There’s a popular theory (popular, at least, with 50 percent of the population) that when it comes to tolerating pain, women are tougher than men. We’re built to tolerate childbirth, after all – and it doesn’t get much tougher than that. How true is this? Jokes about man-flu aside, does it stand up to scientific scrutiny, or is it just another urban myth?

The trouble with pain research

One of the obstacles we quickly run into is that pain is notoriously hard to measure. Pain is, by its nature, a subjective experience. Two people with the exact same injury may feel entirely different levels of pain, and even a single individual’s experience of the same painful stimulus will vary from one situation to another. Trying to compare one person’s pain with someone else’s is a little like wondering whether you and I both have the same experience of color when we look at the same patch of sky.

There are two factors that are of interest to researchers, and these sometimes get confused. Firstly, there’s a person’s pain threshold – how much of a stimulus it takes before that person starts to experience pain. The other factor is pain tolerance – how much of that painful stimulus you can tolerate. That raises the question of what precisely we mean by “tolerate” – after all, in many real-world situations, people have little choice about whether to tolerate their pain or not.

To understand better, we need to look at how pain tolerance experiments are typically conducted. A known safe but increasingly painful stimulus is applied to volunteers (who are usually financially compensated for their inconvenience and discomfort). This might be done by immersing a hand in cold water at a given temperature or applying a certain amount of pressure to specific locations on the body. The volunteers are asked to tolerate as much pain as possible before indicating to the experimenter that it’s too painful to continue. There’s an argument that this isn’t just measuring pain, but also the volunteer’s motivation: after all, if the life of a loved one depends on how much pain you tolerate, you’d probably hold out for a bit longer than you would otherwise. Less dramatically - if you’re concerned about being perceived as “tough,” then you’ll probably try a bit harder, especially if there are people watching. In fact, some studies have found that volunteers will tolerate more pain when tested by an experimenter of the opposite sex.

What do these studies show?

Across a range of experiments, there are some consistent differences between men and women when it comes to pain tolerance. The evidence says that overall, women tend to be more sensitive to pain than men are. Not only do they record lower pain tolerances for many types of experimentally induced pain, but they also report a higher incidence of painful conditions and greater pain after surgery. (There are also variations in pain tolerance that correlate with age and ethnicity.)

There are a number of theories as to why this is the case. Cultural factors, psychology and gender stereotypes no doubt play an important part: men who identify strongly with the “male role” show higher pain tolerance than those who don’t, and women show more of a tendency towards beliefs that are linked to lower pain tolerance. There may also be physiological differences involved: some research has indicated that pain tolerance in women varies with the monthly cycle, leading to suggestions that sex hormones may lead to differences in how pain is processed. Women and men also seem to respond differently to analgesia, and this is an ongoing area of research.

So, are you saying that men have higher pain thresholds than women? I knew it!

We need to be a bit careful how we interpret this. As with most research about sex differences, we’re only looking at averages; and the average man and the average women don’t exist. Any characteristic will vary across the population – and there will be variation within each gender as well as between genders: some men have relatively high pain tolerance, while others have a much lower one – and the same for women. If you draw the graphs and compare them, they will be in slightly different places, but there’s also a large overlap. Your gender doesn’t determine your pain tolerance; it’s only one of many different factors involved, and your beliefs play an important role.

Different types of pain

Individuals also tolerate different kinds of pain differently. We all know someone who’s super tough when playing sports but just can’t stand injections. While men and women show a substantial difference in their ability to tolerate some kinds of pain, for other stimuli the difference is much less clear. It appears that women are no more susceptible than men to muscle pain induced by exercise, for example (and some studies have even found the opposite effect, with women significantly less affected).

The verdict: FALSE

Overall, women do seem to show a lower pain tolerance than men; although this varies depending on a lot of things - including individual differences, psychological factors, the social situation and the type of pain. The good news, though, is that regardless of how high or low your pain tolerance is, there’s some evidence that you might be able to improve it. How? Exercise.