
Gender differences in health have been reported in several domains. Since the 1970's, biomedical literature has shown that women suffer from higher morbidity than men due to acute and chronic physical and psychiatric diseases (8, 64–68).
The majority of clinical, basic human, and rodent literature reports that females are more sensitive to pain. Clinical studies find women are more likely than men to report pain2 and report higher pain intensity (reviewed by Fillingim et al, 20093).
Studies have found that the female body has a more intense natural response to painful stimuli, indicating a difference between genders in the way pain systems function. A greater nerve density present in women may cause them to feel pain more intensely than men.
Everybody who works in the field of injuries knows that after infancy, and before old age, males engage in more behavior that exposes them to the risk of injury, experience more injuries, and die more frequently from injuries.
A century ago, there were less than two years between men's and women's life expectancies in the United States. Today, that gender gap has almost tripled, with men dying 5.3 years earlier than women in 2023.
Women continue to report higher stress levels than men (5.3 vs. 4.6 on a 10-point scale where 1 is “little or no stress” and 10 is “a great deal of stress”). Both genders agree, however, that 3.6 is a healthy level of stress, pushing women nearly two points beyond the level of stress they believe to be healthy.
Women around the world report higher levels of life satisfaction than men, but at the same time report more daily stress.
In their study, the highest pain thresholds occurred at the luteal phase regardless of tissue depth or site but statistical significance was achieved for only the abdominal subcutis and muscle sites with luteal phase threshold (days 17–22) greater than menstrual (days 2–6) and premenstrual (days 25–28) phases.
A study published in the journal 'Annals of Neurology' placed the ends of the fingers as one of the most sensitive points on the body, as they are full of nerve endings which send pain signals directly to the brain. And male readers will want to include hitting the testicles in this list of unbearable conditions.
Men are, on average, significantly more tolerant and less censorious than women. By contrast, while political affiliation makes people more biased towards speakers on their side, it affects their overall willingness to let speakers speak, regardless of ideology, very little.
Differences were especially strong in pain tolerance—even though male participants had higher tolerance, female participants were less variable across visits. According to the researchers, this was the first study to measure gender differences in the test-retest reliability of pain sensitivity in humans.
None of the leading theories propose that women are more sensitive than men. But in studies that measure sensitivity with questionnaires, women often tend to report higher sensitivity.
Our State of Musculoskeletal Health 2024 report has shown that women are more likely to experience chronic pain, with 38% of women having chronic pain compared to 30% of men. We also know that 14% of women have high-impact chronic pain compared to 9% of men.
Women reported more worry than men on two measures of the tendency to worry, as well as more worries about lack of confidence issues. Women also reported a more negative problem orientation and engaging in more thought suppression, a type of cognitive avoidance.
Physical differences are undeniable — baby boys have higher levels of testosterone than girls and lower levels of serotonin, which causes them to be more easily stressed and harder to calm down.
Small but significant gender differences in emotion expressions have been reported for adults, with women showing greater emotional expressivity, especially for positive emotions and internalizing negative emotions such as sadness.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men in the United States, accounting for 25 percent of all male deaths. Various factors, including smoking, high cholesterol levels and obesity, can cause heart disease.
The results revealed that men fall in love, on average, about one month earlier than women, women experience romantic love slightly more intensely, and women think about their loved ones more than men.
You shouldn't fear death because it's a natural, inevitable part of life, and accepting its impermanence helps you focus on living fully in the present, find peace by letting go of attachments, or find hope in spiritual beliefs about an afterlife, with philosophies suggesting it's just the end of experience, making the fear itself pointless. Many find liberation in understanding that all things change and by focusing on leaving a positive legacy, as suggested by existentialists.
Research has consistently found that women experience anger as frequently and as intensely as men. Men who feel angry are more likely to display aggression, although this does not mean that women are not motivated by rage as frequently.
Just remember that there are no guarantees and the odds of conceiving a boy or a girl are almost exactly the same for each and every pregnancy.
The study found that approximately 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women and women are also more likely to end non-marital relationships as well. And while a break-up can often be bittersweet for women – a combination of sadness, and some hopefully optimism for the future, that just isn't the case for men.