While pain is a universal human experience, the treatment varies greatly, depending on the individual that it experiences. All over the world, women tend to act on delayed diagnoses, receive inadequate pain relief or let their symptoms reject as emotionally or exaggerated. This inequality is known as a gender gap – a persistent and harmful gap in medical systems that reacts to pain based on gender.
While science claims objectivity and impartiality, the personal reports of women in cultures show a disturbing reality, a deeply rooted gender -specific tendency that reduces their suffering.
Systemic neglect: How medicine continues to fail women painfully
Our health systems claim to offer equality, but the gap between sex pain shows a tough reality: women pain is often released or underestimated. Despite medical progress, these problems exist and affect women of all demographies. Research continues to confirm what many women have known from experience for a long time: their pain is released too often. Women are more likely to have disregard, even if they report the same symptoms as men.
A 2024 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences I looked at over 21,000 emergency rooms in the USA and Israel – and the results were clear. The health concerns of women were rather downplayed or overlooked, which increases the systemic tendency that continues to endanger their well -being. This is not only a minor discrepancy, but a revelation of systematic preloads that are deeply embedded in medical practices.
Historically, the health problems of women were overlooked. A classic example of this may be that women are called “hysterical or emotional” and lead to their pain being released. This gender -specific bias is partially due to the fact that the research work on health problems is carried out by women. Most studies have been carried out on male subjects, which led to abuse of the pain of women in healthcare.
Real life reports: Women refused to relieve adequate pain
Every statistics about the gap between the sexes painful gender pain gap in a personal experience of frustration, discharge and a long time. There were many cases in which women had weakening pain before they received precise diagnoses. For example a The woman’s endometriosis was initially diagnosed incorrectly as appendicitis that leads to unnecessary operations and other complications.
Similarly, a parliamentary hearing from 2024 on birth trauma in Great Britain discovered widespread cases in which women were refused to relieve adequate pain during birth. There were more than 1,300 certificates in which women were released, mocked or exposed to procedures without consent. Many also reported serious postnatal neglect.
These stories are not isolated incidents, but the reflections of systematic topics within health systems. These shine a recurring pattern of the pain of women, which are played down or attributed by psychological factors, which leads to delayed diagnoses and inadequate treatment.
While these personal stories show the consequences of dismissing the pain of women and general medical neglect, these problems are deeply embedded in medical research and practices that have historically neglected women.
Science behind the bias: medical research and gender
The recurring discharge of the pain of women is not only a cultural problem, but also a reflection of how modern medicine was built. In the past, medical research focused on male autonomy and had female physiology underexposed. Women were excluded until the nineties due to concerns about hormonal functions and potential risks of clinical studies. As a result, so much of what we understand about the autonomy and health care of women is based on male data. This continues to create a gender-specific gap in diagnostic and treatment protocols.
The gap in the scientific understanding of the autonomy has serious effects. Disorders that mostly influence women such as endometriosis, fibromyalgia and various autoimmune diseases are often overlooked or diagnosed incorrectly.
These stories are not isolated incidents, but the reflections of systematic topics within health systems. Instead of maintaining pain relievers, many women are still prescribed sedatives, which reflects old, harmful ideas that their pain is not physiologically but emotional. This is not just a medical problem, but a form of systemic discrimination that needs to be called.
These deeply rooted distortions characterize the dismissive treatment that many women are exposed. When medical training, literature and research concentrate on male bodies, they often internalize and replicate these patterns unintentionally and do not only replicate a question of individual prejudices, but of an entire system that privileges a kind of body through a different privileges.
The result? A persistent gender -specific gap in pain treatment, in which science itself contributes to the silence of the suffering of women. But scientific neglect does not occur in isolation; It is deeply overlapping with social structures such as class and breed that often worsen for marginalized women.
The intersectionality of the pain: race, class and gender
It is important to understand the interface of breed, class and gender to understand the gap between the sexes. Systematic inequalities ensure that the stress caused by medical neglect women from marginalized communities are most difficult: Dalite, adivasi and workers’ groups, whose pain is often rejected, devalued or completely ignored.
In April 2025, a 13-year-old Dalit girl in Tamil Nadu Was forced to sit on the stairs in front of her classroom to write an exam because it was menstruation. Your pain, instead of being recognized with dignity or support, became a public spectacle. The incident triggered the public outrage and led to a departmental investigation that is reflected in how the caste and menstrual quota overlap in order to criminalize and shape fundamental physical experiences. In the United States, there were also cases in which black patients, including women, are less likely to receive adequate health care compared to their white colleagues.
Such incidents are far more common than they should be. There have been several cases in rural clinics in which women from marginalized groups such as Dalit or Adivasi women were refused anesthesia during the procedures or ashamed of the search for reproductive care. The lack of cultural sensitivity and accessible health care for marginalized women shows how pain is recognized differently, not only on gender, but also on the class.
The economic and social effects
The economic effects are strong because women who deal with untreated medical problems are more likely to miss the work and take on daily tasks. This not only affects your income, but also burdens your families financially, especially in rural areas. The cultural stigma in relation to the health of women, in particular reproductive pain, continues to discourage it from the search for treatment and worsens the economic tribute. The gap between the sexes has significant economic and social consequences.
Women from marginalized group dalite, adivasi and groups with a low income-sind most affected from the differences in pain treatment. These women are often exposed to systematic barriers in the health system, which leads to untreated pain and chronic health problems. As a result, their ability to maintain their families and contribute to their communities is severely impaired.
Gender pain is not unique in India. For example, black women in the United States also suffer from gender -specific neglect in medical environments. These global differences reflect a deeply rooted systematic problem that is directly connected to the social and economic reputation of women, especially in marginalized communities. In the future, immediate measures will be needed to build up a health system that all women treated fairly.
Moved towards equity: address the gender pain gap
The confrontation of gender pain gaps not only requires individual awareness, but also systematic change. We need a reprogramming of medical training from gender -sensitive training to the financing of research that focuses on women’s autonomy in order to close this gap. In India, this means to strengthen the public health system, to train providers in the sensitivity of the gender and the caste and to create strict systems in order to deal with unjust pain treatment.
Political reforms must match the advocacy of the base. We need strong public health care, gender -sensitive training and a real accountability to close the gap between sex pain so that a woman’s pain is released, no matter where she lives or who she is.
We have to adopt intersectional pain models worldwide and treat as human law as human law. The first step towards justice is to recognize all pain regardless of gender, breed or class.
Juhi Sanduja is an editorial intern at Feminism in India (FII). It is passionate about intersectional feminism, with a great interest in documenting resistance, feminist stories and identity questions. Previously, she was as a research intern in Delhi in the Center for Political Research and Governance (CPRG), Delhi. She is currently studying English literature and French and is particularly interested in how feminist thinking can influence public order and drive advantage of social change.
