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This source is an academic journal that factually discusses pink tax and to what amounts it happens. They then also look at specific items that are pink taxed, similar to Jezebel, Forbes, and other articles.

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For my final project I created a Prezi and shared it online to inform others. There have been no responses yet.
https://prezi.com/p/pytbuahs2gsx/

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The audience I chose to target was women, as they are the ones mainly effected by this issue. However, because my outcome was online, my secondary audience was men and others who don't know about pink tax.

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This source describes pink tax more and gives more specific facts proving it. It also sources New York's department of Consumer Affairs. They also include a new site, boxed, and offer an alternative to having to buy pink taxed items.

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ELM is brought to you by your local library or school media center, Minitex, and State Library Services, the MN state library agency, with state appropriations to the Minnesota Office of Higher Education and the Minnesota Department of Education, and federal LSTA funds under the support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

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This source describes current changes surrounding pink tax and compares items with unnecessary pink tax. They also discuss how women often pay more for services and other things without tax. This source then brings up some history of pink tax and includes quotes, ending with a call to action.

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Pink Tax Repeal Act Aims to Make Pricing Fair to Women

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Women are often charged more than men for similar products, a problem that is known as the Pink Tax. A proposed bill, endorsed by Consumer Report, intends to make such pricing practices illegal.

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This source is very factual, and presents a lot of information about specific items, including their prices and taxes. They also create an essay below this, bringing up objectives and the history of pink tax.

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This source talks specifically of items and their percentage of change in tax when they are targeted towards females. In New York, gender-biased service prices differences are banned, but they can't change the price of products.
"[Pink tax] doesn’t just apply to shampoo and razors—women pay more for almost every product over the course of their lives, from baby clothes to home health care items."

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Women Pay More for Everything Their Entire Lives

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Not just shampoo-the "pink tax" applies to baby clothes and adult diapers as well

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This source specifically defines pink tax and lists statistics about it, offering the viewer a more basic knowledge of the subject and questioning why it happens.

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CLOSE

NEW YORK - The "Pink Tax" has many women seeing red when it comes to gender inequity.

Whether it's razors, dry cleaning or toys, women still pay more for those gender-specific items than men, studies show. As Women's History Month draws to a close, gender-based pricing remains a stubborn issue that is yet to be solved, right along with equal pay for equal work.

"Price discrimination adds another layer to the wage inequality women face, making it harder sometimes for women to make ends meet," said Surina Khan, CEO of the Women's Foundation of California, a group devoted to advancement of gender equality. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that in the decade between 2004 and 2014, women earned 80% to 83% as much as men.

The Pink Tax, so named because of the color of products directly marketed to girls and women, refers to the price difference for female-specific products compared with the gender-neutral goods or those marketed to men. And even though the issue has been around for decades, it is still profound.

In late 2015, the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs published a study comparing nearly 800 products from more than 90 brands, looking for price differences in items marketed to different genders. On average, products for women or girls cost 7% more than comparable products for men and boys. For example:

* Apparel. Girls' clothing cost 4% more than boys, and women's clothing cost 8% more than men's. A side-by-side comparison of red, short-sleeve polo shirts used as uniforms showed a $2 difference despite there being no obvious difference in style or quality. Both came from the same retailer.

* Toys. Girls' toys and accessories cost an average of 7% more than boys' toys. Separately, a side-by-side comparison of two Radio Flyer My 1st Scooters showed this: A red scooter cost $24.99 and a pink scooter cost $49, despite them being identical in all other ways.

* Personal care. Women's personal care products also cost 13% more than men's, according to the department's study.

Normally, consumers look to supply and demand to remedy inequities. If prices get to high on a product or service, someone finds out how to provide it cheaper. But "not all markets are perfect," said Michael Cone, a customs attorney who filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade in 2007 that raised the broader question of whether different tariff rates for men's and women's apparel violate constitutional equal protection provisions. The case was dismissed, but discussion around the issue goes on.

There can be reasons to explain the differences. Service providers say that women's dry cleaning and haircuts tend to be more labor and time intensive, which is why women are willing to pay higher prices. Dry cleaners who use pressing machines, traditionally built for men's shirts, need to hand press women's shirts, a more labor-intensive, and costly, process. Women's often smaller and tapered clothes are typically not suited for these machines. Unisex machines exist at half the price of man-sized machines, but press fewer items of clothing per hour.

Ted Potrikus, CEO of the Retail Council of New York State, a statewide retail trade association, looks to different points along the supply chain that may explain price differences for seemingly identical products.

"Retailers see women as their biggest target," said Potrikus. "Research and development, following trends, meeting trends, advertising products on television and in magazines are not cheap." Companies are willing to spend more money advertising to women than they are toward men, contributing to the price discrepancies."

