These are hard times to be a female shopper. Whether you spend your money on pens, razors, designer fragrance or plain old Marks & Spencer vests, you will pay a surcharge just for being a woman. In theory, men and women enter stores equal – but, in practice, the shelves each gender browses, the aisles each chooses, lead them down very different paths to the cash register. Products marketed specifically at women routinely cost more than similar or identical products marketed at men.
The extent of the discrepancies is staggering: an analysis of hundreds of products by the Times found that where equivalent products were priced differently, they cost 37% more for women. It is hard to imagine, for instance, why a single-blade razor made by the same manufacturer should cost more to produce in pink than orange. They are made by Bic, which also charges more for its Bics for Her biros than its Bics for everyone, a strategy that has seen the Bics for Her brand repurposed as the title of comedian Bridget Christie’s standup show. I’m not saying that the French penmaker is sexist, but it once advertised its feminine, pastel-barrelled writing tools with the slogan “Look like a girl / Act like a lady / Think like a man / Work like a boss”.
Factor in the tampon tax and the pay gap (19.1% across all workers in the UK) and it becomes clear that, whenever they reach a till, women are effectively paying three times, once in their salaries, once in their spending, and once in a surcharge on any women-directed products in their shopping baskets. “We earn less and we’re charged more. How many more times do you want women to be ripped off?” asks Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society.
So, what to do? Women could buy Gillette’s sensitive shaving gel for men, instead of its Satin Care sensitive shaving gel for women and save 50p. The downside is that it will make you smell like a cheap man. Is it too radical to look for a fragrance-free shaving gel? Or to expect companies to market a unisex line? After all, it works at the higher price points for brands such as Dermalogica and REN. Smethers thinks the equivalent of a supermarket value brand – plain-speaking, no-frills packaging – could work for skin and bodycare products. “There is a massive opportunity here to create gender-neutral lines – why not? I think that’s a really interesting proposition for retailers.”
Fashion stylists have often shopped in the men’s department for women’s basics – plain-cut vests or T-shirts, sweatshirt and sweaters, watches – on the grounds of taste rather than price. Manufacturers routinely overdesign products for women, complicating necklines, adding unwanted tucks or tat, embellishing packaging. “We carry that with us throughout our lifetime,” Smethers says. “We create this norm that a women’s product has got to have extra presentational baubles on it, and then it can be charged more for. This is a massive issue that goes over generations of women.”
Girls start paying for the differences at an early age – it costs an extra £10 in Halfords for a Kiddimoto balance bike decorated with flowers rather than skulls. Surely it is time to end the tyranny of pink, which makes girls pay by delimiting their tastes according to gender stereotypes, and then charges their parents for the privilege.
Why women are perceived to have more fanciful taste baffles me, but these design discrepancies make the surcharge legal, as does the fact that these products are available to men to buy, too (unlike cheap women’s car insurance, which was ruled prejudicial to men, although somehow men’s haircuts are permitted to undercut women’s). Sometimes, even where products are marketed as unisex, price discrepancies remain. Who can say, for instance, why a Tom Ford eau de toilette should cost £75 for 50ml at Net-a-Porter and £64 for 50ml at Mr Porter, the women’s and men’s luxury shopping sites both owned by the Yoox Net-a-Porter Group? (Not Net-a-Porter, who wouldn’t comment at short notice.) Or why a woman logging on to Nike’s website to buy football boots would face a selection starting at £125, while her male counterpart can buy a pair for as little as £29.99? Pity women footballers, who must take the social and commercial one-two of being taunted for their lack of femininity, and then made to pay girls’ prices.
The problem isn’t limited to Britain. In December, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs released a study of 800 nearly identical products with male and female versions. The report, entitled From Cradle to Cane: The Cost of Being a Female Consumer, found that, on average, female versions cost 7% more than the male.
Women, the shops are laughing up their sleeves at you! It is time to make careful choices about where and how to spend that hard-earned, partially docked money, to find a way to make the sexists pay. (No Bic was used in the writing of this article.)
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