Who handles pain better—men or women? There’s a clear answer to this question.

However, according to scientists, the answer may lie not only in biology: they have found that stress, childhood trauma, depression, and anxiety can also intensify pain, says Jeffrey Mogil, a professor of psychology at McGill University. It has been discovered that all four factors are more prevalent in women than in men. This demonstrates that the pain threshold in women is indeed lower.

The biological processing of pain, regardless of its intensity, significantly varies by gender. Different genes, proteins, and cell types are utilized in both sexes, resulting in fundamentally different biology in each case.