Women’s Pain Is Being Dismissed – Here’s How McCann and Nurofen Are Fighting Back

“It’s just a period!” “Your pain is normal.” “Maybe you’re stressed?” 

These are just some of the dismissals women in pain are offered by healthcare professionals, in lieu of actual medical treatment. 

We make up half the population, yet half of women feel that their pain has been dismissed because of their gender. We wait longer for diagnoses even when reporting the same pain as men; one in ten of us has been described as ‘overly emotional’ by our GPs; and nearly one fifth as ‘overly dramatic’.

Reckitt pain-relief brand Nurofen and McCann London have dubbed this the ‘gender pain gap’: “the phenomenon in which pain in women is more poorly understood and more mistreated compared to pain in men due to systemic gaps and biases.” 

To combat it, they’ve built the ‘See My Pain’ brand platform – which recently earned them an IPA Effectiveness Award and two Effie shortlists. Milestones so far include the launch of Nurofen’s annual Gender Pain Gap Index Report, investigating and monitoring the issue’s progression, as well as the PAIN PASS, a free tool equipping women with the language they need to get the right support, diagnosis and treatment.

Above: Nurofen’s ‘See My Pain’ installation in Newcastle

The most recent iteration of ‘See My Pain’ took to the streets to force people to stop and pay attention. A 13x22 foot pill pack emblazoned with real women’s pain dismissals landed in the heart of Newcastle, while an all-female crew invited vox pops from passers-by, empowering women to share their own harrowing experiences of medical sexism.

It’s an extremely important initiative and there’s more to come. LBB’s Zara Naseer sat down with McCann London creatives Ran Stallard and Amanda Devarajan to dive into the campaign strategy, and how the agency has been elevating its female talent through its Ambition Collective.

Above (left to right): McCann London creatives, Amanda Devarajan and Ran Stallard

LBB> You’ve been collaborating with Nurofen on its 'See My Pain' platform since 2022. Can you give us a brief overview of how that came about and the insights you’ve been working from?

Ran> For the agency and the brand, it kind of all began by speaking to real women and hearing first hand those really shocking dismissals that they experience in their everyday lives when they go to the doctor. So women experience more types of pain more often than men, but they're often gaslit by the medical profession and told they’re just being emotional, to man up, it's just a period, it's all in their heads… 

Amanda> Then the two of us started getting involved through Ambition Collective, a Europe-wide McCann initiative to elevate female talent in the industry. Brands can put out a brief for women from all over the network to answer, and Nurofen was the very first client to be a part of it. Ran and I were one of the creative teams that answered to the ‘See My Pain’ brief, and our ideas got into the finals. It felt like a natural fit for us, especially since we are both young females who bring in fresh perspectives and it’s a topic that resonates with us. We've been working from the insight that one in two women feel their pain has been dismissed because of their gender, which is crazy. But it's nice how, by McCann elevating our voices, we actually help elevate the voices of women. It comes full circle.

Ran> Nurofen has actually invested millions into researching the gender pain gap, which is the name given to this massive problem. They've explored unconscious biases in the medical industry through research partnerships with Oxford and Imperial universities, and they also run an annual Gender Pain Gap Index Report, which explores the physical and emotional impact of pain and its dismissal actually has on women's lives. 

Amanda> Some amazing stats and lived experiences have come from that, like the fact that one in six women live with severe pain every day. We're really proud to be working for a brand that is actually doing something, by making a campaign like this, and by producing a report.

LBB> Why was a larger-than-life, 13x22 feet pill packet the next evolution? How did that idea come about? 

Amanda> This year, we really wanted to hear the voices of women whose pain has been dismissed. We wanted them to be the centre of the campaign and the larger life pack with real life dismissals felt like an unmissable way for people to confront what women face all the time, and that's why we put it out there. We wanted a big PR-able piece that heroed real dismissals, more than anything else,

Ran> The campaign is still in its infancy – it's not like you launch something and suddenly everybody knows about it overnight. You say “gender pain gap” to someone, and a lot of the time they hear “gender pay gap”. Doing something on this massive scale was an important way to get people to take notice, but it also was made to represent the scale of the problem.

LBB> Why was out of home the right media channel?

Amanda> This is all about real women, so we wanted it to be in a space where we could talk to them. A big PR stunt felt like the right thing to do, because it felt like a natural way to engage women directly. The gender pain gap is still hardly talked about, so this felt like the right channel to make as much noise as possible.

Ran> Whilst this was activated through out of home, it’s part of a bigger campaign which is going to span TV, social and print. But it was the right time to get out there and speak to the public and interact with them, as it’s an issue that so many women can relate to, but it's not often talked about. The billboard was also used as this place to interview real women on the street, and we wanted to capture their reactions either learning about this issue for the first time or actually, as many did, sharing their own experiences. That footage we captured was incredibly powerful. It was really emotional to hear it firsthand, and we're hoping that we'll reach many, many people through it.

LBB> With the vox pops you collected, how willing were passers by to share their personal stories with you?