But some don't see marketing costs as a big factor. "Advertising that doesn't talk up the product but tells you you'll be prettier and more successful is emotional advertising," said Cone. "It creates insecurities and jacks up the price."

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2nFwKCc

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'Pink Tax' forces women to pay more than men

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CLOSE NEW YORK - The "Pink Tax" has many women seeing red when it comes to gender inequity. Whether it's razors, dry cleaning or toys, women still pay more for those gender-specific items than men, studies show.

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This source discusses more specifically the differences in prices on certain items for children. However, the author believes that the only way to change this is to force the manufacturers to even prices by only buying the cheaper- and usually not pink- items.

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Being 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.)

Who do we blame for this lunacy? Jenn Steele, the director of product marketing at the consumer data firm Indix (and a former product marketing manager at Amazon), says that when it comes to the online retail giant, it's the sellers who are responsible for setting their own prices. Some do it algorithmically, and others-typically smaller operations-do it manually. But why retailers price things the way they do is anyone's guess. Marketplace sellers are under enormous pressure to have their products featured in the site's coveted "buy box," often adjusting the cost of their items multiple times a day in an attempt to optimize their visibility.

"If you're finding consistently that pink sippy cups are more expensive than the exact same sippy cup in blue, then the marketplace could be putting pressure on sellers to drop the prices of the blue ones more," Steele said.

"But this is so much supposition. Because I could also say, 'OR they might just be jackasses, and they're doing it because they can.'"

The better question, said Anna Chu, Vice President for Income Security and Education at the National Women's Law Center, is what such price disparities say about the company setting them.

"These practices of charging more for pink goods-how does that speak to [a company's] overall policies about how they treat women and men?" she asked. "Are they the same companies who inexplicably pay 79 cents for the dollar that men are paid?"

The truly pernicious part of the price disparity in children's toys is that it's only the beginning. Over the course of their lives, women will pay more for everyday items 42 percent of the time, despite the fact that we make less money than men.

"You're basically squeezing women and families from both ends of the stick," Chu said. "You're squeezing them at their cost of living, and you're squeezing them at the wage end, too."

The bad news is that there really isn't any way of forcing retailers to set their prices fairly-at least not yet. In July, Congresswoman Jackie Speier introduced the Pink Tax Repeal Act, which would prohibit companies from charging different prices for similar products based on the customer's gender.

Following the release of the report, New York's Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs Lorelei Salas told me that some sellers did voluntarily even out their prices. Still, "it's a little hard when you don't have the stick of penalties or fines when you find an issue like that,"she said.

The best recourse women have is to vote with their dollars-why shouldn't a little girl have a green Power Wheels? Especially if it costs 50 bucks less than its pink counterpart.

"Fundamentally, I don't think retailers are going to change their behavior until we change our buying behavior," Steele said, adding that she herself as altered many of her own buying habits as a result of her research.

"If the pink is more expensive, don't buy it. Buy the green! Green is cheap. Awesome."

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Bad News, Ladies: The 'Pink Tax' Starts At Birth

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Being 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.

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This source discusses more specifically the differences in prices for certain items and a few brands. They average how much more a woman spends than a man because of this tax, and tried to sue McDonald's.

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Why would a "pink" stool softener cost 11% more than its blue counterpart?

Are the ingredients more expensive? Did it cost more to survey OB/GYNs? Is the company contributing $1 per package to Susan G. Komen?

Or are the manufacturer and retailer reaping higher profits on the pink package?

This last possibility is a central concern of a new Gender-Pricing Study of The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. The report, entitled "From Cradle to Cane: The Cost of Being a Female Consumer," compares the prices of nearly 800 product pairs with female and male analogs.

Overall, the Agency found that "women's products cost 7 percent more than similar products for men."

The Agency tried to select "products with comparable but distinctly gendered male and female versions" that "were closest in branding, ingredients, appearance, textile, construction, and/or marketing." This isn't so hard to do because a well-known marketing strategy is to " pink it and shrink it " where a manufacturer takes "an everyday product, producing it in a Pepto-Bismol-pink shade, and making it smaller for women to use."

A key concern is assessing whether the higher prices for female products are justified by differentially higher costs. A company might, for example, have higher fixed costs per unit on women's products if they sold at lower volume than men's products. The report acknowledges that there "may be legitimate drivers behind some portion of the price discrepancies unearthed in this study." It's easy to think of examples where the cost of tailoring a women's blouse might make it more expensive than the cost of tailoring a similar men's shirt (although women's clothing tends to use less material).

But a strength of the report is that it includes photos of a variety of products where it is unlikely that cost differentials justify the price difference. For example, take a look at these scooters (where I've covered the price of the female product):

How much more could the pink styling of the girl's Radio Flyer cost?

