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I’ve got a couple of questions for you all today, folks. Is it cheaper to be a girl or a guy in today’s society? Is it cheaper to raise a guy or a girl?
I recently told my girlfriend my idea for this post, and she immediately said, “It’s loads more expensive to be/raise a girl! Are you nuts? How is that even a question?”
So, even though the answer to this question may seem apparent to some, let’s do our due-diligence and find out once and for all if it’s cheaper to be guy or a girl.
In doing some quick research, I couldn’t find any definitive studies on this subject. However, there was some good general guidance out there about the types of things that guys/girls have to spend money on.
Let’s take a look at some of these to see if we can find a concrete answer!
- Cars/Car Insurance
- It’s a well known fact that girls have cheaper car insurance than guys. I think this is because girls tend to get in to smaller, more frequent accidents, but when guys get in to accidents, they are more likely to be making a HUGE error and total the car.
- Winner = Cheaper to be a girl.
- Clothes/Shoes
- There is no question in my mind that girls spend more on clothes and shoes. Guys wear the same clothes for years and have 4 pairs of shoes (brown, black, sandals, and running shoes). Girls have 10^100000 pairs of shoes. One for every outfit.
- Winner = Cheaper to be a guy.
- Â Dating
- The generally accepted practice in today’s dating culture is for the guy to pay for the date. Both guys and girls probably buy about the same amount on birthday/Xmas presents. However, guys also have to pay for Valentine’s Day ideas and other random gifts/flowers (even if you get them discounted like I do from 1-800-Flowers.com) that cause the overall cost to go up.
- Winner = Cheaper to be a girl.
- Marriage
- The guy has to buy the engagement ring. Sadly, the generally accepted practice for this is to spend about 1 month’s salary on this (if you make $60,000 a year, this amounts to $5000). So, this causes the price of being a guy to go up.
- When it comes to the actual wedding, the girl’s parents usually pay twice as much as the guy’s parents.
- Winner = Tie. Cheaper to have a guy as a child, but cheaper to be the girl getting married.
- Food/Drink
- Guys definitely eat more. However, I feel like girls tend to eat higher quality/expensive food. But, I think that guys tend to eat out more often, driving the cost up.
- In addition, guys tend to be the “providers/buyers” of drinks at parties and bars. This also drives up the cost of being a guy.
- Winner = Cheaper to be a girl.
- Hygiene
- Since girls wear makeup, I believe that this drives the comparative costs up.
- Winner = Cheaper to be a guy.
- Sports
- This category is a tough call, as I think that for the most part, it is equal between boys and girls.Â
- However, I think that our culture places more importance on guys playing sports (for better or for worse). Therefore, guys are more apt to be involved in multiple sports.
- Winner = Cheaper to be a girl.
- Personal note – It was probably my sports of baseball and cycling that made me slightly more expensive to raise than my sister growing up. This was due to the fact that competitive cycling required a lot of expensive equipment (think multiple thousand Dollar bikes, shoes, wheels, etc) and the traveling that was involved.
Putting all of the results together, 5 times out of the 7 categories listed, it was cheaper to be a girl. 3 times out of the 7, it was cheaper to be a guy. So, by just looking at the number of categories, it appears that girls would be cheaper.
However, I think you have to also consider the magnitude that guys save in some of the categories in which they are cheaper (probably the clothes category especially).Â
Because of this, I’m going to get on my soap box here and conclude that girls are more expensive to raise (from parents’ perspective), and actually being a guy is about as costly as being a girl in the long run (even though this might not be apparent on a day-to-day basis).
How about you all? What do you think? Is it more expensive to raise a boy or a girl? Is it more expensive to be a girl or a guy? Did I leave out any big categories of spending?
Share your experiences by commenting below!
***Photo courtesy of http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4137/4915591835_721ab43540.jpg
