Do women have a higher pain tolerance than men?

When people discuss their experiences of getting tattoos, sustaining sports injuries or giving birth, a question often comes up: Do people of different sexes experience pain differently?

It turns out that, on a cellular level, there do seem to be inherent differences in how males and females process painful stimuli. But the question of which sex — if either — has a higher pain tolerance has a fuzzier answer.

For a person to feel pain, sensory neurons called nociceptors detect painful stimuli and then send a signal to the brain for interpretation. These painful stimuli include extreme temperatures, mechanical pressure and inflammation. People show differences in how they perceive each stimulus, and these differences stem from various factors, including a person's sex. 

Several studies have reported that women have higher pain sensitivity and a lower pain threshold than men. For instance, a 2012 study that examined how men and women respond to physical pressure found that women are more sensitive to mechanical pain than men are. In another study, men and women were asked to indicate when they felt a heat stimulus and judge its intensity. It suggested women have lower pain thresholds to heat than men. 

"It is well known that females are more sensitive to pain than males," said Jeffrey Mogil, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University who studies sex differences in pain. "This has been shown in humans in hundreds of studies; not all of them are statistically significant, but essentially all of them go in the same direction," Mogil told Live Science. 

However, some studies actually show the opposite. 

Related: Do women get cold more easily than men?