“Pain Is Not Just Physical. It’s Personal”: McCann and Nurofen’s Fight for Women to Be Heard
In November 2022, McCann and Nurofen (Reckitt) launched the platform ‘See My Pain’, pledging to ensure all pain is taken as seriously as it deserves to be - particularly for women. According to research conducted by Nurofen, one in six women experience severe pain everyday, yet their suffering often goes unseen and is mistreated due to a traditional ‘male as default’ prejudice in medical research and ingrained societal biases that they are somehow ‘making a fuss’ or being overly emotional. This has led to the phenomenon of the gender pain gap, where women are less likely to have their pain taken seriously, understood and treated effectively than men.
The ‘See My Pain’ platform began with the release of the Nurofen Gender Pain Gap Index Report, designed to highlight the scale of the problem and serve as a launchpad for Nurofen’s commitment to close the Gender Pay Gap. The following year, McCann London brought out the ‘Fake Products’ campaign, launching a series of medicine bottles with labels featuring comments such as ‘Maybe You’re Stressed’ and ‘It’s All In Your Head’ to demonstrate the dismissiveness women often face when they seek medical explanations for their chronic pain. Other campaigns from the past few years include the ‘Pain Pass’ digital tool (designed to help women document their pain and aid more constructive conversations with their doctor), the Giant Pill Pack and the ‘Pain Pledge’, an initiative dedicated to helping employees navigate their pain in the workplace. These ground breaking efforts saw the campaign win multiple awards at the Effies 2025.
‘Pain Game’ marks the next phase of the campaign, as it draws on insights from Nurofen and McCann’s research to recreate how too many women are still fighting to have their pain taken seriously. The board game structure shows how for women, the battle to be heard is very much dictated by luck, with unfair setbacks constantly threatening their access to effective treatment. Cards with offhand comments like ‘You’re just stressed’ or ‘You’re being emotional’ force the players to take several steps back on the board, while the complicated winding path to the end reinforces how needlessly difficult it can be to navigate the healthcare system. The campaign was informed by sobering findings from Nurofen’s Gender Pain Gap report that one in two women felt their pain was dismissed or ignored because of their gender.
McCann London’s strategy partner Jocelyn Major and Reckitt’s marketing director for Northern Europe David Shillcock spoke to LBB’s Cathy Meyer-Funnell about their latest campaign, the real-world impact the platform is having and their aims for the future.
LBB> How did the relationship between McCann and Nurofen begin?
Jocelyn> McCann and Nurofen have had a really long-standing relationship, it was probably 2020 or 2021 when we came to this. For decades, Nurofen had been the category leader, it was a brand that built itself on talking about fast fixes and how it was faster than others in the category and that was really what brought the brand success. It was hugely important to who Nurofen was. But by 2020, it was really hard to position Nurofen as the leader when everyone else was starting to say the same things. So, there was a huge piece of research commissioned to look at what was actually driving the category and identify the gaps in the category that no one was addressing. And something really interesting emerged from the research, which was that people felt like their pain wasn't being understood. It does make sense: pain is something that is physical but it's also something that is incredibly personal; it's incredibly emotional and people felt brands just didn't understand that side of pain.
We found that actually, for women, this was an even more heightened issue. We started to see that over time this was an audience who felt their pain was being ignored, it was being gaslit, they were hearing comments such as “It's all in your head” or “You're being emotional”. It was at that point we took a step back and realised that Nurofen is this incredible organisation with decades of research into understanding people's pain. It's an organisation that innovates in people's pain and actually has also been doing gender equal testing for quite a long time. So, it felt like this was a cause that was really tied to the DNA of Nurofen.
LBB> What was the strategy behind structuring women’s pain dismissal as playing a game in the latest campaign?
Jocelyn> This marked a shift from the first phase of the campaign, which was all about raising awareness of women's pain dismissals and this incredible insight that women's pain was being overlooked, dismissed, gaslit by not just the medical system, but society all across the UK. We had a really interesting creative device which was all about turning real women's pain dismissals into these fake medical packs for everyone to see. It was incredibly provocative. We used it in all of our communications. For the second phase of the campaign, something we really wanted to make sure we did was not just tell people about the issue but really make them feel it as well. Just telling people something isn't enough to shift the cultural narrative around it, it’s not enough to make them rethink their biases. So, in order to genuinely start to make people rethink how women's pain is treated, we wanted to put them in women's shoes and we wanted to force them into an environment that felt really immersive to really help them to understand the frustration and anger women feel – as they can feel trapped in an endless cycle of dismissals. And there were some incredible quotes when we went into the research, such as “When I'm trying to get a diagnosis from my pain, it feels like one step forward, two steps back”.
For the second phase, we also focused more on how women internalise a lot of that bias themselves. One woman we found had actually started to doubt her own pain and started to feel like she was going insane and it was that frustration across that incredible long never-ending journey that we really wanted to capture and distil into an experience that made people understand it.
