Diana Clement: Beware the pink tax

What's with the price difference between men's and women's razors?

Opinion

Women beware. Products marketed specifically to us are often more expensive than the equivalent male version. Everything from razors to jeans costs more if you want the female version, despite costing the same to produce.

The Financial Markets Authority’s Tammy Peyper raised the issue of pink tax at an International Women’s Day event. Women earn less on average. Yet we pay more for equivalent products than men. It makes Peyper see red, not pink.

This matters. The United Nations has called for member states to end the practice of gender-based price differentiation on goods and services to encourage gender parity and equal participation in economies.

“It’s an obstacle that we really need to move beyond,” Peyper said.

It’s up to you and I to call out gender-based pricing when we see it. I’m starting with my hairdresser, who I recently discovered charges $89 for a women’s cut and blow wave, and $49 for men. I have short hair, so I think I might book a men’s cut next time.

The term ‘pink tax’ is said to have arisen thanks to a 2015 study on the cost of being a female consumer conducted by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. The study concluded that products are typically 7 per cent more expensive if marketed toward women than men. The researchers found that girls’ toys, for example, cost more than boys’ toys. Ditto with children’s clothing.

The largest discrepancy was in women’s healthcare/hygiene products. Don’t we know it? One example that bugs me is the concept of women’s razors. I checked my local supermarket to catch up on pricing. Gillette’s cheapest razors for men worked out at $2.12. The cheapest Gillette women’s razors were $4 each. Likewise, on the day I checked, the cheapest Schick men’s razors worked out at $2.07 each, but women’s razors were $3.30 each. Razor blades are razor blades, whether they’re cased in pink or blue plastic.

I never dry-clean anything. But when I checked New Zealand Drycleaners’ pricing, I found that a blouse was $15 to dry-clean and a men’s shirt $6. Ouch.

Awareness is helping. I searched the websites of businesses such as The Warehouse looking for differential pricing for pink-coloured products and found very little. Pink-branded women’s multivitamins did cost $1 more than the men’s equivalent. But the difference is a lot less than it used to be. Pink PlayStation controllers were the same price as black ones. Children’s scooters seemed to be the same price whatever colour they were.

The message about not ripping women off obviously hasn’t got to Levi’s’ NZ operation. Men’s original 501 jeans are A$129.95 on the Levis.co.nz website, and women’s 501 original jeans are A$159.95. That sucks, Levi’s. I encourage readers to boycott these jeans until the pricing is fairer.

I took a look at school uniforms. Often the price differential is due to girls wearing skirts and boys wearing shorts or trousers. The trouble with that is when a school has skirts on offer, girls don’t want to be different from their friends, so they wear them. Lo and behold, school skirts often cost more than trousers, despite being simpler to sew and using the same amount of fabric or less.

Some schools I searched charged either the same or roughly equivalent prices for boys’ and girls’ uniforms. Mostly, it was a dollar here and there.

But for many, the girls’ uniform was more expensive than the boys’. At Avondale College, for example, a girls’ short skirt is $69 and a long skirt is $80. Boys’ shorts are $50 and trousers are $66. Likewise, blouses cost $6 and $8 more for short and long sleeves respectively than the equivalent boys’ shirts. Others that sell their uniforms through the NZ Uniform site such as Ellesmere College, Bayfield High School and many others also had differential pricing.

I say if your school is charging huge differential prices, then it’s time to kick up a stink. Why should the parents of girls be penalised?

Finally, if you’re reading this article because you’re concerned about cost of living increases, check out Sorted’s new Cost of Living Hub, which collates information from the three Government agencies and has ideas on how to handle money better and where to go to get help.