Why do female models earn more than male models?
Most people know about the existence of a Gender Pay Gap: women tend to earn less than men even when doing the same jobs in the same organisations. But very occasionally the pay-gap is reversed, and it is women who earn more than men for doing the same job. This is clearly revealed in recently released figures showing the annual earnings of top models — female and male. A quick glance at the figures shows that the earnings of female fashion models far outstrip those of male models. The top grossing female model, Kendall Jenner, earned last year 15 times the amount of the top male model, Sean O’Pry.
Do these figures show that fashion modelling is the one industry that isn’t sexist? Or even that the industry discriminates against men? Economics suggests this is not the answer, and the analysis of the fashion industry helps to shed light on what determines wages of workers in general.
In Economics, we don’t ask the question “what should models/nurses/footballers/(insert your own), earn?”. That’s for politicians and moral philosophers. But we do try to understand the reasons behind these earnings figures. Why do female models earn so much more than male models? Why do premiership football players earn so much more than nurses? The latter has of course been much in the news. A simple analysis of demand and supply can help us to understand the cause of these wage differentials. That does not mean the reader accepts a market wage as being “deserved” or that nurses are not worth more. But our economic models provide us with a way of understanding why things are the way they are.
A central factor explaining how much people earn is how much people are prepared to pay for the service they offer. In the case of female fashion models, it is the case that demand is relatively higher than that for their male counterparts. People organising a fashion shoot or publicity event are prepared to pay much more for the services of a top female model than they are for a top male model. And why are they prepared to pay more? Because the female model is believed (correctly) to bring in more money to the company than a male model. The service she yields is more valuable. The extra revenue a worker brings to a company is called the Marginal Revenue Product (MRP) of the worker. Female models have a higher MRP than male models. There are two reasons for this:
- Female fashion, makeup and accessories is a far larger business than the male equivalent. Women, on average, spend twice as much on clothing as men do. Womenswear had the biggest share of the broader $1.7 trillion apparel and footwear market in 2017, with menswear less than a quarter, Euromonitor data shows. So associating your brand with an attractive female makes more sense — a successful advert has the potential to shift much more stock than would an advert by a male model.
- A female model appears to add more value to a brand than a male model. Having a beautiful female associated with your product raises demand and brings in more sales than a male model. As a result, the demand for female fashion models is high and this bids up the wage.
The result of these two factors is to raise the demand for female models above that for male models. The demand curve for labour reflects the amount people are prepared for a certain type of labour. As we have seen, companies are prepared to pay more for a female model than that are for a male and hence the demand curve for female models is above that for male models. For a given supply of models, the equilibrium payment for female models will be higher.
In the diagram above, D is the demand for male models, and D1 the demand for female models. For any given supply of models, the demand for female models is higher than for male. Hence while the equilibrium wage for male models, where D=S, is W, for female models it is W1. As can be seen, both the wage and number of models employed is greater in the female market. More women than men will be models and they will be paid more.
However the market for men’s fashion and accessories is growing at a much faster rate than women’s so this may change in the years to come. If the revenue male models bring to a company is expected to increase, then the MRP of male models will rise and the demand curve will shift upwards, raising the earnings of male models. If this does indeed happen we can maybe expect the gap between female and male model earns to narrow in the years to come.
