Women with painful health conditions, such as endometriosis, are having to “suck it up”, according to a new report by the Women and Equalities Committee. Historically, women's pain has been minimised, dismissed, and, let's face it, totally ignored in medical spaces, from a lack of specialised research into female health conditions to gender stereotypes in GP appointments. It's something that Dr Angela Naef, Chief Research and Development Officer at Reckitt, is determined to change.
Dr Naef, or Angela, is a scientist by trade and manages a team of 6000 people around the world, from researchers in laboratories to medical doctors, who are all working to innovate and deliver superior health and hygiene products for the masses. One such product is Nurofen.
In 2022, Nurofen commissioned groundbreaking research into the gender pain gap, defined as “a phenomenon in which pain in women is more poorly understood and more mistreated compared to pain in men.”
Earlier this year, Nurofen released its third Gender Pain Gap Index Report as part of the See My Pain campaign. It found that a higher number of UK women felt like their pain had been dismissed or ignored in 2024 (62%) than in 2023 (49%) and 2022 (56%). In her forward to the report, Angela writes, “We are still a long way from achieving a level playing field when it comes to women’s experiences of pain treatment.”
“We cannot continue this way,” she continues. “Everyone should have the same experience with pain and should feel confident that they will get a diagnosis and resolution for it, regardless of gender.”
Here, Angela Naef speaks to GLAMOUR about being a woman in STEM, coming up against the “male as default” approach to healthcare, and revolutionising how we think about women's pain, closing the gender pain gap once and for all…
Practical things to help if you have endometriosis.
“My first role model was my mom,” Angela tells me on a chilly December afternoon in central London. As a young girl growing up in California, she remembers how her mother spent many evenings studying for nursing school. Angela recalls pinching one of her mother's books. “I spent hours and hours paging through it and tracing things.” When her mother came to retrieve the book, she realised that her ten-year-old daughter had been poring over her microbiology textbook – a sure sign of things to come.
Fast-forward a decade, Angela is studying chemistry at the University of California. “There's no doubt about it: there is a massive gender imbalance in many STEM fields,” she explains, adding that chemistry, physics, and mathematics are often sorely lacking in female representation. When she achieved a PhD in physical chemistry, she was part of a small graduating class. “There were other women with me, but we were the minority,” she explains. This wasn't the last time she experienced a gender imbalance in her career.
Throughout Angela's journey from PhD grad to one of the most senior leaders at Reckitt, she has advocated for honest conversations about women's health – even when she's been the only woman in the room.
“I’d been around many tables where I was the only woman where I had to say, but you all know that women have menstrual cycles, right? Or you all know that women have breasts and breasts require different PPE?”
She continues, “Things are getting better, but I've absolutely been in those meetings where we had been talking about women's issues, and I was the only woman at this table. I've even had that sense where I was like, ‘Anybody want to ask me – a woman – anything?’"
Fertility has been put above my quality of life.
The Women's Health Strategy, a ten-year plan created by the previous Conservative government to improve women's health outcomes, identified a “male-as-default” approach within research and clinical trials. This means that far less is known about conditions that predominately impact women, such as endometriosis, adenomyosis, and perimenopause.
As Angela explains, “Women are physiologically and technically more complicated, more complex. We have more parts to us…”
“The menstrual cycle creates all sorts of very interesting differences at a very high frequency,” she continues. “And so you have all of this cyclicality to the female existence. As a scientist, that's difficult to deal with because you go, ‘Wait a minute, where am I in that cycle, and how do I think about variables from a scientific perspective?’ So there's been a systemic issue in clinical research for decades of saying that's just too difficult to deal with.”
This, Angela argues, results in a “massive gap in medical research and scientific understanding of what it means to have female physiology”. There is, however, cause for celebration.
“It's changing in a really meaningful way,” says Angela. “The conversation has turned into action. At Reckitt, we do clinical trials and tons and tons of research. We're committed to ensuring that our clinical trials have the appropriate gender balance and the appropriate representation to make sure that the outcomes are going to drive the best possible treatment, interventions and care for these precious consumers who are counting on us.”
Endometriosis is a debilitating condition that affects 1 in 10 women and those assigned female at birth.
Our conversation frequently returns to women's pain; how do we articulate our pain without shame? How can we advocate for ourselves in medical settings? How do we ensure that our voices are heard by those who seem determined not to listen? I bring up the example of a TikTok I've recently seen, in which a woman spoke about how she eschewed pain relief during menstruation to see how much pain she could endure – out of sheer curiosity. Women have an interesting relationship with pain, don't they?
Angela is clear that pain relief, specifically in women's reproductive healthcare, is a matter of choice. “If you choose not to take [pain relief], that's fine, but we want these choices to be well-informed, well-educated and not be dismissed by healthcare professionals,” she explains. “We also want those healthcare professionals to have what they need to do their jobs effectively and to lean into a conversation. So, we want to be part of helping to engage them in a way that creates choice.”
Nurofen's Gender Pain Gap Index Report shows that 1 in 2 women feel their pain was dismissed because of their gender. This research inspired the creation of the Pain Pass, a free tool designed to help women tackle bias and have constructive conversations with healthcare professionals.
“The idea of the Pain Pass was about providing women with a tracking tool. How is my pain? What is it? How do I talk about it in a way that would help me be heard? Because we know we're not being heard. Being able to go to your pharmacist or doctor and talk about your symptoms in a way that helps dimensionalise pain better so that they can seek the appropriate treatment.”
“We have a whole program now where we talk about the gender pain gap as part of the education of emerging medical professionals,” Angela continues. "If you're going to choose to be leading in consumer healthcare, you have to take the responsibility to know where it's going to matter.”
She adds, "Empowering people to take control of their own healthcare is a broader position that Reckitt has across all our health products. This idea of self-care and health begins at home, and we try to enable people through education and through products, that they can take care of their own health and look after themselves
“We know that women's pain is disproportionately dismissed. Once you accept that, you can do something about it.” And if Angela's track record is anything to go by, we should all be following her lead.
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
Medical misogyny reigns supreme.
