The headline is broadly defensible, but the qualifications matter. Effect sizes vary by population, the strongest claims rest on shorter trials, and credible voices push back on how it's typically framed.
Meaning the individual variability within men and within women is much greater than the difference between men and women. There's plenty of women on that curve that have much greater heat thresholds than men do. But when you pool things, you end up with that difference.
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Native comments, Twitter mentions, and Reddit threads about this claim — surfaced together so the conversation isn't fragmented across platforms.
Bookmarking — the dossier-vs-overview split is the right call. Most of the time I want overview; sometimes I want receipts.
Would love a "what would change this verdict" RSS feed. Sign me up if it exists.
One is in general, men have higher pain thresholds to things like heat stimulus than women. And what people have to also, though, understand, as scientists, we make a big deal out of small differences. What we do is we take a group of people, in this case, men and women, and we apply the same thermal stimulus to them. And we draw averages. The average man has this stimulus. The average woman has this stimulus. And we say, well, women have a little bit more sensitivity to that heat stimulus. And so we then go into the press and we say, men are tougher than women. That's a terrible statement.