‘Women with chronic pain’: a diachronic corpus-assisted analysis of the gender pain gap in Australian news (2011–2025)

Even though chronic pain is now recognised as a major public health concern, its gendered representation in news reporting has received little attention. Earlier corpus-assisted studies have revealed asymmetrical tendencies in public health discourse, but less is known about how gendered differentiation persists or evolves in media coverage over time. This study focuses on how gender is discursively attached to pain in Australian news reporting, relying on a diachronic corpus of 1000 news articles (467, 327 words) published between 2011 and 2025. The investigation combines collocational profiling and qualitative analysis informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), linking distributional regularities to clause-level realisations. Gender attribution is operationalised using lexical features in concordance lines in order to compare male-, female- and neutral environments. Statistically salient expressions containing pain are extracted, followed by qualitative analysis of process types, participant roles and evaluative and evidential resources.
The findings show that gendered differentiation is entrenched in recurrent collocational patterns. Pain is typically represented as localised and responsive to intervention in male-associated contexts, with individuals presented as active participants in diagnostic and treatment activities. In female-associated environments, however, pain is more commonly portrayed as longstanding and disruptive, describing personal experience while distributing agency between institutional actors and unresolved processes. Neutral reporting contexts form a discursive baseline in which pain is presented using healthcare terminology, providing a background against which gendered distinctions become apparent. The linguistic evidence shows that routine Australian reporting practices perpetuate an uneven attribution of recognition and agency in depictions of chronic pain.