The Glam Tax Is a Trap — And It Just Got a Gym Membership
You’re already earning less. Now they want you to spend more — and call it empowerment.
Picture this: You’ve been invited to a team networking event. You show up expecting cocktails and conversation. Instead, there’s a woman in scrubs with a syringe.
Welcome to the Botox party. The new frontier of workplace belonging.
I wish I were making this up.
First, let’s talk about the math
Women in the U.S. earn $0.82 for every dollar men earn — and that gap widened in 2026. Equal Pay Day this year fell on March 26, meaning women effectively worked nearly three extra months into 2026 just to match what men earned in 2025.
But here’s what the pay gap headlines miss: we’re not just earning less. We’re spending more.
The glam tax (the additional cost women pay simply to participate in professional life) is real, relentless, and rarely named for what it is.
We pay more for the products themselves. Personal care products marketed to women cost on average 13% more than equivalent products for men. Items specifically labeled “for women” run 17% higher than their male-gendered counterparts. Same ingredients. Different packaging. Higher price.
We also pay for categories that don’t even exist in men’s professional lives: accessories, manicures, pedicures, skincare routines, makeup. A man’s grooming routine is optional. A woman’s is assessed.
A Utah publicist recently shared that she spends $12,000 a year just to maintain the appearance expected in her market. That’s not unusual. That’s the tax.
And the cruelest part? Studies show that “well-groomed” women actually earn higher salaries — which means the tax isn’t irrational. It’s coerced. You pay it or you pay a different price.
Now they’ve added a weight room
A recent Business Insider piece celebrated what it called a new era: ambitious women are turning to strength training to “project an image of competence, drive, and self-mastery.” Gyms are another networking venue. A muscular physique is the new status symbol. One executive described her lifting routine as “a direct investment in leadership capacity.”
And I want to be clear: strength training is genuinely good for you. The health benefits are real. If you love the weight room, lift. Please.
But let’s not miss what Business Insider is also describing.
The old boys’ club had golf courses and strip bars. Now powerful women are building their version - and it lives in the weight room. The message underneath the empowerment framing is the same one it’s always been: to belong here, your body needs to look a certain way.
Sculpted is the new smooth. Gains are the new glam.
One Fortune executive was quoted saying that women “simply won’t last” without physical strength. I’d push back on that. Thousands of women have built extraordinary careers without six-pack abs. What they had was something the glam tax can’t sell you.
Here’s what actually builds a career
The research on what drives women’s advancement is unambiguous: it isn’t how you look in a gym selfie. It’s being known as a leader with skills including:
Engagement excellence — the ability to form and sustain strong relationships with direct reports, colleagues, managers, others in your value creation chain inside and outside the organization.
Personal greatness — being known for valued attributes and values such as trustworthy, ethical, curious, etc. And, of course,
Business savvy — the ability to understand how your organization creates value, how decisions get made, how to connect your work to outcomes that matter. The leg of leadership that women are most undercoached on, and most likely to overlook while spending their time, energy, and money on everything except the thing that moves the needle.
The glam tax works precisely because it’s invisible as a tax. It looks like personal greatness. It looks like self-care. It looks like wellness. It looks like belonging. But what it actually does is redirect your finite resources — money, time, attention — away from the development that compounds.
A $12,000 appearance budget, invested instead in executive education, financial acumen, business strategy or professional/industry associations, changes your trajectory.
An hour a day spent lifting - if it’s more about optics than health - is an hour not spent understanding your P&L, studying your competitive landscape, or building the relationships with decision-makers that actually open doors.
Both change your trajectory. Just not in the same direction.I’m not saying choose between your health and your career. I’m saying: see the glam tax for what it is before you pay it.
Questions worth asking
Here’s something I learned decades ago that I’ve never forgotten.
The Wodaabe people of West Africa have a tradition called the Gerewol — an annual male beauty pageant in which men spend hours applying makeup, jewelry, and elaborate adornments to be judged by women. Unlike other cultures where women are expected to beautify themselves to attract suitors, Wodaabe men spend the time, effort, and financial resources on adornment — and the women do the choosing. FunTimes Magazine
When women hold the power, men wear the makeup.
Which raises an uncomfortable question about everything we’ve been told regarding our own beauty rituals: do we wear makeup, dye our hair, shave our legs, accessorize, and smooth our faces with Botox because it makes us feel better — or because we’ve been so thoroughly conditioned by a male-centered culture that we can no longer tell the difference?
I’m not here to tell you the answer. That’s genuinely personal, and I mean that. There is real pleasure in adornment. There is real confidence that comes from feeling put-together. I’m not arguing for a world without lipstick.
But I am arguing for clarity.
Real self-care restores you. It serves your health, your energy, your joy. It asks nothing of the patriarchy and gives nothing to it.
The glam tax is something different. It’s the spending you do not because it restores you, but because you fear what happens if you don’t. It’s the Botox between client calls. The $12,000 annual appearance budget. The injectable “team-building” event you felt you couldn’t skip. The gym membership you got not for your health but for your optics.
So the next time you reach for the expensive moisturizer, the new power suit, the gym membership marketed to ambitious women; stop for just a moment and ask yourself honestly:
Am I doing this for me? Or am I paying the tax?
Only you know the answer. But you deserve to ask the question.
And then ask this one too:
Who benefits when I believe my body is the price of admission — paid for with my unequal pay?
Not you.
You’re already bringing your greatness. You don’t owe anyone a particular version of it.
From my soapbox,
Susan
What do you think about the glam tax? I’d love to hear it in the comments.
If you’re looking for content that directly addresses the business, financial and strategic acumen you want more of — the kind of development that complements the presence and relational work you’re already doing — Be Business Savvy (specifically the Be Business Savvy course) is built for exactly this purpose. The content is designed to be accessible even if you didn’t come up through finance or strategy, and rigorous enough to make a real difference in how you show up as a viable candidate for opportunity.
I welcome your next step:
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Susan