![]() All three of the bags were notably more expensive when marketed toward women, despite the fact that two of the three were virtually identical across the gender lines. Three of the ten bag pairs that we tested were Givenchy the brand has, by far, the most overlap between its men’s and women’s styles overall. I also tested two bags that were exactly the same size for both men and women the price disparity persisted, indicating that the other differences weren’t simply a result of price not scaling in exact correlation with size, no matter the targeted gender. That may seem like a relatively small difference, but for two bags of the same size, it results in an average price disparity of over $190, largely because one bag is intended for a female consumer base and the other is intended for men. For that space, designers generally asked less of men, with an average price of $2.17 per cubic inch female customers were asked to pay $2.58 per cubic inch. The men’s bags were indeed larger, with an average volume of 1,479.5 cubic inches, compared to the average women’s bags at 1,014.4 cubic inches. For the best results, I used head-to-head comparisons of bags from the same retailers whenever possible, to help ensure that each bag was measured the same way. That way, we’d know how much designers were asking per unit of bag real estate, no matter how much or how little the particular consumer chose to buy. Because men’s bags are usually larger, I broke it down even further by calculating the price per cubic inch of each bag. For accuracy’s sake, I did ten head-to-head comparisons of bags from the same designers’ men’s and women’s lines that were as similar as possible in leather, shape and finish. ![]() The biggest obstacle to getting results was figuring out how to compare the bags in a fair way. With all that in mind, I set out to do an informal study of my own. The so-called Pink Tax has come under fire in France recently after a women’s group assembled a 40,000-signature petition to challenge a popular supermarket’s practice of marking up goods marketed toward women, and the New York Times Editorial Board recently wrote on the topic, citing a 2010 Consumer Reports study that found the same problems for women’s products in the US. Higher prices for women aren’t uncommon, and they go beyond fashion. ![]() I put our perceptions to the test last week, and what I found largely confirmed our suspicions. Second, those bags generally seem like a better deal than the women’s alternative, even though they’re usually bigger and feature nearly identical finishing and hardware. ![]() First, when most designers have a super-popular women’s bag, they modify it into a more traditionally masculine version for their menswear audience. Over our years of covering men’s bags, we’ve noticed two things. ![]()
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