Effects of Gender Differences on Expressing Pain

The present paper aims to investigate the role of language and gender in expressing pain. Pain is usually described as a personal subjective experience and sometimes it is believed that language is the only device to access this personal experience. Besides, considering physiological, psychological and social differences between men and women, gender affects the expression of pain. In this paper, I will investigate if men and women express their pain differently. To investigate this, 31 men and 31 women were asked to write one paragraph about a painful experience they had in the past. Qualitative analysis of the data (using MaxQda software and considering sensory, affective, evaluative dimensions of pain in McGill pain questionnaire) showed that although men and women’s texts had equal number of words, women’s texts had more coded segments. This implies that women describe their pain in more details. Both men and women expressed the affective dimension of their pain, but women expressed more emotions and described their pain more severely. As for the sensory dimension, men had more coded segments only for this category, but for other dimensions women rated higher. The results of the t-test tells that the difference between men and women in expressing the affective and evaluative dimensions of pain is significant while for other dimensions is not.  Knowing about these gender differences in expressing pain can be beneficial to medical practitioners.