Battle of the Prices: Is It Ever Fair to Charge One Sex More?

Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2014-10-19 02:42

Article here. Excerpt:

'Gender price discrimination is illegal in many states but it can be quite tricky to determine when two products are really the same and when they are different. For example, Miami-Dade County has ordinances that prohibit gender pricing for dry cleaning. The gray area is this: "A business is permitted to charge a different price if the goods or services involve more time, difficulty or cost. In other words, consideration must be given to the quality and complexity of the goods or services to determine whether or not you have been discriminated against."
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"There’s no general federal law prohibiting price discrimination on the basis of gender," says Ayres. "There's the Unruh Act in California which is a matter of state law. There’s an increasing number of states and municipalities that have prohibited gender price discrimination in public accommodations."

So do women always pay more? Not always. Often, nightclubs charge women less for entry, a practice California has banned. Similarly, nail salons often charge men more than women, reportedly because so-called man-icures require more work.

At least a couple men have spoken out against ladies' night: GWU law professor John Banzhaf, and New York lawyer Roy Den Hollander (who has been rightly ridiculed for his comments regarding why he sued: he hates feminists).
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While some women and men might want to hold onto arrangements that benefit them—whether it's ladies night or cheaper cars and insurance—ultimately staying away from places that gender price discriminate in either direction is what feels right to me. I just think about how infuriating it is when a dry cleaner wants to charge more because I'm a woman, and it's enough for me to give up that free drink at ladies' night.'

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Comments

... posted as follows:

People make a lot of points, good and bad, but both kinds on both ends of the debate spectrum. Re insurance rates in particular, the issue is less abt whether men and women, older or younger, etc. ppl will be charged more or less than others. It's more abt by what *properties* should ins. cos. differentiate/discriminate re the rates they charge. Re male drivers, like many, I was 18-25 YO in a state that didn't prohibit (as I think none do at the moment) gender or age-based pricing of car ins. policies. So I was in the assigned risk pool from 21 to 25 (age 21 is when I got my first car). The monthly ins. payment was 50% more expensive than the car payment! But in all that time, I got only 1 speeding ticket. No accidents, DUIs, etc. Still, I paid $1800/yr. to insure a $5,000 car (well, $7,500 w/ financing...). I was paying all this $ unnecessarily b/c it was *assumed* I'd be an irresponsible doofus vis-a-vis driving until I was 25, when magically I'd become a fine, upstanding citizen and guardian of civic virtue, etc., etc. Ludicrous.

Another example brought up in comments includes homes built along fault lines. If it's true homes built along faults have higher ins. premiums, then should they be assumed riskier covers than homes not built on fault lines? Are homes built near, say, coal-fired power plants maybe also in greater danger of catching fire than other homes? Or how abt homes built near forests in places that occasionally have serious droughts/dry summers?

Ultimately as a society I think we need to decide whether or not insurance is to be *truly* a risk pool for any given insured item, activity, etc., or not. At the moment, it's pools inside pools. Differentiating on correlated attributes (e.g.: age, gender, etc.) instead of *causative* attributes is how we're doing things now. If using pools within pools instead of true all-member pooled risk, I feel factors ought to be shown to be causative rather than correlative before their use as justification for differing premium req'ts among policyholders. Just as now though, that one desires a policy doesn't mean one is entitled to get one; if it can be shown the person is excludable for causative rather than correlative factors, that's fine. (e.g.: 2 DUIs in 2 years? No policy for you!) But to charge on a scale due to an unproven assumption abt that individual merely b/c they are identifiable as a member of a certain class, esp. one defined by indelible characteristics like age, sex, etc., well, there's a word for that: prejudice. And that's not right.

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Submitted by Matt on Sun, 2014-10-19 03:16