Pink Tax

The pink tax is a practice that isn’t known by most people but is still a very important gender issue. In our world today, contrary to what many people believe, sexism, homophobia and racism are still at large, causing many discriminatory practices in our lives. One of them is the pink tax.

The pink tax is a tax imposed on more than 50% of our society and most of us don’t even realise it. It’s a sexist tax that is imposed on products for women. Women, on average, pay about $1400 more than men because their everyday products are more expensive than men simply because they're pink. For quite some time now, blue has been associated with the masculine colour and pink as the feminine colour. If a gender likes the colour they are not supposed to, especially boys liking pink, they get severely bullied for it.

But economically the colours mean much more. Pink products from prams baby girls would use, to shaving razors that you would use for the rest of your life, pink products often have prices that are double the blue products. Are they different in any way? Not at all. In fact female products might be smaller, yet more expensive than male products. This is a classic marketing strategy called ‘Shrink it and pink it’. Shrink the item and direct it towards women.

Women get less for the same price as shown in the picture above. Another example of the pink tax would be dry cleaning. Dry cleaning a woman’s shirt would be more expensive than a man’s shirt although both use the same techniques and ingredients. Menstruation products, products that are necessary for women’s hygiene but aren’t free and can’t be ignored on the shopping list are also very expensive. Adding to the high pile of money, pads and tampons are taxed as luxury goods, which is a fundamental misunderstanding on its own. Before a woman’s menopause she spends about 10,000 dollars on period products alone and sadly she can’t choose not to buy it. Scotland became the first country to provide free menstruation products only recently so that was a small improvement but we’ll get there.

A point to remember here is that women only make 80c for every dollar that a man makes that a man makes and women of colour make even less. It has been calculated that if the pink tax didn’t exist by the end of each year a woman could buy a macbook pro with the amount of money she saved.

So a solution to this problem would be to educate other women on this problem and fix the gender gap. It will take a century to happen(that’s actually a fact, at the rate we are making progress it will take 108 years to close the gender gap) so in the meantime, women, buy blue products and move to Scotland.