Multiple research has shown that a baby girl’s clothing costs more than that of boy’s. As a girl further matures through life’s cycle, she has to cope with the high price of sanitary towels, just because she has a period. With over 83 million people living below the poverty line in Nigeria, sanitary towels are a luxury many women and girls cannot afford.

Every day, the female gender faces implicit and explicit biases from cultural facets, discriminations, inequalities and barriers that hinder her self development and economic progress.

These factors reveal themselves in a number of ways from the gender wage gap, financial exclusion, poverty, social and cultural exclusion; and the list is indeed inexhaustible.

But beneath this dire portrait lurks a hidden upcharge, taxing the female consumer through her lifecycle for specific products and services on sale. In other words, the female consumer gets to pay an extra amount for similar products as her male counterpart. The only difference here is the product design and sadly, the end-user being a woman.

This unfair gendered pricing has been dubbed the Pink Tax.

The Pink Tax exerts itself in a number of products and services from self care items like shaving sticks, body wash, drugs, women’s clothing, hairstyling, automobile repairs, insurance to children’s toys. What’s so interesting about the Pink Tax is that women pay for it without even knowing that they do. How ridiculous!

Read more about the Pink Tax

What exactly is this Pink Tax and is it in Nigeria?

To better understand the Pink Tax phenomena, allow me the honor to quiz you for a few seconds. Let’s go. Are you a girl or a woman? Do you buy feminine hygiene products like sanitary pads, shaving sticks, deodorants and body wash? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are definitely paying the Pink Tax.

The Pink Tax is not really a tax. It’s rather a form of gender priced discrimination targeted towards female consumers.

According to a research by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, products targeted to girls and women cost an average of 7% more than those targeted to boys and men. That is,the female consumer is likely to pay ‘thousands of dollars more over the course of their lives to purchase similar products as men’.

Further research by independent bodies revealed that women were paying 42% extra more than men all of the time. That’s a whopping N624,000! Money that can be put into other things like investments and pension.

Now holl-up here, if you think say na only oyibo people get this Pink Tax wahala. My sister, Pink Tax, has built a mansion in Nigeria and holds a significant amount of economic implications for women. If you still doubt the existence of the Pink Tax, go to a supermarket close by and compare the prices of girls and boys toys or just shaving sticks for men and women. You’d discover that the ones in pretty pink or purple packs cost more than the blue ones. Yet they perform the same function.

So why this gendered price bias against women?

Advocates for the ‘Pink Tax levy’ argue on the basis that women are less price-sensitive than men. In other words, women do not care about the extra prices they have to pay for specific products or services than men. Other arguments in favor of Pink Tax claim the cosmetic packaging of female branded products contributes to its high price thereby, heaping the cost burden of product design on the female consumer through the Pink Tax.

Critics of the Pink Tax however, debunked these claims. According to them, female consumers are less concerned with brand packaging, as to the efficacy of a product.

Is the Pink Tax in Nigeria?

Yes it is and below are some of the ways it shows itself.

Wedding things: Saturdays are for owambe, jollof rice and Aso-ebi’s too. It’s beautiful attending weddings, but let’s be honest, these Aso-ebi’s are not smiling with our pockets. You might argue: men buy Aso-ebi’s too, but dear when we compare the money we spend to look so peng on these occasions- makeup artists, gele, matching purses, shoes, jewelry- it’s enough to make you scream. We spend more as women attending parties than our male counterparts do and it definitely has an impact on our overall income.

Vehicle repairs: For whatever reason, I don’t understand why some roadside male mechanics still think women are dumb-witted when it comes to knowing about cars. They charge women extra to just fix a little fault in the car by magnifying the problems to scare them. But when it comes to men, they are more realistic with their pricing because they feel men know better. For all the times women have unknowingly fallen into this bait, they’ve been pink-taxed.

Try this at home, have a male buddy and you call the same mechanic separately for a quota and compare prices. Let’s know what happened next.

Shaving razors: While writing this, I took a break and headed over to an online store to compare the prices of men and women shaving sticks. A pack of disposable razors for men cost N4,100 and for women N6,680. That’s a difference of N2,580. These price differences matter.

Sanitary Pads: Although this is called the Tampoon Tax, it goes a long way in demonstrating the gender priced discrimination that women are subjected to. Menstrual hygiene products have been categorized as luxury items therefore, they attract heavy levies which are ultimately paid by the end user-the female consumer. A 2018 study revealed that Nigeria places a heavy tax on sanitary products with a pack of pad costing around $1:30. That’s over N400 with the current exchange rate. The latter is highly significant in a country where the underemployment rate amongst males is at 26.3 percent in 2020 compared to 15.4 percent in 2018.

According to UNESCO, 10 out of every school girl misses a day at school due to period poverty. Recall the country had exempted VAT on sanitary products in February 2020, but the exemption was only targeted at locally made brands. ALWAYS for example, an American brand of sanitary towel enjoys a wide patronage from young girls and women in Nigeria. Between 2014 to 2020, the price for Always Ultra skyrocketed from 250 naira to 400 naira. Ladycare, another similar brand equally increased to 400 naira from the previous amount of 250 naira. These brands are top of the mind awareness when it comes to sanitary towels in Nigeria.

How can we change the Pink Tax narrative?

The first key to change is awareness. How can we challenge what we aren’t fully knowledgeable and informed about. It’s important that we know and speak against this pricing discrimination which has the potential to force companies, businesses and nations into redress their pricing policies against women. Women should take steps in educating themselves and advocating for change. One country where this has worked is India. In 2018, after a series of lobbying by advocacy groups and celebrities, the country eliminated 12% tax on feminine hygiene products.

Another recommendation to companies is to be less focused on over-designing products to save branding cost which will in turn reduce the market price for women. Attention should be paid to the efficacy of the product rather than product design.

The step taken by the Nigerian government in 2020 to make locally made sanitary products VAT exempt is a right step in dealing with period poverty, Pink and Tampon tax. However, it does not end there, as some countries that eliminated VAT on sanitary products still face the challenge of period poverty. A good illustration is Kenya. The Kenyan government does not tax sanitary products however, 65% of girls in the country still suffer from period poverty.

By addressing this, the government should provide subsidies to promote domestic manufacturing of products like cosmetics, personal hygiene products like sanitary towels, shaving razors, etc. This will help improve domestic production of these goods. Furthermore, tariffs should be reduced on imported products that are marketed to female consumers, so the burden isn’t placed on us. I mean na buy we wan buy. We no offend pesin.

The reality that women are largely underemployed or underpaid is no subject of dispute. What matters is why they should be burdened with an extra price cost when they have less disposable income to part with, especially now that the impact of COVID-19 has reinforced income loss, unpaid care and domestic work burden amongst women in large, developing and underdeveloped economies. Why does this unfair, gendered, price-differentiation exist?

I leave this as food for thought. What would you recommend?