I'll focus my remarks on something that Sioned Williams has mentioned: the normalisation of pain for women in medical procedures and the ways in which girls and women are brought up to expect and tolerate discomfort as part of their daily lives. Perhaps most worryingly, when women complain about experiencing pain, as we've heard, there's ample research to suggest that they are routinely ignored or not taken as seriously as men in medical settings. In January, the cross-party group on women's health held a discussion about pain experienced in gynaecological out-patient settings, and, Llywydd, we heard truly harrowing stories about how some women feel they can't complain when they're in pain. We heard about a resistance amongst some practitioners to introducing more widespread pain relief and about a disconnect between patients and clinicians in terms of how they estimate pain.

On this question in terms of how we estimate pain, the disconnect seems to come about because women and girls are very often told that a level of discomfort will be something like period pain, and there's a significant problem here because period pain will be drastically different for different individuals, and the assumption that period pain will be a constant will mean that some clinicians either give patients an unrealistically low expectation about the kind of pain they should expect or they don't understand how some women's bodies work. And why should women be expected as a matter of course to tolerate pain similar to period pain? Why should there be an assumption that women's tolerance for pain will be higher because of childbirth? Why should that be normal?

Our motion talks about the cost of women's health. The monetary cost is well rehearsed: sanitary products that until relatively awfully recently were taxed as luxuries; over-the-counter pain medication. But, again, what about mental health? It's been mentioned already, the mental health impact of a failure to acknowledge women's health issues, the cost to society and the economy of sustaining a taboo, a veil of shame when it comes to talking about some conditions. How many women feel that they can't tell their employer that they can't go into work because their period pains are debilitating? How many women suffer in silence or can't tell their colleagues that they've had a miscarriage and that they need time off to get over it? How many women are summoned by HR to explain why their sickness record is so long, when, in fact, they're going through the menopause? Society both normalises women's pain and expects us to shut it away, not to mention it, not to consider it as appropriate for polite conversation. That is a double injustice, an intensified injury and a wrong that's wrought upon women.

Now, research suggests that women in acute pain go longer without being treated in hospitals than men suffering from similar conditions. They're also, as we've heard, more likely to be misdiagnosed with mental health problems and given anti-anxiety medication rather than having their pain or the cause of that pain treated. The tendency to dismiss women's pain is rooted in a centuries-old bias. The words for hysterectomy and hysteria have the same root, and this medieval notion that women were made mad or unbalanced because of their wombs, that still has aftershocks today—an ancient, outdated prejudice upheld by modern medical practices.

Chronic pain conditions that affect women, like fibromyalgia and endometriosis, are treated with a lack of seriousness and urgency. Women wait longer to receive pain medication; they face longer waits before being diagnosed with cancer; they're less likely to receive CPR because their symptoms are so often ignored or dismissed. And this isn't just a cognitive bias that we're battling; it's the fact that textbooks tend to focus on the male anatomy. The norm is always male, and not enough funding is put into conditions that affect women. These failures, Llywydd, result in unacceptable numbers of women dying, and before that, horrendously high numbers of women thinking that the level of pain they're going through is normal when it isn't. That's the cost of a lack of attention to women's health: you can count it in bodies or prescription scripts.

So, in closing, Llywydd, instead of normalising women's pain, we should be normalising talking about how we experience pain, talking about gynaecological conditions, improving training, because this gender pain gap has to be closed once and for all.