Does The Pink Tax Still Exist? From our Research, Yes.

Martin Perez -

From the results from our research, unfortunately the Pink Tax still exist. Women Pay +50% more on Hygiene Products than Men.

Women are paying a “pink tax” on most personal hygiene products. When broken down to price per gram of product, products marketed to women are priced higher than those marketed to men.

In some product categories, such as body wash products, women are paying over 60% more than men per 100g of product.

Let’s break down the details.

What's the Pink Tax?

In broad terms, the pink tax refers to products that are specifically marketed towards women and are more expensive than the same products marketed towards men. Its the extra amount women pay for everyday products that men use.

How We Did It

In order to collect all the data to find these price discrepancies, we used ParseHub, a free and powerful web scraper that can extract data from any website.

We used ParseHub to scrape data on thousands of products from Shoppers Drug Mart's and Walmart Canada's websites. We then categorized products into their intended audiences and calculated the average price per 100g of product.

We did this across multiple product categories such as body wash, deodorant and more.

Women pay more for personal hygiene products

When looking at hundreds of deodorant products, women on average pay around $9.75 CAD per 100g worth of deodorant. In comparison, men pay an average of $6.45 CAD per 100g of deodorant.

For those keeping count, that means women are paying an average of 51.31% more for deodorant products that are marketed to them.

But hold on, it gets worse.

Turning our eyes to the “Body Wash” category, the numbers tell a different story.

Firstly, as per our data, there are many more body wash products and SKUs targeted toward women rather than men. Through our research we found there are over 200% more body was products marketed toward women over body wash products marketed toward men.

But more shockingly, women pay an average of $2.32 CAD per 100g of body wash. While this might not sound that bad, at the same time, men pay an average of $1.40 CAD per 100g of body wash.

That means women are paying 65.57% more per 100g of body wash product. Through our research, we found this to be the product category with the largest difference in pricing between genders.

Here’s an example

Want to see how this price disparity looks in the real world?

Look at these two products, both from Dove, both stick deodorants with antibacterial odour protection. Their biggest difference? One is marketed to men and the other to women.

Now, not only is the men's deodorant cheaper, but it is also sold in a higher quantity (85g vs 74g).

This makes it so women pay $9.44 per 100g of deodorant while men only pay $7.64 for the same amount of product. That's a 21% difference for what is essentially the same product.

In other categories…

In other product categories, the differences are not as drastic but still exist. For example, when it comes to shaving razor blades, women only pay 4.95% more per blade unit when compared to men.

A product category where men actually pay more than women is shaving cream. Not only do shaving cream products for men heavily outnumber those for women. But men also pay 16.75% more for these products than women. Through our research, this was the only product category where this happened.

The Pink Tax is getting worse

Back in 2016, we ran this same study using ParseHub to determine what the Pink Tax looked liked at the time.

Our research back then revealed that women paid an average of 43% more than men on hygiene products. Our new research shows that not only are women still paying for the Pink Tax but that the Pink Tax has also gone up.

What’s the solution to this problem? While we cannot offer a solution for this pricing disparity we can recommend purchasing unisex or male-marketed products to avoid the pink tax. However, this might not be a long term solution for this problem.

What do you think about the Pink Tax and its increase through the years?

Want to use a web scraper to extract data from any website? Check out our starter guide on web scraping.

Is the Pink Tax Real?

To conclude, is the pink tax real?

From what we scraped and from the 1000 product data we analyzed, we can conclude that the pink tax is still real.

Woman are still paying more for the same type of product marketed towards them. This is the 2nd time we've done this research and the pink tax has increased!

View the other research pieces we have done: