Bad News, Ladies: The 'Pink Tax' Starts At Birth
LatestBeing a woman is expensive. It’s a well–reported fact that everyday products—from razors and deodorants to jeans—cost more when marketed toward women than men. The crummy additional news is that women start getting ripped off right from their first sippy cup, an injustice that will persist until the day our pink, sequined coffins are finally lowered into our overpriced “Hers” graves.
The argument du jour is that it’s simply costlier to manufacture women’s goods: That feminine floral scents are more expensive to produce than Generic Man Clean, that the features of our bodies require additional sewing finesse to properly account for the complicating presence of boobs. It’s bullshit, of course, but nothing elucidates why it’s bullshit quite as vividly as the cost of children’s toys.
It took me around 20 minutes to dig up multiple examples of a so-called “pink tax” in children’s toys—functionally identical items that are several dollars more when sold in the color pink versus the color blue. As of Friday, the Ty Tinker Blue Bear was $29.99, while the Ty Pudder Pink Bear was $34.99. Fisher-Price’s Power Wheels Jeep Wrangler in blue was $194.63, while the identical Barbie Jammer in pink was $214.88 (the blue car’s price has been raised slightly, but is still less than the pink car).
I’d also noted that this Schwinn was discounted to $70.38 from $79.99 in blue, but full price in pink. Those bikes are now priced identically at $79.99, and the same shift has occurred for the bears. The changes in price happened after I emailed Amazon and asked for comment on the price discrepancy; though there’s no indication that my poking at this issue is why there’s been a shift, the company did not respond to my request for comment.
The evidence for the “pink tax” even among girls and boys is more than anecdotal: A 2015 study conducted by New York City’s Department of Consumer Affairs found that girl’s toys cost more 55 percent of the time, and that girl’s clothes cost more 26 percent of the time. General toys were found to cost around 11 percent more for girls than boys.
(Though the study was conducted by an NYC agency, the investigation focused only on national retailers.)