If you picture the gender pay gap as a three-legged stool, the pink tax is leg number three. It’s the demand side of wages, and it results in women giving up larger shares of their wallets than men for similar products. Shampoo, jeans, wool socks, ball-point pens, you name it. The pink tax is a form of gender-based price discrimination and women have been paying it for decades.
Multiple factors contribute to the pink tax. One sneaky factor? U.S. import taxes. Our country’s tariff code has inequalities written directly into it, and now is prime time to talk about not the import taxes themselves, but their gendered impact on our country.