WHO HURTS MORE?! Men vs Women Pain Tolerance

Full animated episode, 8:02. Published 2026-11-05.

Men vs women pain tolerance: who really hurts more? In lab tests women on average feel pain at lower levels, but women also get more pain, more often, and get believed less.

Watch next: What If You Were the LAST Woman on Earth? https://youtu.be/9BA8lYRTYfY

Male vs female pain, explained by the two crews running each body: his has one big red OW button, hers has 12 screens and a filing cabinet. Real science, every claim sourced. So who really has it worse?

0:00 Men vs women pain tolerance

0:26 His pain HQ vs her pain HQ

1:10 Who has higher pain tolerance in lab tests?

1:55 Why men and women feel pain differently

2:39 Is man flu real?

3:34 How bad is period pain?

4:16 Kidney stone vs childbirth

5:04 How the brain can mute pain

5:41 Whose pain gets believed?

6:28 Two lab tricks that cut pain

6:57 The verdict: who has it worse?

Transcript

Two people walk into the same coffee table. Same little toe. Same speed. Same bang. Him... and her. But inside their heads, two very different crews get the message. So who really has it worse when it hurts? Let's open them up. On the left, his pain department. One room. One guy, Steve. One giant red button that says 'OW'.

The toe message arrives, Steve slams the button, the whole body hops around the kitchen... and ten minutes later Steve is back on his sandwich. On the right, her pain department. Twelve screens. Four desks. And Ruth from Records, who files today's toe right next to every other toe since two thousand nine. Same signal.

Very different paperwork. Of course, these crews are a cartoon. The real science is stranger. Scientists have tested pain for decades, with heat, ice water and gentle pressure, on volunteers who signed up for it. In nineteen ninety-eight, researchers pooled a pile of these studies. On average, women felt pain at lower levels, and stopped the test sooner.

Not by a mile. But clearly. Case closed? Not quite. In nineteen ninety-one, a small ice-water study found that men reported less pain when the person running the test was a woman. Steve, it turns out, has a second button. It says 'Act cool.' And the two crews might not even use the same messengers.

In twenty fifteen, a team in Montreal studied long-lasting pain in mice. In males, the pain alarm ran through immune cells called microglia. Block them, and the pain faded. In females, the same trick did nothing, because the message used a different crew: T cells. Then the twist. Give the female mice testosterone, and they switched to the male route.

That's mice, not people. But it means a painkiller tested only on males could miss half the crew. Which brings us to the most famous male medical condition in history. Man flu. In twenty seventeen, a Canadian doctor reviewed the evidence in the British Medical Journal. Some studies found men were more likely than women to end up in hospital with flu.

In mice, females fought the virus off harder. And testosterone may turn the immune system down a notch, while estrogen may turn it up. So when Steve lies on the sofa, dictating his final words... he might have a point. A small one. The paper ran in the journal's Christmas issue, and the author admitted parts were tongue-in-cheek.

But the question was real. Team Steve or team Ruth? Subscribing is how the next one finds you. Over on the right page, Ruth's team gets a monthly delivery. In surveys, about seven to nine in ten young women get period pain, and for some it's severe. Migraine, a headache that can knock you flat for a day, is about three times more common in women, and the gap mostly opens after puberty, when the hormone desks switch on.

Add it all up, and in a big US survey in twenty twenty-three, about one in four women lived with chronic pain. For men, a little lower. The right page simply has more pain to file. But the left page has a monster of its own. The kidney stone. A hard little crystal, often about the size of a grain of rice, squeezing through a very narrow tube.

In the US, about one man in ten gets one in his lifetime, more than women. And in twenty seventeen, doctors in the UK asked women who had been through both a kidney stone and childbirth: which hurt more? Most of them said the stone. The men were asked to imagine childbirth. Most of them guessed childbirth was worse.

Nobody volunteered to check. And both pages share one secret switch. During World War Two, a doctor named Henry Beecher looked after badly wounded soldiers. About three in four of them didn't ask for morphine. Back home, civilians with similar wounds from surgery asked far more often. His guess: for a soldier, the wound meant a ticket out of the war.

The brain doesn't just measure pain. It decides what the pain means. Steve and Ruth both have a mute button. They just don't know where it is. Here's where it stops being funny. In twenty twenty-four, researchers looked at more than twenty thousand emergency room visits in the US and Israel. Women in pain were less likely than men to get pain medicine, even with the same pain scores, and they stayed about half an hour longer.

Male and female doctors both did it. And Steve's crew has the opposite problem. In surveys, men are more likely to wait, and wait, before seeing a doctor at all. So one page gets doubted by everyone else. The other page doubts itself. Two real tricks from the lab, for both crews. One: in a two thousand nine study, people who were allowed to swear kept their hand in ice water longer.

Two: in twenty fourteen, scientists found lab mice felt less pain when a man was in the room. Not because men are soothing. The mice were stressed by the smell of men's T-shirts. Science is weird. So who really has it worse? Her crew gets more pain, more often, and gets believed less. His crew takes some brutal hits, then pretends nothing happened.

Underneath, it's one blueprint with two settings, and both crews have the same job: keep you alive. So... team his, or team hers? Tell me in the comments. And if you want another big what-if, what would you do as the last woman on Earth? It's right here.

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