Trade War Hits Women Hardest
Originally published by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf for The Contrarian
President Donald Trump’s trade wars continue to create global turmoil and churn for financial markets. Monday’s move—a temporary suspension of his “Liberation Day” bombast and 90-day pause until massive tariffs are fully imposed on China—seemed in part prompted by warnings of a dire toy shortage and the sour reaction to Trump blathering about … dolls. “A young lady, a 10-year-old-girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old-girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls,” he told reporters. “She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.”
Incoherent as it sounds, it so happens that toys geared to girls indeed are among the consumer products most likely to be subject to an upcharge—tariff mania notwithstanding. I have been writing on the phenomenon known as the “pink tax” for the better part of a decade and, yes, from American Girl to Barbie dolls, we are talking ground zero for understanding how pricing inequities proliferate.
Generally, the phrase “pink tax” refers to gender-based pricing—which is nothing less than price gouging. Two federal consumer protection reports document the prevalence of the practice, both issued in 2018 during the first Trump administration: from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Gender-Related Price Differences for Goods and Services”; and a study conducted by former U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, “Earn Less, Pay More: The State of the Gender Pay Gap and ‘Pink Tax’ in 2018.”