Sometimes things are so covert that they are overt - just like PINK TAX. The pink tax is a form of gender-based price discrimination. It refers to an inherently invisible cost that women have to pay for products designed and marketed specifically to women, as against the same products designed and marketed to men, which are often available for less. This phenomenon is not limited to first-world countries. In India too, women pay pink tax on a wide variety of products and services marketed specifically to them.
For Instance, in a Salon, the same haircut costs more for women compared to that men. This is also true for personal care products such as razors and deodorants.
Another instance of discriminatory Pink tax is if you pick up a razor from a certain brand marketed to a man, you would notice that the cheapest razor (for a pack of 5) is priced at Rs 88. On the other hand, if you pick up the cheapest razor of the same brand marketed for a woman, you’ll notice the price at Rs 80 (for a pack of 1).
Why is this a concern?
Women earned less than men and coupled with having to pay more for every little product or service, will just end up making women, poorer in the end. The goal of the Pink tax is to further intensify the gender gap and create a profit off the minute differences in the products. It hinders the progress we made to reduce gender inequality.
"The Pink Tax promotes gender discrimination and encourages the patriarchal society."
The amount of money spent due to the Pink Tax is significant in another way as well, since there is an investigating gap with women putting away less than men for retirement.
Attempts to Regulate the Pink Tax
When a company sells a pink product (the female version) for more than a blue product (the male version), the additional revenue from the pink product does not go to the government. The only beneficiaries of the "pink tax" are the companies that charge women more than men . The pink tax also doesn’t refer to the cost of items such as lipstick and menstrual products that many women use and pay for throughout their lives but that most men do not.
Several states have passed laws against the discriminatory gender-based pricing of products and services. There’s also been at least one attempt to pass such a law at the federal level.
The goal is to regulate seemingly unjust price discrepancies out of existence. After all, women already earn less income; why should they also pay more for equivalent products and services?
The Bottom Line
The pink tax may not be an actual tax, except in the case of disparate import tariffs on women’s apparel. But hundreds of products marketed toward women end up costing more than nearly identical products targeted toward men. Evidence of gendered price discrimination clearly exists, even if there is room to debate why it exists or how serious or costly a problem it is.
The world is slowly changing towards becoming a fairer one, but through this process, there will be inconveniences like the pink tax, and, we, as women, need to account in, plan for and strategize our savings in order to be future-ready!
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Author
The article was written by Khushi Jain who is currently pursuing Economics honors from Daulat RAM College, Delhi University, and is a first-year student.
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