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Gender Pricing – When Women Pay More for the Same Products as Men
Women still pay significantly more for razors than men. This is reported by the Berliner Zeitung (BZ), citing a recent study by the Hamburg Consumer Centre. The market sample has already been taken for the fourth time – the price difference has changed little.
Of the eleven examined shaving products including shaving foam and some perfumes from drugstores, the prices for the women’s versions were on average almost 38 percent higher than for the men’s. The ingredients and compositions of the products examined were almost identical, the BZ quotes. Consumer advocates have called on cosmetics manufacturers and retailers to stop price discrimination against women.
Gender Pricing: Companies are aware of the different willingness to pay of customers
Pricing expert Prof. Dr. Hans-Christian Riekhof from UNICconsult states here that “Price discrimination means nothing other than that companies try to take into account the different willingness to pay of different target groups.” This applies to men and women alike, as well as to younger and older people, to well-off people and people with smaller wallets, to city dwellers and families in the countryside. “We will not be able to abolish this without a state uniform pricing”, says Riekhof. “But it is good that there are such price comparison studies. Whether price-conscious women now buy the male products? Let’s be surprised.”
Visibility as Currency
Marie-Christine Ostermann advocates in the Handelsblatt of 9.7.2021 in a guest article for more visibility of women in the (media) public: a very exciting perspective in a long-standing debate.
Visibility is in an economy of attention, as described by Georg Franck in his book of the same name, an important currency that is rarely so clearly addressed. Marie-Christine Ostermann considers the psychological dimension of the topic (who has too many self-doubts and why and shies away from too much attention, who shies away from the rough tone on some platforms), and she also names possible “costs” of high personal visibility.
And she looks at the differences in attention that women and men receive in the traditional media. But what absolutely needs to be added is the attention in social media, which women and men strive for and which their shared contributions receive. Here, other laws apply for achieving attention. No editorial team and no curator have a more or less secret agenda when it comes to likes and followers – a topic that would be very accessible to empirical research.
Links:
Guest contribution in Handelsblatt (Website):
https://www.handelsblatt.com/meinung/gastbeitraege/gastkommentar-ein-plaedoyer-fuer-die-sichtbarkeit-von-frauen/27399210.html
Guest contribution in Handelsblatt (pdf):
Women must become more visible
Photo/Screenshot: Handelsblatt