Strolling through the aisle of your local grocery store, you start picking up some essentials: milk, bread, tampons. In the checkout line you decide to treat yourself and grab the soda you’ve been yearning for. After paying for your groceries, on a whim, you take a look at your receipt. The milk, bread, and even your soda was exempt of sales tax, while your tampons were not….

As consumers, a lot of the time we don’t pay attention to what we are buying or the taxes we are paying. What if there was a tax that affected about half of the population, and most of them were unaware that they paid it? This is the case with the “pink tax”, which directly affects women. The pink tax is a tax on everyday items that are labeled specifically “for women”. This means essentially the same item is being made at the same production cost for the producer, but since they are slapping a sign on it targeting women consumers the price is higher. North Platte High School English teacher Jami Allen said “I feel it [the pink tax] plays on the naivety of women…it also plays on the uninformed consumer and that’s wrong.”

Forbes did a price comparison for products that were the same, but one was meant for men and the other women. The results varied greatly, Walgreen’s charged 23 percent more for women’s razor cartridges and 35 percent less for Men’s shampoo, while Levi’s charged 29 percent more for the same pair of jeans. This may just seem like a few dollars here or there, but it really adds up. According to Listen Money Matters, women pay about $1350 extra every year on the same everyday items men would buy.

You may be asking yourself, how is this even legal, isn’t equal treatment protected somewhere? It is in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employer discrimination and disparate treatment; which refers to policies, rules, practices, or other systems that seem to be neutral, but have disproportionate impacts on certain groups.

Wouldn’t the pink tax fall under this type of treatment since it is specifically targeting women? According to Forbes, lawyers say offering these products don’t constitute disparate treatment because consumers can buy items of whatever gender, regardless of theirs. Allen believes that women shouldn’t have to buy items that are primarily formulated for men, just because items targeted at women don’t have the mark down, she claims that it is unfair. “I think this is a societal issue,” said Allen.