Being a woman is more expensive than being a man

USPA NEWS - They already knew, but a study on consumption in the city of New York has just confirmed that a woman is more expensive than a man. And it has nothing to do with the alleged fondness for them to compulsive shopping or the number of items they keep in their closets or the number of beauty products.

It's just that the same products sold to them, are more expensive than when sold to men. And there is nothing to justify the price difference, which can reach 56%. This was revealed by a study conducted in New York by the Department of Consumer Affairs of the City (DCA), which compared 800 products sold in the New York shops: toys and accessories, children´s clothing, adult clothing, personal care products, and home health care products for seniors.

Conclusion is that “across her lifetime, a female consumer faces different degrees of markups. Babies´ and children´s products had the least pricing discrepancies, adult personal care products the most, and adult clothing and senior products were in the middle, at roughly equivalent pricing discrepancies by percent. This is notable, given the “˜adult´ stage of a consumer´s life is longer than any other lifecycle stage. Additionally, the frequency at which adults consume personal care products is higher than any other category of the consumer goods analyzed in this study.“

“In the aggregate, over the course of a female consumer´s lifetime, these discrepancies would have a much larger financial impact, given that, on average, personal care products cost 13 percent more for women than men,“ added the study. 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.

Specifically, girls´ toys cost more 55 percent of the time, while boys´ toys cost more 8 percent of the time. Girls´ clothing cost more 26 percent of the time, while boys´ clothing cost more 7 percent of the time. Women´s clothing cost more 40 percent of the time, while men´s clothing cost more 32 percent of the time. Women´s personal care products cost more 56 percent of the time, while men´s products cost more 13 percent of the time. And senior home health care products cost more for women 45 percent of the time and cost more for men 13 percent of the time.

Over the course of a woman´s life, the financial impact of these gender-based pricing disparities is significant. In 1994, says DCA, “the State of California studied the issue of gender-based pricing of services and estimated that women effectively paid an annual “˜gender tax´ of approximately 1,351 US dollars for the same services as men. While DCA´s study does not estimate an annual financial impact of gender pricing for goods, the findings of this study suggest women are paying thousands of dollars more over the course of their lives to purchase similar products as men.“