I am a woman with a short, boyish hairstyle. Is it unfair that I am charged more for a haircut than a man with similarly short hair? Different prices for different genders seems to me like a sexist relic from a less enlightened time. When I called local salons to find a new stylist (mine moved away), many of them balked when I said I should be charged the men’s rate because I have short hair. Many salons claim that “it has always been done that way.” This seems like a very bad excuse for an antiquated and discriminatory policy. YUKI MURATA, SANTA FE, N.M.

Just to make my biases clear, let me open by stating the following: I hate getting my hair cut. It’s a boring experience that always seems like a rip-off. Moreover, I feel that the worldwide obsession with hair, clothing and shoes is the clearest illustration of mass superficiality within human culture, and that the outsize role these things play in day-to-day life is corrosive for everyone.

That said, I agree with your complaint (unless you are not telling me the whole story).

If you walk into a salon and request the same haircut that would be given to a male patron, you should be charged the same. But this assumes that these cuts are literally identical. The length of the hair isn’t necessarily a reflection on the complexity of the cut. Anne Hathaway sometimes wears short hair, but I’m sure her haircut still takes far more time than the one given to Jeremy Renner (barring his recent, well-coiffed appearance in “American Hustle”). Gregg Allman and Cher both had long hair in the 1970s, but I’m confident they weren’t requesting identical haircuts.

Salon prices are built around a wholly reasonable supposition: In general, women’s haircuts are more complicated and time-intensive than men’s haircuts. Certainly, there are exceptions to this rule. But it’s not unethical for salons to use a system that makes sense 99 percent of the time; all they need to do is recognize that exceptions exist. And it sounds as if you are one of these exceptions. So if you tell a barber, “Give me the exact same haircut you would give a man in my position,” you should be charged the same price as a man.