Why Do Women Just Put Up With Pain? The Cost of Being Told It's Normal

If you have ever downplayed your own pain — to a doctor, to your family, even to yourself — you are in vast company. Putting up with discomfort, exhaustion and symptoms that would send many people straight to A&E is something women do quietly, every day, often for years. I did it myself for the best part of a decade before I was finally diagnosed with adenomyosis, a story I have told in full in my own account.

The question worth asking is not "why are women so good at coping?" It is "why do so many women feel they have no choice but to?" The answer turns out to be less about individual willpower and more about a long pattern of women's pain being minimised — both by the systems meant to help, and, over time, by women themselves.

You are not imagining it

Let us start with the most important thing, because so many women quietly wonder it: you are not imagining the sense that your pain is taken less seriously. There is now a well-documented phenomenon researchers call the gender pain gap — the consistent finding that women's pain is more likely to be underestimated, under-treated and attributed to emotional rather than physical causes.

In one UK survey of more than five thousand people, more than half of women — 56% — said they felt their pain had been ignored or dismissed by healthcare professionals. Studies have also found that when men and women describe the very same level of pain, women's pain is often rated as less intense by observers, and women can wait longer for pain relief. None of this means the care women receive is deliberately unkind. It means there is a measurable bias in the system, and recognising it is the first step to working around it.

How women's pain gets normalised

For many women, the training to minimise pain starts young. Period pain is one of the clearest examples. Cramping severe enough to interfere with school, work or sleep is extremely common — and it is also one of the most readily dismissed symptoms there is, waved away as simply "part of being a woman." Yet that same pain can be a signal of conditions such as endometriosis or adenomyosis.

The effect of hearing "that's normal" enough times is that you stop mentioning it. You recalibrate. What would alarm someone experiencing it for the first time becomes, for you, just Tuesday. And because the change is so gradual, you rarely step back to notice how much you are actually carrying. By the time the pain is severe, you have years of practice in treating it as unremarkable — and so does everyone around you.

The most effective way to make a woman stop talking about her pain is to tell her, often enough, that it is normal. Eventually she believes you — and stops mentioning the thing that was quietly taking over her life.

What the evidence actually shows

This is not a vague feeling — it is now documented at the highest levels. In December 2024, a UK parliamentary committee published a report describing what it called "medical misogyny" in women's reproductive healthcare. It found that women with conditions such as endometriosis, adenomyosis and heavy menstrual bleeding frequently have their symptoms "normalised" and their pain "dismissed," and that a lack of awareness among healthcare professionals leaves many undiagnosed for years.

The numbers bear this out. According to Endometriosis UK, it now takes an average of almost nine years — around 8 years and 10 months — to be diagnosed with endometriosis in the UK, and that figure has been getting worse, not better. In the charity's 2024 survey, roughly 60% of those affected had visited their GP more than ten times with symptoms before finally being diagnosed. Ten times. That is not a story about women failing to seek help. It is a story about how hard it can be to be heard when they do.

Why we stay quiet — even when we know something is wrong

The dismissal is only half the picture. The other half is the quiet, internal reasons women stop pushing — and they are worth naming honestly, because they are so widely shared.

Many women are, from girlhood, gently socialised to be accommodating, to not make a fuss, to put others' needs first. Add to that the sheer practical reality of busy lives: the woman who is the default carer for children and often ageing parents, who carries the household's mental load, frequently has no obvious gap in which to be unwell. Taking a symptom seriously means time off, appointments, childcare, and a sense of being a burden — and so it gets quietly deprioritised behind everyone else.

There is also the fear of not being believed. When you have been told once that your pain is normal, it takes real courage to go back a second, third or fourth time. Many women hold back precisely because they dread being seen as dramatic or wasting the doctor's time. The result is a painful loop: the system minimises the pain, the woman internalises the message, and the silence deepens.

What it costs

Putting up with pain is not free, even when it looks like it from the outside. Delayed diagnosis can mean a condition is allowed to progress — endometriosis and adenomyosis can worsen over years, and that delay can have consequences for pain, for fertility and for the eventual treatment required.

There is also the daily cost that rarely gets measured: the careers quietly scaled back, the relationships strained, the exhaustion of functioning while in pain, and the steady erosion of confidence that comes from not being believed. Living in pain that you have been told is normal is its own particular kind of lonely — you cannot fully explain it, and you have half-convinced yourself you shouldn't try.

How to be heard — practical ways to advocate for yourself

None of this is your fault, and the responsibility for fixing the system does not rest on individual women. But while that wider change is happening, there are things that genuinely help you to be taken seriously. Here is what I wish I had known sooner.

Keep a symptom diary. Write down when the pain happens, how severe it is out of ten, how long it lasts, and crucially how it affects your daily life — work missed, sleep lost, things you could not do. A clear, written record is far harder to wave away than "it's quite bad sometimes," and it helps you see the true pattern yourself.

Name the impact, not just the pain. Doctors respond to function. "I am in pain" can be minimised; "I have missed four days of work this month and cannot stand up straight on my worst days" is concrete and harder to dismiss.

Be specific and persistent. Ask directly: "What could be causing this? Can we investigate rather than just manage it? Can I have a scan or a referral?" If you are told it is normal and you do not believe it is, it is entirely reasonable to ask again, to request a second opinion, or to ask for a GP with a special interest in women's health.

Bring someone, or bring notes. Taking a partner or friend to an appointment, or a written list of your symptoms, can make it easier to be heard and harder for your concerns to be brushed aside.

Know that persistence is not making a fuss. Pushing for answers about your own body is not being difficult. It is healthcare. You are allowed to take up space in the system that exists to look after you.

A gentle reframe

If you take one thing from this, let it be this: the fact that you have coped for so long is not evidence that your pain is minor. Often it is the opposite — proof of how much you have quietly carried while being told it was nothing.

Taking your health seriously is not self-indulgent, and it is not a betrayal of all the people who rely on you. It is, in fact, one of the most responsible things you can do for them — because the version of you that is well, heard and properly cared for is the version they need most.

So much of what I now do through JINC grew out of exactly this realisation: that women carry an enormous amount silently — pain, information, responsibility — and that putting it down, and writing it out, is an act of care rather than weakness. If you have spent years quietly coping, perhaps let this be the nudge to ask, again, and to be believed.

• My Adenomyosis Story
• Before My Hysterectomy — How JINC Began
• Hysterectomy Recovery — What Nobody Tells You
• Menopause and the Mental Load
• The Mental Load
• 10 Things Your Partner Should Know