After being picked up by the Daily Mail, a Reuters story on a ruling by Denmark’s Board of Equal Treatment has spread far and wide. Mia Shanley writes:
It ordered a salon advertising women’s haircuts for 528 crowns ($94) and men’s haircuts for 428 crowns – plus an extra fee for long hair – to pay 2,500 crowns ($450) to a woman who had filed a complaint.
Now, a trade organization for hairdressers has called the decision absurd, saying it will become a nightmare to set prices for customers and warning of “pricing chaos”.
“It takes, quite simply, longer time with women,” Connie Mikkelsen, chairwoman of the Danish organization for independent hairdressers and cosmeticians, said in a statement on Monday.
The story is being passed off as yet another example of loony Scandinavian gender politics, but I’m not so sure I agree.
The actual report (run through Google translate, it does relatively well with Danish) gives more detail on the story. The complainant is a woman with a short, boyish haircut, who was nonetheless told she would have to pay the price for a “woman’s haircut” (over £10 more). She left without getting her hair cut, and complained to the Board of Equal Treatment.
In other words, a woman, who wanted to purchase an identical service to a man, was told that she had to pay a £10 surcharge for being a woman. Not for having long hair — which would take more time to cut, and be a justifiable expense — nor, she claims, for wanting a more complex cut — the salon claims she could have got a male price if she’d wanted clippers, but I, and the Board, find it hard to believe a salon offering a £50 men’s haircut would refuse to use anything but clippers on a man — but simply for being female.
That seems a textbook example of gender discrimination. It could be easily avoided by offering, say, “women’s style” and “men’s style” haircuts, or haircuts for “long” and “short” hair. But instead — and I think the complainant hits the nail on the head when she argues that the price difference is based on the traditional pricing in the industry, rather than the pricing which best reflects the costs involved — it has opted to price based on gender.
Far from ludicrous over-stretching of gender equality laws, it sounds more like the very reason they were made. No wonder the salon lost, and was ordered to pay a little under £300 in compensation.
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