LBB> Thankfully, there have been some steps taken in the right direction, but how do you think we can close the gender pain gap and allow all women to have their pain taken seriously?
David> A lot of these biases are truly embedded in culture, so I think there's a more faceted platform that we put behind this. The first rumbles drive awareness and make sure that this is visible over time. A lot of the commitments we've made is the commissioning of the Nurofen Gender Pain Gap Report to really measure and understand how dismissals are impacting women's life and help them navigate the programmes and partnerships we’ve put in place to drive that. We’ve been working with Plan International UK around their period pain programme and focussing on menstrual education. From a lot of the research, we saw about a third of dismissals actually happen to girls and women under the age of 21. But again, we have to measure that year-on-year so we're constantly on a drum beat every single year to hold ourselves and our partners accountable. The report also revealed the importance of engaging the healthcare professional ecosystem as well. That's where a lot of women were saying that they were experiencing their pain dismissals. So again, how do we actually invest in training and education for healthcare professionals so they can identify and overcome biases as well. We've been working with the Royal College of General Practitioners and our retail partners, such as Boots and Tesco , to really educate their pharmacists. Recent government reports on women’s healthcare have provocatively talked about misogyny in the ecosystem, so we're seeing a lot of awareness significantly start to increase around pain dismissal in multiple areas.
Jocelyn> This bias has been built over centuries and is rooted in every single layer of society. Nurofen has made a genuine commitment to tackle this at every layer – from empowering individuals to providing research tools and training that have been so absent in the medical system; changing the cultural narrative and even going to the EU parliament in the last few years. It's something that requires every single lever to move.
LBB> Was there anything from your research on this topic that really surprised you?
Jocelyn> One of the things that stood out is the sheer scale of this, because there's a lot of women on our team who have experienced this as well. We didn’t expect it to be so widespread and pervasive within society. The second thing was the emotional and psychological impact it has on women and the fact that when you are dismissed over years and years, you start to almost believe those dismissals yourself. A lot of the women we spoke to thought they were going mad, they doubted their own pain, they struggled to speak up because they didn't know whether to trust themselves anymore. With conditions like endometriosis, women sometimes wait 10 years struggling their way through the medical system for a diagnosis. And increasingly, they're going to unvetted platforms. They're asking ChatGPT, and there's so much danger and risk in that, that they're not getting the advice and diagnosis they need; and it's actually perpetuating the problem too. It's becoming a really fragmented and complex system for women to navigate, full of bias.
One of the other things that stood out to me was just how little we still know about women's pain in general. This is changing now, but back when we originally looked at it, about 80% of pain studies historically have been done on men. There's just this huge gap where we don't know as much about women's pain as we do about men's pain. So, it's no wonder that there's all of these biases. Until we get the knowledge base up to a certain level, it's going to be almost impossible to support women in that journey to diagnosis.
David> AI is now playing a much greater role in how we’re trying to navigate the system. From a brand point of view, how do we actually help or put useful tools in place? What we're really focused on as part of this new campaign is providing access to tools that can help women have constructive, supportive conversations with GPs that are documented and quantified as well. We have the Nurofen Pain Pass, giving women a way to document and navigate what they're tracking, how they can articulate the pain, just to make sure they can go into conversations equipped with quite a lot of data and understanding.
LBB> What has the real-life impact of this campaign been so far?
David> There’s a couple of key points. Originally the first launch of the campaign was to drive awareness of pain dismissal. The great thing is the awareness of the existence of a gender pain gap - in the latest report back in 2024, we were seeing 21% awareness of this. It's a good first step of awareness, but it also shows the scale and longevity that this campaign needs to drive in order to get up to that critical mass. The next evolution of the campaign is how to actually drive greater change. What we're seeing is across the three years since our first report, the gender pain gap is still there. What we're seeing is probably an average gap of about 7% across the three years. So there's still a lot of work to be done.
Jocelyn> It's worth noting that that 21% figure is up from 15% in the first year of the campaign. It is shifting in a really positive direction. There’s a shift in narrative among healthcare professionals and they're not actively biased against women's pain. This is an unconscious bias that is society-wide. Healthcare professionals, more broadly, are beginning to realise that they have those biases in place and there's been really positive conversations within the medical industry about what needs to change.
LBB> What’s coming next for the campaign?
David> We've gone into our second phase . This journey is multi-year, at least over the next 12 months it's really moving into showing the impact, but also giving very pragmatic tools that women can lean on and use to help navigate this journey.
Jocelyn> We always knew right from the start of this that we're taking on a problem that is born out of centuries of bias within the medical industry and society. It was always intended to be something that was a long-term commitment to move those things in a way that is not going to happen overnight. Nurofen has been committed since the beginning to really clear actions behind the scenes. The next iteration of that will be how to live in culture and try to change the cultural narrative.
