Women report more pain than men at all 11 body sites across 118 countries

Most estimates of pain burden count diagnoses. The authors argue that this can leave out people with limited access to healthcare, so they analysed self-reported pain instead ^[12]. Pooling surveys from 1990 to 2025, covering ages from five to over 100 ^[2], took what the team called "one of the largest harmonization efforts in pain epidemiology to date" ^[3]. The authors list the costs themselves. Surveys measured pain in different ways, and coverage was uneven across regions and at the youngest and oldest ages. The data also describe age groups instead of following the same people over time, and the authors say these limits could affect interpretation without changing the overall patterns ^[16].

Prevalence varies widely by site. About 40% of participants reported back pain and 2% reported facial pain ^[8], a twentyfold spread ^[20].

Because the outcome is self-report, the finding is strictly that women report more pain than men ^[1]. The Guardian's account gives the direction of that difference at each site but not its size. A gap pointing the same way at all 11 sites, in more than 6 million people ^[1][2], is hard to put down to chance. Whether it is a few percentage points or many is the figure a clinic would plan around.

The age curve holds two shapes. "Overall, our results suggest that, although the likelihood of experiencing any pain rises steadily with age, the most disabling forms of pain followed an inverted-U trajectory, peaking in mid-to-late adulthood before declining," the authors wrote ^[11]. Neck, shoulder and elbow pain peaked around midlife. Back, hip and knee pain kept rising, and the authors attribute that to "cumulative mechanical and degenerative load at weight-bearing sites" ^[13].

The steep climb before 55 ^[5] comes with a caution. Because the study compares age groups ^[16], its younger and older respondents were born decades apart. Part of what looks like ageing could be a difference between generations, in weight or smoking for instance, two of the risk factors the study measured ^[14]. Only data that follow the same people through midlife can separate the two.

Regional differences in those risk factors are large. Obesity accounted for 14.6% of pain in North America and 2.7% in central and southern Asia ^[15], a ratio of about five ^[22].

Andrew Horne, director of the Centre for Reproductive Health at the University of Edinburgh, called the research a landmark study ^[17]. "Pain also rises most steeply before age 55, during women's working, caring and reproductive years. It is strong evidence that the gender pain gap is real, consistent and global. Yet women's pain is still too often dismissed, under-researched and under-treated," he said ^[18]. The Guardian uses "gender pain gap" for a treatment problem: women being less likely to be prescribed the pain relief they need ^[23]. The study's outcome was self-reported pain ^[12], so its data bear on how much pain women report and not directly on what they are prescribed.