It's official: women return twice as many clothes as men. But why?

1 in 5 items sold by women-focused apparel stores is returned, vs 1 in 8 at men's stores.

Have you ever wondered whether men really are less picky about their outfit choices? Or maybe they just have a knack for picking the right item first time? I was curious whether the stereotype is real, and what better way to test it than with actual data!

What I found when I dug in was more interesting than I expected. Across 28 million orders from 400+ online apparel retailers, 1 in 5 items sold by women-focused stores comes back. At men-focused stores, it’s 1 in 8. A 20% vs 12% return rate is not something to ignore. But when I went looking for obvious explanations, I had great difficulty finding them.

The return gap persists across every season

Women’s returns are seasonal - they peak in Q1 and Q2, then settle into a Q4 low reliably. Men’s returns barely move from quarter to quarter, though across years they’ve slowly drifted from 13% down to 10%.

A reasonable explanation for the Q4 slump could be Christmas: gifts bought in December, opened on the 25th, and never returned. For orders placed in December, the share of women’s returns taking more than 30 days to come back nearly doubles, from a 15% baseline to 26%. So the January spike does contain a measurable layer of likely gifts returned late. But 74% of December returns still process within a month, which means most of the Q1 surge is real Q1 buying behavior, with a Christmas cherry on top.¹

The return gap holds at every single price point

The simplest explanation for the gender gap is price composition: women’s apparel simply costs more on average, and expensive things get scrutinized and sent back. But the data doesn’t appear to support that claim.

If we cut every item in the dataset into price bands, the return gap largely holds across each one. Under $25, women’s items return at 7% vs 4.5% for men’s. At $25 to $50, it’s 18% vs 10%. At $250 and up, 27% vs 14%. Roughly double, in every band, from a $20 t-shirt to a $300 dress. Whatever drives women’s returns, it isn’t the price tag.

Men’s returns climb smoothly with price and plateau around $100, a textbook more-money-more-scrutiny curve. Women’s returns spike to 27% above $250, the highest rate anywhere in the analysis. So while there is some truth in an increased price resulting in an increased return rate, the distribution across men and women is roughly equal; it’s not only the price of items that explains the gap.

The bracketing myth has it backwards

If price doesn’t explain it, the next suspect is bracketing: ordering the same item in two or three sizes, keeping the one that fits, returning the rest. A kind of at-home fitting room if you will. So, are women just better at trying on different sizes?

When women order the same item in multiple sizes or colors, those items return at 13%. That’s below their single-item rate of 17%. Deliberate bracketing is in fact the best-behaved part of women’s returns. Men are the true bracketers: their bracketed items come back at 16%, nearly double their 9% single-item baseline.

There is a genuine outlier however: women buying two or more of the identical item return at 27%, the kind of purchase that looks like you ordered a second as “a backup”. Imagine attending a wedding and the day before it gets stained; the sensible choice would be to purchase a back-up and if not needed, return it!

Even if you strip out all the multi-buys, the gap is still there. Single-item purchases are returned at a rate of 17%, vs 9% for men’s. The women’s apparel return premium for retailers is inescapable, it seems.

Of course there will always be orders of the same item where double-buying was purely a mistake. But surely this is something that men and women are as equally likely to do? Unless men are too sheepish to admit they made a mistake?!

So what is it, if not price or bracketing?

Here’s my best guess: sizing. A men’s medium is a medium almost everywhere. A women’s 8 is a guideline that varies by brand, by silhouette, sometimes by batch. Fit uncertainty on a single garment, with no fitting room and no penalty for guessing wrong, would produce exactly the pattern in this data: an elevated return rate on individual items that no amount of price-controlling or bracket-blaming makes disappear. What the data does establish is that the one behavior retailers most often blame, deliberate multi-size ordering, is measurably not the only problem.

High return rates are a long-tail problem, not a womenswear destiny

One more bonus cut of the data, because it changes what a retailer should take from all this. Nearly 1 in 4 women-focused retailers sees returns above 20%. For men-focused retailers it’s about 1 in 20. That long-tail drags the segment average up; it doesn’t describe the typical store. At the other end, 17% of women-focused retailers keep returns under 5%, the same share as men’s. Selling to the same customers, in the same category, a meaningful group of women’s stores post return rates that would look respectable on a menswear P&L.

What’s next?

There’s a finding from this same analysis for next time: take the same brands, selling the same clothes, and compare what happens when the parcel ships to Britain versus America. The returns gap makes the gender gap look small.

In the meantime, if you run an apparel brand and your return rate would surprise me in either direction, let me know. The under-5% club is real and I want to know what it knows!

Footnotes

¹ Measured as days between order date and refund processing date. Baseline months (Jan–Oct) show ~15.5% of refunds taking over 30 days; December-placed orders show 26.1%. Presumably there is a Christmas slowdown around the holidays!