Abstract or Keywords
Previous research has established a pricing disparity of consumer goods and services by gender such that women pay more for the same products and services than men, the so-called pink tax. This study expands this research by examining whether these price disparities persist across a wider range of personal care products including lotions, deodorants, shaving gels/creams, razors, razor cartridges, body sprays, bar soaps, liquid soaps, and shampoos. Using the largest sample of these products to date, we examined over 3000 products to test gendered pricing across these products. Our findings suggest that gender-pricing is not pervasive across products or consistently punitive toward women. Women pay more for deodorants/antiperspirants and lotions than men, while men tend to pay more for shaving creams/gels than women. Our analysis reveals another, perhaps more insidious, process at work however: the proliferation of gender differentiation for products that makes price-comparisons for the average consumer difficult. Both gender differentiation and the pink tax are founded on essentialist thinking about gender, and further reify gender structures and inequality in society.