The “pink tax“, an untraceable piece of data?

The hour of glory of "data" has come. However, among the billions of billions of encrypted information we have, there is one that apparently no one can find for the moment. What is the price difference between a product intended for men and its equivalent supposed to be purchased by women?

Answering this question would make it possible to affirm or refute that the latter are victims of discrimination when they do their shopping. More broadly, this would help determine whether marketing segmentation by gender implies inequality for consumers in one direction or another.

This problem, raised at the end of 2014 in France via a petition by the Georgette Sand collective, has still not found an answer. However, the services of the Ministry of the Economy were very quickly invited to look into the question. The DGCCRF, in charge of this study, has yet to finalize its methodology. According to the State Secretariat for Women's Rights, led by Pascale Boistard, this should be completed in March, before the actual price surveys are launched. "There are no elements which indicate that it is infeasible", says one within this secretariat. Even if "difficulties may have arisen in the market segments to be taken into account."

Discreet amendment

In addition, before the executive used article 49-3 of the Constitution for the Macron law, deputies tabled an amendment that went almost unnoticed. This requires Bercy statisticians to assess the “consequences of gendered marketing, sexist price differentiation, and inequalities weighing on the purchasing power of women and men”, and this by September 30. 2015.

In the meantime, they will therefore have to have removed the main methodological obstacle: by nature, the products or services evaluated are different. Compare cabbage and carrots? A Franco-Berlin agency of data-journalists tried it. It collected 5,000 prizes for perfumes and 500 for deodorants from the French distributor Monoprix, the German Rossman and from the specialized stores Sephora and Douglas.

Result: overall, in the "women's" department, the median final price is higher than in the shelves intended for men. However, in detail, by trying to compare prices two by two for similar products in which "the price of ingredients does not influence the selling price", the results seem much more uncertain. For women, the product ranges are much more elaborate than for men, hence the different price levels too. Brands and distributors argue that this wider offer meets a stronger and more demanding demand among women than among men.

Femininity Award

"We couldn't find an adequate methodology", recognizes Nicolas Kayser-Bril, one of the initiators of this project launched in November. To try to validate it, he says he called on "professional economists". Without success. Their explanation: this operation amounts to calculating a "price of femininity" in relation to the "price of masculinity". To one as to the other would be attached too subjective criteria to lead to a quantified evaluation. They ask themselves:

However, certain services such as hairdressing or ironing clothes at the dry cleaners would raise fewer methodological difficulties in establishing inequality. Only, in the first case in particular, professionals can always put forward techniques and longer cutting times to justify higher prices for "feminine" hairstyles than for masculine ones.

This is what happened in 2013 when, in Denmark, the Council for Equality condemned a salon for discrimination. The head of the Danish hairdressing union then protested, saying in a statement that the duration of service was on average higher for women. But in this case, it means that "women's hairstyles" and "long hair" are equated. Once again, economic evaluation comes up against the issue of gender and the social representations that may be associated with them...

"Being a woman, more expensive on a daily basis"

No need to cut your hair in four? The authors of a survey published in 2011 by the University of Orlando dealing specifically with the prices of cosmetics, sessions in a hair salon and the ironing of clothes mention these objections in their introduction.

No "technical impossibility"?

"These are subjects that it seems impossible to us to approach from the angle of the cost of living, it should rather be approached from the angle of education", finally concludes Nicolas Kayser-Bril.

"Gendered marketing exists", retorts Juliette Melba, from the Georgette Sand collective: "To say that 'reality is far too complex to be able to affirm that a woman tax exists, even less to measure it, is somewhat relativistic. It is totally kick for touch." Judging women "prisoners of social representations leading them to spend more on their appearance", she believes on the contrary that "certain brands take advantage of this and the price differences for similar products are real".

His association therefore refutes the technical impossibility of a study on price readings. "Distribution players must be included in the reflection, otherwise you can always continue to get lost in candy pink or royal blue shelves that do not allow the consumer to find their way around," says Juliette Melba .

In the meantime, the accumulation of consumer data now allows a finer segmentation of the offer than ever. Distributors can, for example, count the number of women who enter their stores and thus "adapt" their service by sending "specialist" salespeople to meet them. Statistical survey or not, marketing pros have all the tools in hand to continue selling cabbage to some and carrots to others (or rather cauliflowers, red cabbage, stuffed cabbage, etc.)