Price discrimination tends to be worse for women
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The only discrimination going on here is that men are more discriminant on price than women are with broad categories of items. I work with retail data, and I know this is 100% true. Items marketed towards men in the "Consumables" category (deodorant, razors, shampoo, etc) are priced lower than their female counterparts because decades of scientific analysis has shown that men are more likely to shop for these particular products based on price than women are.
In economic terms, depending on the category, men and women have different price elasticity curves.
An interesting twist on this is that certain Men's products within the "Consumables" category are at high price points due to the data showing their respective consumer group to be far less price sensitive, especially with the 18-25 male demographic with hair care products.
This is all data and algorithms talking, not actual discrimination.
Anyone with a son can also point out exactly why boy's underwear costs more than girl's underwear: boys get very excited about underwear with characters on it, so parents are less price sensitive on those products. But according to this story, this is just another form of evil discrimination towards boys wearing underroos.
Source: I help my customers set prices for their product/store combinations using data.
The discrimination occurs when you say "in economic terms" as an excuse to ignore all the other data that people look at when determining what is discriminatory or not. Or maybe when you say "maximum profit" is the goal of your algorithm; it's clearly not the goal of the people determining what is discriminatory, nor is it the goal of society in general.
Not all discrimination is bad, nor is always a problem. But you can't argue that it doesn't exist just by ignoring the variables you don't like or can't see. You can't say "all I see is numbers and price stickers" and think that gives you any credible expertise on quantifying the value of human interaction and culture. Oversimplifying the problem always introduces errors, even if it is necessary.
Part of this problem, though, is the company's fault. To this day I can never make sense out of the "sizes" that appear on women's clothes. My wife's closet has size numbers that vary by 5! We are almost exactly the same size, but my jeans say "30/30", meaning 30" waste, 30" length (at least, that's what I think they mean) and since my weight doesn't ever fluctuate, I have the same size jeans spanning 10 years. Her jeans, same brand, which perfectly fit me (to the point that I mistakenly have worn them) have a single number on them.
I rarely try things on and I don't think I've ever returned clothes because of a bad fit. I've been the same size since High School and I know if I buy a 15 shirt and a 30/30 pair of pants, they'll be within an acceptable margin of error that they'll fit. She can pick out a 4 or a 7 and not have any idea if it's going to fit.
Part of it is the stupid clinging to traditional "dress sizes", the other part is that each clothing maker has their own sizing, and they can be radically different. For an extreme example, go check out a Lane Bryant store at your local mall. A "6" there is definitely not like a "6" at someplace like Express. Of course, LB does this for a reason: they cater exclusively to fat women so they have their own sizing standards.
But still, given how much curvier women's bodies tend to be, it would make sense for the sizing to be more complex, just as men's pants are.
>but my jeans say "30/30", meaning 30" waste
Your jeans have 30" of trash?
Why does nobody step up and fix this problem? (See also: clothes for women with useful sized pockets). Given the amount of complaining I see, I would have thought that somebody releasing a range of sensible clothes in women's sizes would instantly dominate the market...
> Why does nobody step up and fix this problem?
Because its a cross-industry consistency problem [0], so if someone tries to fix it, you've just created yet another set of inconsistent-with-everyone-else sizes.
[0] Lying on top of a "reducing a multidimensional issue to a single variable" problem, sitting astride a "trying to avoid making people buying the product associating the negative body image feelings the fashion industry has deliberately manufactured to create the need for certain products with the products themselves by labeling some of the axes of variation in a clear manner" problem. So, you know, layers of issues...
Some of that is that fit is more complex for women (and sizing less consistent -- which unlike the other part, is a direct result of commercial practice -- compounding the problem.)
That statistic completely ignores experience and numbers of hours worked per week.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/04/16/its-time-tha...
"The wage gap statistic, however, doesn’t compare two similarly situated co-workers of different sexes, working in the same industry, performing the same work, for the same number of hours a day. It merely reflects the median earnings of all men and women classified as full-time workers."
Any time someone trots out the '79 cent for every dollar' canard, their credibility goes to zero. Ie they are either too stupid to properly research the issue or actually intend to obfuscate it.
The real wage gap is about 3% (http://time.com/money/4009768/wage-gap-men-women-equal-pay/). But most of that comes down to choices made by the individuals - hours they work per week, career interruptions, etc.
Nonetheless, that is totally irrelevant to this topic. Regardless of the reasons, women do earn less than men on average. Since the topic here is about spending money (i.e. consumption side), then the amount of income available to a person to spend is absolutely relevant (regardless of the origin of the disparity in income). The reality is that most women are making less than men and yet goods tailored towards them do cost more.
This is one of the rare cases where the old days were better.