I bet it's a lot less than the $20 extra Target actually added on to the price - bringing the price for the girl's scooter to a whopping $44.99!

Or here's a "guess the pink price" game, where I've covered the price of several female products. Estimate what you think would be the maximum legitimate price that could be charged for the female products shown in the following screenshots given the price charged for their male counterparts:

Let's see how you did:

Target charged $13 (87%) more for the pink Raskullz helmet.

Levis charged $20 (29%) more for the women's jeans.

Walgreens charged $3.50 (23%) more for the Women cartridges

Walgreens charged 70 cents (35%) less for the Men's 3 in 1 shampoo.

I find it hard to believe that differentials of these magnitudes are justified by cost.

The different prices charged for products that are explicitly marketed to different genders can produce unjustified disparate impacts. Offering these products doesn't constitute what lawyers call "disparate treatment," as consumers of any gender are free to buy either the product labeled for men or women. But women are very likely to disproportionately purchase the higher-priced "female" products (after all, that's the purpose of the gendered marketing). In those states, like Connecticut, which have made it "illegal to be denied the full and equal enjoyment of goods, services or facilities offered to the general public because of your . . . sex," charging higher prices on products marketed to women may constitute actionable "disparate impact" discrimination.

The price differentials uncovered in the New York report, if found in other states, might be sufficient to shift the burden, for example, to retailers like Target to justify why they are charging 87% more for the girl's helmet. A Target representative when asked about its pricing differentials by a Washington Post reporter pointed to a company statement: " Our competitive shop process ensures that we are competitively priced in local markets. A difference in price can be related to production costs or other factors." If Target could show that its costs were 87% higher for selling the girl's helmet, that difference in cost would justify the differential in price. But meeting competitors' prices in local markets is not a business justification under the civil rights laws. The fact that your competitors are price-gouging on the girl's helmet doesn't mean that you have to. Price-gouging is never a business justification for discrimination - even if it really helps a seller raise its profits.

It is somewhat surprising that the NYC report fails to mention the need for strengthening civil rights laws to make such pronounced gendered price differentials illegal if the product retailer or manufacturer cannot demonstrate a credible cost-based justification. Instead the report was designed "to heighten consumer awareness . . . and to publicly shame companies with glaring disparities." The DCA encourages people to tweet about disparate prices with the hashtag #genderpricing.

But if public shaming of companies with glaring disparities is a goal, it is also surprising that the report didn't more explicitly identify the retailers with the most glaring problems. While the report's appendix includes the retailer identity for each of the products analyzed, the report does not analyze the average gender disparities of different retailers. I've done just that in the following table and sorted the results by retail/product type categories with the highest female to male price differential:

The table shows that Club Monaco holds the dubious honor of having the most disparate prices, charging an average of 28.9% more on its women's products than on its men's products. For the 14 (7 female, 7 male) products analyzed, the female product was 6 times more likely to have the higher price. Urban Outfitters and Levis were not far behind with pricing disparities on adult clothing of 24.6% and 24.3% respectively.

The most substantial "pink taxes" in other product categories were charged by the following retailers:

Carter's for Children's Clothing 18.8%

CVS for Personal Care Products 14.7%

Target for Senior Home Health Care Products 12.1%

The most substantial retailer pricing differential for "Toys and Accessories" was charged by

Babies "R" Us, but the 11.1% differential was based on just 2 male/female product pairings.

It is also useful to note how well some retailers did. OshKosh B'gosh for example charged the same price on its boys and girls children clothing 82.4% of the time. Costco on the single Senior/Home Health Care product pair analyzed charged the same price. American Apparel half the time charged higher prices on its adult male clothing and half the time higher prices on its adult female clothing. The report doesn't mention it, but the report's data shows that Old Navy on average charges 12.9% more on men's adult clothing than on the similar woman's clothing - suggesting pricing bias in favor of women

The NYC report mentions a 1994 California study estimating "women effectively paid an annual 'gender tax' of approximately $1,351 for the same services as men." Whether you call it a #pink tax, a #gender tax or #shoppingwhilefemale, the report shows that substantial price discrimination is still very much with us, and probably not justified by credible cost differences.

P.S. My daughter and I have unsuccessfully sued McDonald's franchises claiming, inter alia, that giving boys and girls different Happy Meal toys without asking their preference violated Connecticut's public accommodation law. We have argued for a multi-factored test for assessing whether gendered marketing should run afoul of our civil rights law.

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Which Retailers Charge the Largest 'Pink Tax'?

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Why would a "pink" stool softener cost 11% more than its blue counterpart? Are the ingredients more expensive? Did it cost more to survey OB/GYNs? Is the company contributing $1 per package to Susan G. Komen? Or are the manufacturer and retailer reaping higher profits on the pink package?