Eleanor Dohrenwend

Editor’s note: This is part one of a two-part series.

By ELEANOR DOHRENWEND

8-18 Media

Marketing is obviously successful. But what makes it so successful? And how much of it is evolved around gender?

What gender-based differences are there around shopping, and how do marketers use this to their advantage?

I think about this from time to time as I work at Fancy-free in Marquette or go to various stores to shop.

For women, the inclination to shop goes back to the instincts to gather. Even in our current generation, at least in the U.S., families are moving away from more traditional household roles. Although the connection may not be apparent, traditional roles are still being reinforced in other ways, and shopping is one of them.

The reason women tend to shop more than men for family necessities such as groceries and clothing has to do with the traditional idea that women are “caregivers.” They care for others by ensuring everyone has everything they need and purchasing items to fill in the gaps.

Women also shop for people outside of their immediate families, such as more distant family, friends, children of friends, etc. This is because, culturally, women have to think not just about their own needs, or their immediate family’s needs, but also the needs of other members of the community.

I think this has helped humans survive in the past. If a mother notices her child’s friend has no gloves and temperatures are starting to drop, she may be on the lookout for a pair of gloves when shopping.

It’s great that women are looking out for and making sure everyone has basic needs, but I hope we are moving toward a culture where everyone is taking care of one another, not just women.

I wonder how these cultural beliefs may change as we move toward a world where men take on more of these roles. Part of this system works around natural tendencies, but other parts are based on societal norms and generational expectations, ingrained into people when they were raised.

People’s views on parenting roles are influenced by how they remember being raised as a child. External pressures, such as job demands and flexibility, can influence this, but this system reverts to “traditional” roles.

Although roles are changing, I don’t think this will evolve quickly, as this system isn’t based around law inequality like money or safety. The change in shopping roles won’t be based on a cultural change, but rather on individual households changing the systems of their own accord.

Marketers know that women are the primary shoppers, and given the greater societal pressures on women, companies will sometimes make products “for women” more expensive. This is called the “pink tax.”

On average, personal care products were found to be 13% more expensive than the most similar items. A U.K. study found that, on average, clothing and accessories were 7% to 8% more expensive, moisturizers 32% more expensive, and dry cleaning a woman’s blouse was found to be 90% more expensive. Whoa!

The term “pink tax” has been around since the early 1990s. Despite this, it seems that there has not been very much action taken to minimize and ideally remove these price differences.

Sometimes these price discrepancies come from separate companies making similar products, catered to opposite genders, at different price points, and sometimes they come from the same company just marking higher prices on women’s products. Creating various price points for products and services based on any form of difference, regardless of the situation, is a form of discrimination.

Eleanor Dohrenwend is 17 years old, partly home-schooled, and looking forward to summer break.