By Shreya Vikram
What is the Pink Tax? The pink tax is the difference in amounts of money women are forced to pay for certain products and services compared to the amounts of money men are forced to pay for similar products and services. Items such as menstrual products, hygiene products, even dry cleaning apply to the Pink Tax. Overall, women pay more than men 42% of the time which is about $1,351 more a year in extra costs. The following list is how much more certain products cost for women than for men:
7% more for toys and accessories
4% more for children’s clothing
8% more for adult clothing
13% more for personal care products
8% more for senior/home health care products
Boomerang Commerce did a study of 50 popular kids products at 6 online retailers including Target, Amazon, and Walmart. After carefully analyzing items in a variety of colors, every time, the items that were colored pink were the most expensive. Pink items compared to other colors ranged from 2-15% more expensive. Not only are primarily women’s items taxed, but even items that are merely targeted towards women are taxed.
Why do we have the Pink Tax? The main reason is product differentiation. It usually takes longer to create products targeted for women. Women haircuts are more labor-intensive than men’s, women hair products have better ingredients (most men’s hair products don’t care about the ingredients as much as they just want the job done), and dry cleaning certain women’s clothing can be more tricky than men’s. In theory, the Pink Tax can be understandable, IF it was only applying to more personal care such as listed above, but it also applies to hygiene products. Pads and tampons are considered “luxury items” in multiple countries, including America. However, it is not a “luxury” to have menstruation. About 58% of women said they’d found themselves without a tampon or pad during their period at least once in their lives. Many homeless women have to rely on using rags or their own clothes to help with their periods. Doing this can cause vaginal yeast infections, which can cause death if untreated.
What is the current state of the Pink Tax around the world? The current California Governor, Gavin Newsom, has been planning to eliminate the sales taxes on tampons. However, the current status of the plan is unknown. Nevada has just eliminated the tampon tax which has freed consumers of a 6.85% sales tax when they buy tampons and sanitary pads. There are currently only 10/50 US states that do not tax tampons, Nevada being the 10th. The states are Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Montana, Oregon, Minnesota, Delaware, and Nevada. Kenya was the First Nation to abolish the tampon tax in 2004, Canada dropped the tax in 2015, and Malaysia, India, and Australia dropped the tax in 2019.
The best way for you to help abolish the Pink Tax is to spread awareness about its existence and sign this petition on change.org for California to get rid of the Pink Tax: https://www.change.org/p/governor-newsom-stop-the-tampon-tax-in-california through this petition you can also find petitions for other states to do the same.
Statistics from https://www.listenmoneymatters.com/the-pink-tax/
Σχόλια