Gender Role Expectations in the Context of Pain: What is the Role of Socioeconomic Status?

Abstract

Chronic pain has a significant impact on the overall population but does not impact all people equally. More vulnerable groups, such as women or individuals with a lower socioeconomic status (SES) revealed a higher burden of chronic pain. Gender role expectations and similar conceptualizations related to SES do not fully explain the differences in pain experiences and assessments with the literature showing incongruent results. Thus, intersectionality emerges as a valuable tool to promote the knowledge of health inequalities, by examining how multiple psychosocial factors interact to shape and influence human experience. This study aims to understand how socioeconomic status (SES) influences gender role expectations in the context of chronic pain, i.e., whether gender role expectations are different for women and men from various SES. Two-hundred and twenty-two adults (56.6% women), with an average age of 37.4 years ( SD = 14.1) were asked to imagine a (wo)men of low/medium/high SES and to imagine that persons pain. An experimental design was used to investigate the influence of an imagined persons SES on gender role expectations regarding: (a) sensitivity; (b) tolerance; and (c) willingness to express pain. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) concluded that there was a triple interaction effect between sex and SES of the person imagined and participants sex on pain tolerance, but not on sensitivity or willingness to express pain. Multiple comparison tests revealed that female tend to perceive people from lower SES as more tolerant to pain, independently of their sex, since they imagined women of medium SES and men of low SES with greater pain tolerance than imagined women and men of high SES, respectively. In opposition, male participants imagined women of every SES with the same level of pain tolerance, as well as all men with the same level of pain tolerance. However, male participants attributed different levels of pain tolerance to imagined people in the high SES condition, where the imagined woman was perceived as more tolerant of pain. These findings allow us to better understand the influence of SES on gender role expectations in the context of chronic pain.