Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?

This paper provides evidence on price disparities for personal care products targeted at different genders using a national dataset of grocery, convenience, drugstore, and mass merchandiser sales. We find that women’s products are more expensive in some categories (e.g., deodorant) but less expensive in others (e.g., razors). Further, in an apples-to-apples comparison of women’s and men’s products with similar ingredients, the women’s variant is less expensive in three out of five categories. Our results call into question the need for and efficacy of recently proposed and enacted legislation mandating price parity across gendered products.