Headaches. Back pain. Abdominal pain. Knee pain. Across every body site researchers examined, women reported pain more often than men.
That pattern emerged from a new Nature Medicine analysis of 6.1 million people across 118 countries, making it one of the largest attempts yet to map how pain is reported around the world.
The differences were especially striking for some types of pain. Women were 83% more likely than men to report facial pain, 74% more likely to report headaches and 60% more likely to report abdominal pain.
Six Million People Reveal A Pattern
Published in Nature Medicine, the analysis brought together individual-level pain data from 6,125,459 people, drawn from 902 population-based sources covering 118 countries and territories.
Researchers looked at 11 body sites, including the head, face, neck and shoulder, chest, back, abdomen, hip, knee, elbow, hand and wrist, and foot and ankle.
Women were more likely than men to report pain at all 11 sites.
The difference was not small everywhere. Depending on the location, women had between 1.08 and 1.83 times the likelihood of reporting pain compared with men.
Back pain was the most prevalent problem in the overall dataset, affecting roughly 40% of people. Facial pain was at the opposite end, at about 2%.
But the study does not say women have a single, universal reason for experiencing more pain.
Pain Peaks Earlier Than Many People Think
The analysis also challenges another familiar assumption: that pain simply becomes more common as people get older.
It doesn’t.
Across the 11 sites, pain prevalence increased most sharply before age 55.
Headaches, facial pain and abdominal pain generally reached their highest levels earlier in adulthood and then declined.
Back, hip and knee pain behaved differently. Those problems continued to build through adulthood and generally reached their highest prevalence at 75 or older.
In other words, a 30-year-old with frequent headaches and an 80-year-old with persistent knee pain may both be counted as having “pain,” but the underlying age patterns are very different.
That is one of the study’s less obvious findings, and potentially one of its most useful.
Related: 10 Dark Realities of Aging in America That Many Seniors Face in Silence
Where You Live Matters, Too
Among older adults, people in countries with a low Human Development Index had a 30.6-percentage-point higher prevalence of pain anywhere in the body than people in high-HDI countries.
At the oldest ages, low-back-pain prevalence was nearly twice as high in low-HDI countries.
Smoking, obesity and low income together accounted for an estimated 18.3% of the pain burden across the body sites studied.
But those factors did not explain everything. Their contribution varied substantially between regions, leaving researchers with a large unanswered question about what else is driving the global differences.
That could include working conditions, access to health care, injuries, chronic disease, and other social or environmental factors. The study does not establish which of these is responsible.
The U.S. Numbers Echo The Finding
The U.S. data tell a similar story.
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According to CDC figures from 2023, 25.4% of women reported chronic pain compared with 23.2% of men.
The difference becomes more noticeable when the pain is severe enough to interfere with daily life. High-impact chronic pain affected 9.6% of women, compared with 7.3% of men.
Those numbers do not mean every woman experiences more pain than every man. They describe a difference across populations.
That distinction is important because pain is inherently personal. A population study can reveal patterns that are invisible when looking at one patient at a time, but it cannot explain what is happening inside any particular person’s body.
Then Comes The Treatment Problem
Women may not only report pain more often. Separate research suggests they can face differences in how that pain is assessed and treated.
A 2024 emergency-department study involving 17,576 patients found that women were prescribed pain medication less often than men, 38% versus 47%, even after researchers accounted for pain scores and other factors.
Women also spent about 30 minutes longer in the emergency department in that analysis, and their pain scores were less likely to be documented by nurses.
Another 2026 review from the University of St Andrews examined treatment differences between women and men across medicine. Of 38 retrospective patient-record studies, 33 found statistically significant treatment differences.
The review covered cardiology, surgery, emergency medicine, transplant care and other specialties.
Andrew O’Malley, co-lead author of that review, said clinicians should check whether treatment is being offered on “clinical grounds rather than assumption.”
That does not prove that women reporting more pain receive worse care in every setting. It does suggest that the question of pain cannot stop at how frequently people report it. Researchers also need to ask what happens after a patient speaks up.
Women Reporting More Pain Is Not The Same As Feeling It “More”
The researchers measured reported pain prevalence.
They did not test whether women have a lower pain threshold, experience pain more intensely in every circumstance, or have a single biological mechanism that explains the difference.
A 2022 review of sex and gender in pain similarly concluded that both biological sex and gender-related factors can influence pain risk, processing, coping, and treatment response.
The new global analysis adds scale to that conversation.
It shows that the difference is not confined to one condition, one age group, or one country. But it cannot tell us whether biology, social circumstances, medical experiences, or some combination of them accounts for the pattern.
The Question Behind The Numbers
The significance of this study may ultimately be less about proving that women have more pain and more about forcing researchers to ask why the same pattern keeps appearing.
The evidence now spans millions of people and decades of research. Women report more pain across a remarkable range of body sites, while separate studies have found that their pain can sometimes receive less documentation, medication, or intensive treatment.
Neither finding explains the other.
Together, however, they point toward a problem worth investigating: whether medicine is fully recognizing and responding to the pain women report.
For anyone dealing with persistent or worsening pain, the takeaway is not to assume that a symptom is “just normal” or to diagnose its cause from a statistic. Pain that interferes with sleep, work, or everyday activities deserves to be discussed with a qualified health professional.
Have you ever felt that being believed was the hardest part of getting help for your pain?