The demand/supply curve is different. Maybe parents are willing to spend more on their daughters? Maybe women spend more on consumer goods in general? Who knows, it could be a thousand different things.
Whatever the reason, I doubt there's a conspiracy to charge more for goods because of gender. How does that even work? If the retailer ignores the supply/demand curve they're losing money ... they won't do that. If they're charging at the intersection and prices differ between gender-specific goods due to any of the reasons I mentioned above ... well that's the free market? What's the alternative? If you start messing with the price you'll create either shortages or over-supply of the goods.
I have two daughters, one likes pretty much everything my sons do, the other likes more traditional girly things (we don't encourage or discourage which toys the kids play with in the house, it just worked out that way). When I saw the two products, I thought, I wouldn't buy that scooter for my one daughter, she'd never use it. My two sons would both love it (thought not in pink). And if my girly-girl wanted a scooter, she would want it in pink if it were available.
It's an anecdote, but I'm around a lot of other parents with girls and boys and it doesn't strike me that they're going to produce the pink scooter in the kinds of quantities that they're going to with the boy-branded one which will likely affect the cost of production resulting in an expected difference in the cost of the product.
On the razors, there are subtle differences. The lady's Gillette product my wife used to use to shave is significantly different, designed to be held differently for shaving the variety of areas that women typically remove hair from. It was also a much larger product. The blades, themselves, were 1/3 larger, with an extra rubbery pad on the top and the bottom of the blade. They cost about 10% more than the men's version and from a basic visual inspection, that seemed like a fair price difference.
Seniors and military discounts aren't BC companies objectively care more about those populations. It's because those groups tend to have slightly less disposable income, so the company uses price discrimination to segment their market. The same is true here for women -- their price elasticity is different than men on average
It was implied by the commissioner and really, the article as a whole:
"DCA Commissioner Julie Menin, who launched the investigation this summer, said the numbers show an insidious form of gender discrimination."
Not only that, there wasn't any price discrimination to begin with. In your example, people are being charged different prices for the same good. That is definitely price discrimination and attempts to segment the market, you're right.
But that's not happening. They're trying to build an equivalence between different goods. There are many reasons that doesn't work. Another comment here did a fantastic job of explaining why. See above.
She freaked out (as I was expecting; I wasn't being naive or anything), but after a few showers she not only stopped complaining but agreed that they were of equal quality and some smelled better than the Dove or Suave products she preferred.
I generally do all of the toiletry shopping in the house and I keep an eye on coupons and store specials -- I have never found as solid of discounts on products branded for women than I find on men. The body wash thing is always the biggest gap -- probably because a lot of men don't use body wash so they either need to give men an extra incentive to try them or deeply discount them to sell them at all.
Shaving cream and hair conditioner are the second worst offenders from my limited research and led to the discovery that shave cream is a redundant product. My wife used to buy a $30 "premium feminine shaving gel" (for cough sensitive shaving needs). I tried it once when I ran out of the white bubbly stuff and happened to do so just after washing my hair. I realized that outside of the color, it was nearly identical to a store brand hair conditioner that we shared (and bought in a bottle 20 times larger for $9.00). So the next time we tried just using the conditioner -- it was a massive improvement over the best shaving cream I've ever used (though, to clarify, I am a shower shaver, and I have no idea how well it cleans up with a sink shave). Instead of a $1.50-$3.00 shaving cream bottle that lasts 5-6 shaves (or a $30.00 one) we use our bulk conditioner that lasts about six months between the two of us.
I am a 5'11" male with medium build. Whenever I try to get my shoes sized 10-11, I consistently pay 10-15 bucks more than someone with shoe size 7 or 13. I also have to pay more on cloths because people who can wear xxs or xxl usually get swoop in on good deal during sales. Medium or large are always sold out. Does this sound like "discrimination"?
>DCA Commissioner Julie Menin, who launched the investigation this summer, said the numbers show an insidious form of gender discrimination. Compounding the injustice, she said, is the wage gap. Federal data shows women in the United States earn about 79 cents for every dollar paid to men.
They're framing this as a social justice issue and even using that ridiculous 79 cents statistic, which has been thoroughly discredited. When making actual apples-to-apples comparisons, the wage gap becomes an error bar: ~96 cents on the dollar.
No it hasn't.
> When making actual apples-to-apples comparisons
Which is how sexists justify paying women less for doing similar work, whilst ignoring the fact that they're also preventing women from getting the higher paying work.
If you want to highlight discriminatory behavior, you really are better served with an apples-to-apples comparison.
