Shall we get right to it? $34,551. That’s how much it costs you every year to be a woman in America today.
To be just a little more specific, $34,551 is the extra amount you pay for stuff compared to men PLUS the earnings you forego, just for being a woman. Every damn year.
I’ll get to how I came up with that figure—no, I didn’t pull it out of my butt!—but first let’s look at what $34,551 means for the average person.
For $34,551 you could buy a brand-new Honda Civic, or a Toyota Corolla Hybrid, or a Mazda CX-5 every year!
For twice that amount, $69,102, you could buy a BMW 5 series car, a Mercedes-Benz C-class car, an Audi Q7, or a Porsche Macan every two years.
For between $34,551 and $69,102 you could make a down payment on a house every year or two.
Talk about being shafted!! You’ve now just seen exactly what it’s been costing you in concrete terms ever year you’ve been a woman. That’s a hell of a price to pay for the privilege of having men look down your blouse.
Now if you’re so shocked by this that you have trouble believing it, well, believe it!! I’ll show you how it adds up. It’s the boring part of this, but at least you’ll see where your woman-tax dollars are going. (For what it’s worth, all the numbers you’ll see come from established, reliable sources, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Also, these numbers pertain to the typical woman. Of course, individual woman will vary. But while you may be all kinds of wonderful and special, with respect to this data, we’re all pretty typical.)
So here’s how the numbers add up.
Let’s start with how much men and women spend annually on grooming, based on industry data. That includes products and services like skincare, haircare, makeup, and clothing.
Bottom line? Women spend $178 billion on this every year. Men spend $98 billion.
If you divide these numbers by the number of women and men 16 and older, it turns out that grooming cost per woman per year is $1292. For men it’s $769. Subtract the numbers and you get $523 as the amount a woman spends more than a man per year.
So item 1 in the woman tax is $523.
Next there’s the time women and men spend on grooming. Skincare, doing stuff with your hair, applying makeup, and getting dressed.
Women spend about 468 hours on this stuff per year. Men spend about 134 hours per year. Subtract and you get women spending 334 more hours than men do on grooming. Since the median hourly earnings for women are $22 per hour, that’s a cost of $7,348 per year.
How is that a cost to you? Well, whatever your hourly earnings are, that’s the value of your time. If you worked during that time you spend getting ready for work, that’d be an extra $7,348 in your pocket. In any case, that’s the value of the time you’re spending on grooming as opposed to things you might find more rewarding.
So item 2 in the woman tax is $7,348.
Now let’s look at housework (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.) and childcare. When you add up those two categories, women spend about 30.8 hours a week on housework and childcare, while men spend about 18.9 hours per week. That’s 1602 hours for women every year, 982 hours for men every year. Subtract, and you have women spending an extra 620 hours on house and kids per year. At $25 per hour median cost if you paid for these services, that’s $15,500 per year you’d get if you were paid for doing the work you do over and above what your partner does.
So item 3 in the woman tax is $15,500.
What’s up next? Nope I didn’t forget it. Menstrual care: pads, tampons, panty liners, Midol, and so on. What does that add up to for women during their fertile years? About $180 dollars a year. Not a ton, but for poor women it’s a huge burden.
So item 4 in the woman tax is $180.
Finally, there’s healthcare costs, including insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.
Add it all up and take the average, that’s healthcare costs of about $10,500 for women and $9,500 for men. A $1,000 difference.
So item 5 in the woman tax is $1000.
Add up items 1 through 5 and you get $24,551.
Except that we’re not done. Median annual earnings for women are $51,000. For men that’s $61,000. An entire $10,000 difference. So we’ve got to add that in.
So there you have it. The full total of the cost to you of being a woman is $34,551.
And now the question is, how do we think about this? What do we do about this? That’s a lot of thinking and doing!!
I know that all this feels very unfair, and it sucks.
I also know that some of this tax is voluntary, like grooming. Some of it comes from an unfairness in your relationship, as with housekeeping and childcare. These are things you can do something about.
Other things are structural, like healthcare. These are things you can help change by thinking carefully about who you vote for and support. Don’t vote against your own self-interest.
So, yeah, this sucks, but we’re not helpless.
And thank you Emily Blunt, Jenna Ortega, Joan Crawford, Isabelle Adjani, Sophia Loren, and Toni Collette for your wonderful performances in today's post!
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