Many shoppers know about the so-called pink tax – a needless markup on products marketed to women, even if those products are essentially the same, just cheaper, when sold to men. Personal care items such as razors, deodorants and shampoo fall into this category. But shoppers may be less aware of “pink tariffs”, or taxes on imported goods labeled as “women’s items”.
Pink tariffs are one reason women’s clothing tends to cost more than men’s at the checkout counter, and why some women might buy sweatpants or oversized sweaters technically made for “men” – it could save them some cash.
As first reported by the 19th, two Democratic House members, Lizzie Fletcher of Texas and Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, introduced a bill this session calling on the treasury department to study pink tariffs, and publish any findings on how these taxes might lead to a gender bias in retail.
The move comes amid Donald Trump’s continued tariff war, when more Americans are paying attention to how tariffs work and affect their day-to-day lives. (On TikTok, young people especially balked at how the taxes on China-made goods might affect Temu or Shein fast-fashion prices.) Ed Gresser, vice-president and director for trade and global markets at the centrist thinkthank Progressive Policy Institute, said in a statement that the bill “will help us design a better and fairer system”, noting that gender bias in clothing “likely costs women at least $2.5bn per year”.
Fletcher noted that women pay 3% more in tariffs than men, though in some cases it could be more. Things don’t get easier if shoppers head to a genderless aisle: unisex clothing, the 19th also reported, gets taxed the same rate as womenswear. Pink tariffs can also apply to personal care items, sneakers and toys marketed toward young girls as opposed to boys.
Sheng Lu, a professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, says the wide margin between tariffs on women’s and men’s clothing are “the results of decades-old negotiations” influenced by simple misogyny. “Men dominated these discussions, and women were not fully considered in these negotiations, and that’s a very important reason for the impact and legacy of the pink tariffs.”
The first US tariff laws were written in the 18th century and eased by the early 1900s with the implementation of income tax. After the 1929 stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover brought tariffs back, though those decreased after the second world war during the era of free trade agreements. Tariffs became a hot topic during Trump’s first presidency, when he proposed taxes intended to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. (Fashion designers say that’s easier said than done, as China has become a world innovator in apparel manufacturing techniques.)
Studies show that women drive 70-80% of all consumer spending, which is also an incentive for governments to set higher import taxes on their clothing. One study found that in 2015, the tariff burden for US households on women’s clothing was $2.77bn more than on men’s clothing.
Women’s clothing also tends to be made from human-made fibers such as polyester, which is taxed more than cotton, one of the US’s largest exports. “Fashion brands cannot totally absorb these tariffs by themselves, so they are eventually passed to consumers,” Lu said.
The US Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a labyrinthian code which lays out set tariff rates for all categories of goods, contains what Susan Scafidi, director of Fordham’s Fashion Law Institute, calls “financial microaggressions”.
One example: men’s silk brief underwear is taxed at 0.9%, while women’s silk underwear is taxed at 2.1%. Meanwhile, overcoats are taxed by a combination of price per kilogram plus an additional percentage; a wool blend overcoat for men has a tariff rate of 38.6 cents per kilogram plus an additional 10% of the value; a women’s wool overcoat is taxed 64.4 cents per kilogram, plus an additional 18.8%.
You could make the argument that men’s clothing, which tends to be larger than women’s, weighs more, justifying the discrepancy – a higher tariff makes up for the difference in weight. But Scafidi doesn’t buy it. “The average women’s coat may be a little lighter than a man’s, but certainly many of the weights are similar or identical to each other, and that does not account for such a huge difference in tariffs,” she said.
Though Scafidi would like to see the elimination of pink tariffs, she’s not confident that will happen anytime soon. “Tariffs make money in a way that voters don’t see,” she said. The actual markup of an item due to tariffs is hidden from customers, unlike a sales tax, which is printed on a receipt or shown online during checkout. “We can see a price tag, we can see sales tax, but we don’t see the tariffs right in front of our faces when we shop. Those are invisible to us, so there is no incentive for politicians to roll them back.”
Still, the pink tariff’s cousin, the pink tax, is well known, partly due to a heavily covered 2015 study by the New York City department of consumer affairs that in turn inspired ad campaigns from companies including Burger King and the European Wax Center drawing attention to the issue. California and New York state have since enacted laws that prohibit businesses from charging different prices for “substantially similar” but gendered products.
Scafidi imagines that if retailers were required to list out how tariffs affect prices, then people would be more likely to demand change. “Pink tariffs can add up a little bit at a time, drip by drip, like slow water torture,” she said. “It’s unfair at so many levels, but it’s unlikely to be corrected.”