The idea that this statistic must be 1:1 is actually pretty horrifying. We all make tradeoffs throughout our lives between our careers, families, friends, hobbies, and indulgences. These are deeply personal choices. Whether by socialization or by birth, men and women are not identical. It's only natural that their aggregate preferences are different. What's important is that each person is free to make this decision for themselves. There's plenty of couples where the woman earns more.
Men are much more likely to study engineering or math, while women are much more likely to study psychology, education, or social work. Women are much more likely to choose to slow down or pause their careers when they have children. Men are much more likely to put long hours into their work. Any attempt to measure gender pay discrimination has to control for these things.
And then it starts to get really tricky when it comes to individually negotiated salaries. Men are on average better at negotiating their pay. And because job offers are often based on your current pay + some increase to lure you away, the effect gets compounded. This isn't discrimination, but it disadvantages women on average. Is the answer to ban pay negotiations? That's not realistic, it'd just depress pay across the board. The solution is to encourage women to negotiate their pay.
As for your claim that women are being prevented from getting high-paying work, I'm not sure what you mean. Could you elaborate?
Some sources for your enlightenment:
Consad study for the Department of Labor: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20... (seems to be down at the moment, but I've been able to access it before)
Excerpt: > Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wage-gap-myth-that-wont-die-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/...
I know it's anecdotal, but I've talked about this with friends quite often and they all say it. And men's floors are usually singular, too, the other 2-3 floors are all for women, with one especially for girls. The competition for women's clothing is so strong it's pushing prices down. Thought it'd be no different in the US. Not just shops either, second hand markets for girls are insane, you'll easily buy pants for 2 euros at the ijhallen (popular fleamarket in Amsterdam, mostly for girls age 19-26 or so) that cost 30 euros in the shop a year ago, and have the same quality as a guys' 80 euro pants haha. It's crazy.
Then there's the laundry, I've never heard of that before either, nor seen it. Different prices for hairdressers though is very common here though, in fact certain gender-only hairdressers are pretty much the majority. All the other stuff like razors, a more expensive 'female version' of a toy etc is really familiar, too.0
I'd imagine some women prefer the larger blade and find the much larger handle more convenient for reaching areas of the body men don't typically shave. My wife, however, loves using my (inexpensive) Dorco razor. She doesn't care about the added padding on the top/bottom of the blades, nor that it's not specifically a "women's" product. I think the marketing copy holds some actual realities here. They've made a product that they believe was designed to meet unique shaving needs of most women, it's a product that uses more raw materials, and required unique R&D that was not shared with their men's razor. It also had the added risk that women would reject it due to these differences.
I'm going to copy some of the comments I made over there. Hopefully this is acceptable.
The study does not say there is price discrimination, but it heavily implies it. The WSJ article does say there is discrimination.
First of all, I think the article falls into some kind of Political Correctness trap by claiming that certain products are for boys and others are for girls. Why couldn't a boy want the pink scooter? Why couldn't a girl want red?
Building on that, if we see the pink one as "girls" and the red one as "boys" then it does look like discrimination. However, if we view the red one as "neutral/base color" and the pink one as a less popular "color option" it seems less like discrimination and more like paying for a unique customization. Do we know there isn't a blue scooter priced the same as pink?
The conclusion (of the study) states:
> DCA found, on average, that women pay approximately 7 percent more than men for similar products. Products’ price differences based on gender are largely inescapable for female consumers simply due to the product offerings available in the market.
This seems fundamentally contradictory to me. If the products are sufficiently similar but priced differently, why would women buy the "women's version?" What makes it "inescapable?" If product A is so much better than product B, such that buying Product A is "inescapable," I'd expect a difference of more than 7% in price.
The Wall Street Journal seems to draw the reasonable conclusion in its headline: Women should buy the "men's product."
These products principal feature is the advertising. "Natural" and "Essential Oils" and other common "features" mean exactly nothing (or not at all what folks think they mean). And many use pricing for the explicit purpose of implying quality. Obviously a $90 shampoo beats a $5 store brand.
I freaked out when I found out a shampoo my wife loved was $40! So on one of my shopping adventures, I purchased several different brands of conditioner, shampoo and body wash (up to $30.00 w/coupon and no ingredients she was sensitive to), and generic 1 oz. travel bottles. I filled each and we switched them weekly for a few months. Her $40.00 one was in the middle of the rotation and made it "one shower" -- she hated it[1]. In each case the pick was in the bottom 25% for price. Body Wash: Axe for Men O_o, Shampoo: Kirkland (Costco), Conditioner: a Suave product (Suave was a back-up in all three, consequently -- I buy all at once when coupons/store discounts match up, so we needed a few).
[1] I have never told her that was "her brand" -- she would have taken that as me calling her dumb/gullible when the reality is that these companies spend large sums of money to specifically target her -- and there's just no good reason to be a dick.
Consumer Reports study from 2010: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2010/jan...
University of Central Florida study from 2011 (I can't find it online anymore) was mentioned in some of the other studies as saying basically the same thing.
New York Times on The Pink Tax from last year: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/opinion/the-pink-tax.html?...
Can we put this meme to rest already? That gap is mostly attributed to career choices that lead to less pay.
Also I would wager it's more common for a girl to want a red scooter than for a boy to want a pink scooter, hence a larger market size for the non-female-gendered scooter. Not sure what to make of that, though.
So, computers are discriminatory... we might want to ban them along with encryption; think of the children.
One screenshot hurts their entire argument, because I cannot take the rest of what they say at face value. Notice that the $18.49 package gives five razors while the $14.99 package gives four razors. The $3.50~ markup is due to an additional razor being provided. The package is misleading because it is called "Hydro 5" but provides 4 razors as indicated in the bottom right corner of the packaging.
http://i.imgur.com/p3Z2lnJ.png
//End Edit - The above was my mistake of looking at the wrong number on the women's packaging as explained by the replies to this comment.
Tacking on a reasonable counter-argument to the tail end of the article hoping people will miss it is also an annoyingly common practice I see these sorts of hatemongering articles.
And you know what? They probably have a valid point. But they couldn't take the time to carefully make their comparisons, clean the data of any faulty issues (like the razors), and give any counterpoints some proper space. So I'll dismiss it like I would any other topic that tried to do this.
>Ravi Dhar, director of the Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management, said how we perceive “women’s” products could help explain why gender markups persist in the marketplace.
>“Many men's products are not seen as men's products,” he said. “They might just be seen as products in the category.”
>Which makes the “pink” version a specialty product, he said.
No, you've misread the packaging. Both packages contain 4 razor cartridges. The number 5 you highlighted on the women's product advertises 5 blades per cartridge (same as the men's product) but the package contains only 4 cartridges as you'll see if you look a little further to the right. You can see a higher resolution photo of the product and some more details here: https://shop.riteaid.com/schick-hydro-silk-razor-cartridges-...
It appears I have actually. Thanks for pointing this out! That removes a lot of my issue with the article with that issue, because it didn't exist to begin with. Just my own misreading. :)
If I'm allowed to excuse why I overlooked that 4 - I'd blame my familiarity with the male packaging. I didn't even notice the 4 when looking for numbers because it didn't have words next to it! At this point I'd be more offended that they think the word "cartridge" is too difficult for women and use a picture of the blade instead, as if they're children.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006DR2BQU Schick Hydro Silk for Women Refill Blades, 4 Count $13.39 or $3.35 each
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GR0EFRG Schick Hydro 5 Sensitive Refill Razor Blade, 4 Count $11.19 or $2.80 each
For instance, read this amusing anedocte [1] about the difference between the Gillette Fusion and Fusion Power lines. It is from 2007 but I believe it lasts to this day:
Second, I decided to try them for myself... I've been using the Fusion Power razor with Fusion Power blades since they came out (only on the face though). I always notice the price of the Fusion blades is typically $1 - $2 cheaper per 4 pack than the Fusion Power blades. I grabbed a 4 pack of the regular Fusion blades at Wal-Mart for about $12.36 (versus $13.74) and took them home to see if Gillette is telling the truth or if they are pulling our legs and profiting from a clever marketing ploy... ???
The Test and Results...
The first thing I noticed was the regular Fusion blade was blue rather than orange... could that be the "specific design" mumbo jumbo that they were talking about? ??? I like orange, but not for an average upcharge of $1.50 per four pack...
(...)
My take on Gillette Fusion Power blades is that the blades are the same as the, dare I say, ordinary Fusion blades and they market them at a higher price to deceive men that they will get a better shave using the Power blades because they are designed differently.
(...)
He then wrote a letter to Gillette:
All that being said, what gives Gillette?? Why do Fusion Power cartridges cost, on average, $1.50 more per four pack when, in my opinion, they give the exact same shave as a regular Fusion cartridge? What exactly is the difference that makes the Fusion Power cartridges superior to the regular Fusion cartridges?
And received an answer from P&G:
Dear Rob-
The differences between the Power and Manual Fusion Cartridges are subtle but there are differences. The Power Fusion Cartridges have aloe, vitamin E and natural oils in the lubrastrip while the Manual Cartridges have just aloe and vitamin E. There is also a slightly different coating on the blade of the Power Cartridges. That coating was designed to work with the vibration of the razor. I hope this answers your questions.
Thanks again for writing.
Kelly H Fusion Team
tl;dr: no difference between the Fusion and Fusion Power lines of Gillette except for the 1.50 increase in price and "natural oils".