Researchers claim adults do not take girls' pain seriously

Researchers at Yale have found adults don't take girls' pain as seriously as they do boys. The team warns gender stereotypes can be harmful to children.

For the study, a group of American adults had to watch a video of a five-year-old child receiving a finger-stick during a doctor's visit. They were then asked to rate the level of pain the child was experiencing. Even though they all watched an identical video of the same child exhibiting the same behaviour, one group knew the child as "Samuel", while the other as "Samantha". The group that identified the child as a boy reported he was in more pain than the group who identified the child as a girl.

Based on their findings, researchers believe this notion of minimising the pain of girls may be culturally ingrained or down to myths, like "girls are more emotive", which is not scientifically proven. Previous research has conducted studies on gender stereotyping and biased clinical assessment of pain. However, they have only been done on adults, not on a pediatric level.

"We really hope that these findings will lead to further investigation into the potential role of biases in pain assessment and health care more generally," study author Joshua Monrad, told a news portal. Adding, "If the phenomena that we observed in our studies generalise to other contexts, it would have important implications for diagnosis and treatment. Any biases in judgments about pain would be hugely important because they can exacerbate inequitable health care provision."