Feminist Pricing Strategies: Building Prices That Are Fair, Accessible, Generative, and Community-Building

Most pricing advice for womxn tells you to charge what you’re worth and stop apologizing. That’s not wrong, but it treats pricing as a technical problem: You calculate a number and prepare to defend it.  I teach pricing as a feminist practice, as a way we practice what we preach as feminist businesspeople.

Here’s the core of what I’ve developed and teach in this workshop: pricing is never a neutral, technical practice. Every price is a proxy for value — not just what something costs, but what a business chooses to circulate, redistribute, and make possible. Womxn and marginalized people are, in practical terms, triple-taxed: lower wages, higher costs, and a culturally diminished sense of self-worth that shows up directly in how we price our own work. Not to mention, in what our customers are able to pay.  Once you see the politics behind pricing, “just charge what you’re worth” stops being sufficient advice — because the number you land on is never just about you. It’s a feminist decision, whether you’ve been treating it that way or not. Pricing is one of the business practices you can use to promote feminist values and help advance the flourishing of womxn and marginalized men.

Roughly the first half of this session is that theoretical grounding — my framework, not a summary of general pricing wisdom. You’ll work through:

• Why I treat pricing as a feminist issue — how wage gaps become price gaps, why “charge what you’re worth” can quietly reproduce the same inequities it claims to fix, and why I reject the idea that there’s one “correct” price for anything
• My framework for prices as a proxy for value — what else is actually being circulated in a transaction besides money, and what I call “feminist currencies” (trust, access, redistribution, relationship) look like in practice
• Transactions vs. relationships — my case for using price as a bridge connecting the value you offer to the people who need it, instead of treating every sale as a closed, one-time exchange of money and product
• What I mean by feminist financial success — pricing that’s generative rather than merely sufficient: covering your costs, yes, but also contributing to a community’s flourishing, including your own

The second half moves from why to how. I’ll walk you through four proven models for turning that thinking into an actual pricing structure — description-based sliding scales, business-stage pricing, income-based pricing, and reparations/privilege pricing — drawing on work from other feminist practitioners I credit directly, plus my own synthesis of how these fit together. You’ll leave with a draft of your own.

This is a workshop, not a lecture: expect discussion throughout, not just in a closing Q&A. And it’s not just about accessibility mechanics — it’s my attempt to permanently change how you think about what a price is for.

In this session, you’ll get:

• My framework for feminist pricing — why fair, accessible, generative, and community-building aren’t in tension, and how I hold all four at once
• The conceptual groundwork: prices as value proxies, feminist currencies, and pricing as a relationship rather than a transaction — the arguments I make and teach, not a roundup of other people’s ideas
• Four working models for accessible pricing, with real examples:
  • Description-based sliding scales — helping customers self-identify their price tier based on a description of financial circumstance, not a means test (h/t Hadassah Damien’s widely-circulated model)
  • Business-stage pricing — matching price to where a client’s business is, from nascent to fully operational, particularly useful for B2B services (modeled on Toi Smith’s Business for the People approach)
  • Income-based pricing — tying price directly to what someone earns, borrowed from social work sliding-scale practice
  • Reparations and privilege pricing — building an explicit redistribution structure into your price tiers, so people with more capacity pay more by design
  • Self-select tiers — an honor-system model where customers choose their own tier without justification (as used by Andrea Renee, Whole Self Liberation)
• A working session to draft your own pricing structure using whichever model fits your business
• Direct Q&A on your specific pricing questions — bring the pricing language that’s bothered you, the examples that felt right, and the numbers you’re stuck on

Expect to leave with both a shifted understanding of what pricing is for — my framework for that shift — and a draft structure you can actually use.

Note: This workshop is Version 4 of material introduced online in 2014 and in workshops since Jan 2021.