Despite significant healthcare advances in recent years, the gender pain gap – the phenomenon in which women’s pain is more poorly understood and mistreated compared with men’s due to systemic gaps and biases – is well and truly alive in 2023. Although women in the UK live, on average, almost four years longer than men, studies have found that women spend more of their lives in ill health in comparison with men. A startling one in six women experience severe pain every day, according to Nurofen’s Gender Pain Gap Index Report. What’s more, their pain is often overlooked in healthcare and underrepresented in research. While women make up the majority of chronic pain sufferers, they have historically been excluded from clinical drug trials.
Here in the UK, the government’s first ever Women’s Health Strategy for England, published last year, announced plans to tackle the gender health gap by confirming that all graduating medical students and doctors would receive mandatory specific teaching on women’s health. This won’t, however, come into place until 2024.
