Pink Tax: a Study of Gender-based Pricing in Russia

There is a lot of evidence that women pay more than men for various consumer goods and services. This phenomenon is called the “pink tax". In the literature, its existence is usually associated with gender discrimination. As part of the work, we studied the prices for men's and women's disposable razors, which were sold on the Russian marketplace Ozon in January 2022. We collected and analyzed a sample of 415 observations. It was revealed that the average price for one disposable razor for women is 32 rubles more than for men. Using the Oaxaca-Blind decomposition, which is usually used when analyzing the difference in average wages of men and women, we proved that the “pink tax” really exists in Russia. Moreover, we found that the objective differences in the characteristics of male and female razors do not play any role in the pricing of a single disposable razor. Females pay more for identical disposable razors than males in Russia, and this difference is poorly related to the characteristics of the products themselves, which suggests the presence of price discrimination against women in the market under study