Are shoe brands charging more for less based on gender?
I came across this thread on Twitter by Vinay Kesari about how flimsy the women’s shoes were compared to men’s shoes despite the similar price range. Given my own experience with this first hand, I couldn’t stop myself from writing this post.
As a brief introduction, I love my feet. Nope not a feet fetish, I just love and care about my own feet because I know how big a difference it makes to life. I know I can work much better and live much better if the shoes I’m wearing don’t get in the way. I’m an avid runner and love to dance. My fitness goals involve keeping myself so fit that I can run up a hill at the age of 80. So buying shoes that treat my feet well is important to me.
My shoe size is 6 US (yes tiny feet), so finding shoes in men’s section is impossible. I pretty much have to go to the kids section as one shopkeeper had literally suggested.
Are women’s shoes costlier?
This article by Forbes highlights just how big the difference is between the price for men’s and women’s shoes for high-end brands. The top 8 high end shoe brands cost $108 more for women on an average. A study by NYC department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) recently did a study on how it’s straight up more expensive to be a female consumer.
For walking and running shoes like Nike, Puma, Adidas, and many more the price is mostly similar with men paying $5 more on an average.
Do shoe manufacturers on purpose make women’s shoes more flimsy and cheaper quality than men?
For the purpose of this post, I’ll stay away from heels considering just how bad they are and focus on shoes comparable with men’s.
For running shoes, according to Geoffrey Gray of Heeluxe, an independent shoe research laboratory, “women are a lot more dissatisfied with their shoes than men are” even though they also tend to have lower expectations for their footwear’s comfort. Women’s shoes are just painfully tighter. Women’s shoes are up to 70 percent tighter around the big toe joint, 68.4 percent looser in the heel and 18 percent tighter around the toes than men’s shoes. Another fascinating study lists how women are suffering in sandals, casual sneakers, even athletic performance shoes due to those incorrectly fitted footwear.
A brief search on the site flipkart.com (and similarly Amazon.in) reveals the following search results for men versus women’s sandals:
In another study by the NCBI from 2009 confirms “women who wore good shoes in the past were 67 percent less likely to report hind-foot pain, after adjusting for age and weight. In men, there was no association between foot pain, at any location, and shoewear, possibly because fewer than 2 percent of men in the study wore “bad” shoes. Even after taking age and weight into account, past shoewear use in women remained associated with hind-foot pain”.
I know some of this phenomenon can be associated with the social pressure of wearing painful pretty shoes, but even if we discard the case of heels, women’s flats are sometimes even worse than well designed heels.
One big historical reason for this might be shoes for the longest time were built with unisex gendered lasts, a foot shaped mold of steel or plastic based on adult male foot. And women’s feet are not a shrunk down version of men’s feet, they’re fundamentally different in structure. When it comes to manufacturing shoes, it’s not just the shape of foot you have take into account but the shape of your whole frame because your feet will have to carry it. There is a fundamental research gap present for manufacturing of shoes meant for women.
In Conclusion
The average case is looks murkier for women, although there are some brands which do a much better job creating shoes that are comfortable. My best advice would be to at least not succumb to social pressures of willfully wearing painful shoes unless unfortunately it’s obligatory to wear them at the workplace.
