Females process pain differently, but search for pain medication still based on hypotheses drawn from work in males It is increasingly clear that male and female humans and rodents process pain in different ways. Despite this fact, according to a review paper from McGill University published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, most pain research remains overwhelmingly based on the study of male rodents, continuing to test hypotheses derived from earlier experiments on males. Jeffrey Mogil was the principal investigator on a 2014 Brain Canada Team Grant that studied sex differences in pain.