Tag: saving

The Pink Tax

I was purchasing T-Shirts for a team celebration recently and was intrigued to find that female T-shirts cost $10 or 25% more than a male T-shirt at $8. The reason I was given by our vendor (something about volumes usually purchased) wasn’t convincing . I realized I was seeing the “Pink Tax” in action.

I recently came across a fascinating 2015 paper by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs about the cost of being a female consumer. In the 397 retail products compared, women paid more 42% of the time while men only did so 18% of the time.

For example, girls’ toys cost more 55% of the time versus 8% of the time for boys. Girl’s clothing costs more 26% of the time versus 7% for boys. Women’s personal care products cost more 56% of the time versus 13% for men. And so on. This is nuts.

These costs add up over time and have powerful implications on women’s ability to save for retirement – to the tune of a million dollars over the course of a lifetime. Thanks to taxes, a penny saved is worth a lot more than a penny earned.

So, while it is great to see all the efforts going into achieving pay gap equality, we’ll need to pay as much attention to the pink tax. Improving the top line without paying attention to the bottom line is the definition of counter productive.

The Personal Finance Learnographic

First up, the news – We, the Learnographics team, are back with a new learnographic. A learnographic, as you might have guessed, is a synthesis of learnings from a book (or a couple of books ona  topic). In the spirit of starting with “why,” I’d like to share our thesis on learnographics –

We believe that our progress as a species occurs when we find, build and share great ideas. We also believe in the power of learning, reflecting, and sharing ideas in living happy lives. Books are a big source of learning and ideas and we’ve embarked on a mission to spread ideas from our favourite books.

After our first learnographic on willpower last year, we took a bit of a break as we thought about how we wanted to make this process sustainable. Our promise for this year is release 4 learnographics by the end of the year – 2 in the first half and 2 in the second. Producing these is a real labor of love – it involves us reading a bunch of books, synthesizing them, picking a book or two that we think would make for an interesting topic, illustrating them so they are easy to follow, and then sharing them with you.

We picked personal finance as it is a topic that we believe ought to get all the attention it can get. In this case, the learnographic is a synthesis of 6 books, 3 interviews, and 1 blog post.

We really hope you find it useful. Please click on the image below to see the full learnographic.

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And, if you like it, please do share and spread the love. :)