Abstract
Women pay more than men for the same products. How can economic sociology explain such discrimination? To my mind, the most relevant theory to understand this issue is Bourdieu's one. The theory of the distinction developed by the French sociologist can apply to gender and explain the discrepancy by a differentiated socialization. Then, Zuckerman helps us to understand the issue through its concept of legitimacy and the idea that it determines the value of a product. Zelizer' theory, by focusing on the sacred on the profane, seems to be less relevant but presents some interesting points to understand the issue.
For Bourdieu, people in the society are, through their consumption, signaling to which group they belong. He explains, in his book La Distinction, that we consume products according to the social class to which we belong. This logic is, according to Bourdieu, mostly unconscious, due to what he calls our habitus, a word that designates the way of acting and behaving which results from our socialization. This habitus varies between social classes, because our parents do not teach us the same values, show us the same cultural stuffs, give us the same food to eat and so on whether they belong to the working class or to the dominant class. But Bourdieu's idea isn't just that an individual signals to which group he belongs through its consumption. It is also and maybe above all a way of establishing a distinction from the other social classes. In Bourdieu's theory it is the dominant class that creates, unconsciously, the distinction by making their behavior the distinguished one to achieve.
