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Neha Georgie, At first blush—taking a competition lens to healthcare pink taxes, Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, Volume 16, Issue 2, March 2025, Pages 115–122, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeclap/lpaf033
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1. Introduction
The ‘pink tax’ has received considerable media attention in the last decade. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women called out the practice in 2017.1 States in the USA have passed laws to abolish the practice.2 Evidence and discussions of the pink tax are often centred on the personal care sector. The most well-known example of the pink tax is probably razor pricing. Pink razors ‘for females’ tend to be more expensive than (presumably equivalent) razors ‘for males’. It seems implausible for the product to be more expensive when clothed in pink. Is this, then, a form of a ‘pink tax’, ie a gender-based price disparity?
At first blush, gendered pricing seems to have infiltrated numerous products across sectors. The 2015 study by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (the ‘DCA Study’) presents one of the most prominent, large-scale studies on such price disparities.3 The DCA Study examines product prices of about 800 items across industries, concluding that products for female consumers were priced higher than those for male consumers in all but five of the 35 product categories analysed. Pink scooters (with ‘girls’ in the product title), it finds, cost approximately 67% more than red scooters (gender-neutral in the product title). Screenshots of clothing and personal care products that look sufficiently similar, yet differ in costs, are used to demonstrate that the practice is common—whether colour is used as the targeting mechanism or not.