Ran> Surprisingly willing! It's a sensitive issue, and some people don't want to be on camera, but even within half an hour of wearing a Nurofen branded jacket, I had three or four women come up to me and just want to talk and share their stories. People were saying, “Thank you for doing this” – you can't really ask for a bigger reward when you work on this kind of project. It was really powerful.

Amanda> You'll be surprised how passionate women are when they talk about it. There were so many women that were really well educated, and you could tell that they knew everything about the gender pain gap, but they just couldn't do anything about it. And this is where they lean on us to get their voices out. They felt like they were part of something bigger. Also, for this part of the campaign we had pretty much an all-female team, especially on the activation day. So everyone collecting vox pops was female, which we thought was the best way to approach it because women naturally open up to other women. 

Ran> It was really important to make that safe space for women to talk about really sensitive issues. And it was a really cool symbol of women supporting women, which was great to be a part of.

LBB> Can you tell us a bit about the visual design?

Ran> We used the symbol of a pack of pills because we wanted to highlight the real dismissals that women are being given rather than treatment. So a pill packet is a quick visual shorthand that takes you into the healthcare space and can be used to highlight the problem. Having a digital screen on our label allowed us to cycle through those countless real dismissals that we collected from women around the UK. That made the whole thing very personal. 

Amanda> One of the important things was to make it look as close to a prescription pack as possible. So whether it was considering the font, the graphic elements, we wanted it to be a clear visual link that women in pain are prescribed dismissals rather than proper treatment, so we need that to be registered quite quickly.

LBB> How did you select the location for the installation? 

Amanda> It was a very strategic location. It was near a hospital, which is where women will be seeking treatment and where we could easily resonate and speak to women where it counts most.

Ran> We also wanted to be representative of women all across the country, and to keep this out of where it might be more expected. London is often the default for these activations, but Newcastle is such a beautiful city, and it really allowed us this great location where we could speak to many locals, on the one hand, but also quite a big international community.

LBB> What was the main audience you were hoping to reach? Is it primarily targeted at women or the public in general?

Amanda> Mostly women who have experienced dismissals in their lives, and who have felt isolated in their pain journey. This is about standing and supporting them, so that their pain is believed and treated with empathy. 

Ran> This was very much about making the women going through it feel less alone. We wanted them to know that their pain is real and deserves to be seen. It is a nice bonus to be raising awareness with men too, because the truth is, we can't close the gender pain gap with women alone.

LBB> What was the biggest challenge you faced in bringing this installation to life? How did you overcome it?

Amanda> There's the natural factor of it being in real life. We had to consider things like rain, materials, elevation, all the things that have to do with being there. But something equally challenging was going through the amount of dismissals. They are honestly heart-wrenching, and we had so many of them… no one prepares you for that. But it's what makes up the core of the campaign. It needed to be done in the best way possible, to give these women the space they deserve to talk about their pain.

Ran> Working with Reckitt, which is a fantastic client, you do have to be very responsible and careful as with any pharma brand. So we have lots of partners we work with closely like medical, legal, PR, basically so that we're able to assist and answer any questions we might get. It was important that we had the right medical support there at the activation and the shoot. This is real women's lives, and it's a very emotional and sensitive topic. You've got that responsibility, and we wanted to make sure that it was handled really, really well.

LBB> How are you measuring the effectiveness of the installation and the broader brand platform?

Ran> Reckitt has a pretty rigorous approach to effectiveness, and we've seen 'See My Pain' deliver incredible results for society and the brand, including the Effie that the agency won. 

We’re monitoring real women's responses to the campaign, working with Kantar to understand if the campaign is actually connecting and emotionally resonating with women. We’re tracking responses in social media – I think we’ve seen a 218% increase in mentions of the gender pain gap, and 98% of sentiment on social media has been positive. Reckitt also uses econometric modelling to prove that ‘See My Pain’ is delivering a greater increase in sales than product communications alone. And there’s the annual Gender Pain Gap Index Report to monitor the changes in women's pain dismissals and the size of the gender pain gap over time. I think it's really important to be able to track it and check the progress, because that is the ultimate goal, beyond anything else.

Amanda> What makes us really proud to work on a brand like Reckitt is that it’s not just about creating awareness for the campaign. It's really nice when that awareness is directly linked to sales, and that is something they've tracked before and are still tracking now. Because of that, we’re being empowered to make better work all the time, because there’s that direct link to how it performs for them.

LBB> Finally, what’s the most shocking thing you’ve learnt since working on the 'See My Pain' platform that you wish more people knew?

Amanda> The most shocking thing for me was that I didn't even know that my pain had been dismissed multiple times before in my life – that's how normalised pain dismissals have become. So whether it's your period pain or extreme bleeding, we’ve been taught to believe things like that are normal. That’s one of the reasons why women don't have the confidence to speak about their pain. Everyone that I've talked to about this campaign has realised they've been dismissed. It could be any one of us.

Ran> On a similar note for me, it's just how common this is. There are some incredible stats in the Gender Pain Gap Index Report, but by speaking to people for this campaign I learned that nearly everyone has a story or knows someone who has a story. People often don't discuss it in the public sphere, maybe because of shame or embarrassment, or because they just don't feel able to. In some ways, I think of this as almost the next #MeToo movement, and I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg of uncovering and understanding it.