The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid - Hardcover

Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, Anna; Clinton, Chelsea

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593714253 ISBN 13: 9780593714256

Verlag: Portfolio, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Why is it so expensive to be a woman in America? From a rising star in economics comes the first comprehensive look at the costs women face and why the bill runs especially high for women of color—with a foreword by Chelsea Clinton.

The “pink tax” has gained widespread recognition in recent years, but what happens when you look at the costs that define a woman’s entire life, especially across racial lines? 

In The Double Tax, Harvard researcher Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman summarizes the disparities that women face as they navigate life’s biggest moments. Not only do the numbers reveal that women incur higher costs than men, but also that Black and white women lead vastly different lives, marked by dramatic gaps in job opportunities, salaries, housing costs, childcare access, and generational wealth. She coins this gap as the “double tax,” the compounded cost of racism and sexism.

Through rigorous research and interviews with women across the country, Opoku-Agyeman calculates the extra money, time, and effort that women are expected and forced to pay at every stage of their life.

While the evidence may be discouraging, The Double Tax offers actionable solutions for how everyday people, local communities, and global leaders alike can help relieve women of these costs for good. Only by understanding where the gaps are and where the double tax arises can we begin to even the playing field for all.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an award-winning Ghanaian-American researcher and writer. She is a postgraduate student at Harvard Kennedy School studying public policy and economics. She is the youngest recipient for a CEDAW Women's Rights Award by the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Her first book received widespread coverage from outlets like NPR, ESSENCE, TELEMUNDO, FOX Soul, and The New York Times.

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Good Hair

Back in grade school, I was desperate for reminders. Reminders that it was not only okay to be Black, but that it was also okay to be as dark as I was. Reminders that my features were worthy and that whoever is deemed beautiful by society does not have to define beauty for me. And for years, I didn't get them. I did not get those reminders because I am, by many conventional beauty standards, antithetical to beauty itself. Because women and girls like me, who wear our ancestry on our faces and on our heads, incur the double tax.

At the tender age of five, I went from Head Start to a local private school on full scholarship. There I became keenly aware that my Black skin was apparently too Black, and my curly coiled hair was a bit too kinky. No class picture fully captured the features of my face, and this often became the topic of classroom discussion. "Where did Anna go?" the children would tease, while pointing at my blackened face in the middle of the photo.

By my thirteenth birthday, I sat down for perms that seeped into my scalp and self-esteem. I would think that if only I had straight hair like my white classmates, maybe I would be more accepted. At fourteen, I considered bleaching my skin to erase the history my melanin carried because of not-so-gentle reminders to "stay out of the sun." And on my sixteenth birthday, I, like many other teenage girls, believed myself to be the ugliest person on earth. Which is why I remember the first time I saw her, at the age of seventeen.

It was senior year of high school. The Oscars were on. "Best Supporting Actress" rolled across my television screen, and then her name was announced: Lupita Nyong'o. The audience erupted in applause and then stood up one by one as the camera cut to a woman with skin as dark as mine and a teeny-tiny Afro accessorized with a diamond-studded headband. Her jaw dropped as tears fell down her cheeks. She could only lift herself up, give her brother a hug, and float toward the stage with a confused and dazed look across her face.

The reason I started crying that night was because she looked like Cinderella, and she looked like me. It felt like a real shift in pop culture, and for the rest of the year, Lupita, with skin and hair like mine, seemed to occupy rare air. When she gripped that golden statue onstage, she gripped the hearts of young Black girls like me, and as part of her ascent, her beauty became central to conversations beyond that moment.

For months on end, Lupita's brightly colored patterns and prints were plastered across magazine covers in grocery aisles. She became part of a resurgence of creative natural hairstyles for Black women, including, but not limited to, faded high tops, artistic Afros, and long flowy braids. When she was named People magazine's Most Beautiful, she became only the third Black woman and the first dark-skinned Black woman to top the list. Her rise inspired me to look at myself in the mirror a little differently. I began to embrace what my melanin represented and what stories my tight curls told. I started to believe that maybe I too could be beauty itself.

The Cost of Presentability

Beauty is a form of capital, which makes our appearance a source of power, or lack thereof. The world rewards beauty. Society reveres attractive people. That is why, unsurprisingly, attractiveness is positively associated with elevated levels of happiness and higher pay. Our economic and social utility as women and girls is often rooted in our looks, which reflects either positively or negatively in our pocketbooks.

In the United States, one study found that the average woman spends $3,756 per year on beauty maintenance, while men spend $2,928. Expenditures on everything from hand creams and gym memberships cost the average American woman $300 per month and $225,360 over her lifetime (about $50,000 more than men). Furthermore, three thousand women in the US, between the ages of sixteen and seventy-five, spend on average about $8 per day just on their face. And that was back in 2017!

For Black beauty consumers, these price points are often higher. One McKinsey report found that Black consumers of beauty products had to travel longer distances on average than their white counterparts. Not only that, but even neighborhood staples like grocery stores and drugstores were less likely to carry products that catered to Black consumers. Only 13 percent of Black people reported that they could find products meant for them. This means that , in addition to paying higher prices for beauty products, Black people are spending more time and money to travel farther to find the products that are advertised to us. To add insult to injury, Black-owned brands only make up a small part of the beauty market. Investors may not think Black beauty is profitable, despite Black people spending nearly $7 billion on beauty products in 2021, and the story remains the same for hair care.

For many women and girls, hair can be an extension of beauty, which is why the Venn diagram of people who say "It's just hair, what's the big deal?" and people who breathe down your neck in a checkout line is exactly a circle. About a decade ago, researchers found that customers at a restaurant franchise were more likely to tip blond waitresses than other waitresses, holding all else equal. Hair matters for beauty, and that's probably why the second most common beauty expense for all Americans is hair products, not including shampoo and conditioner. (The most common beauty expense is skincare.) It's also why a survey administered to two thousand American women reported that the average respondent spent $80 per month on her hair. That's $55,000 over the course of a lifetime!.

These expenses-buying hair and other beauty products, traveling to buy said products, and spending time using these products-make up the cost of presentability: the price tag of investing in attraction. Women incur these costs because our survival often depends on how our appearance is interpreted and validated by society. For white women, this is "the pink tax," or the higher prices for products aimed at women, even though those products are often the same as or similar to those marketed to men. For women of color, especially Black women, it is the double tax-the pink tax and then some.

Black hair is not always seen as desirable or professional in modern-day society. In the United Kingdom, Dove and Censuswide found that nearly half of Black and biracial women reported experiencing hair discrimination in school. Of those women, nearly 60 percent reported still experiencing hair discrimination, and that most faced this kind of discrimination as adults, and 71 percent cited negative comments made about their hair from peers, teachers, and principals alike. This is the reality for Black women globally. We have to spend more time and money on hair care and hair appointments than any other women.

The Double Tax: Women use hair and beauty products to satisfy beauty standards. However, products used by women of color, especially Black women and girls, are usually more expensive.

Black hair is not considered the default, so the products we need are not produced en masse. Additionally, Black women and girls often require extra products for detangling, deep conditioning, hair masking, and moisturizing because hair breakage and loss are more prevalent among people of African descent. Ingredients used in popular brands may not always be sufficient for maintaining our hair.

The opposite is true for most white women, who can likely walk into any local store and find shelves full of products that cater to their hair without causing permanent damage. Black hair products are often relegated to a fraction of a shelf, if that.

When women and girls of color, especially Black women and girls, do decide to purchase from leading...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593714253
• ISBN 13: 9780593714256
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland