“Yo is This Sexist?”- Podcast

Riley Adleta: Hello everybody my name is Riley and I am here with my co-hosts Kristen and Megan for our segment of the “Yo is this..?” podcast. This week we decided to make our edition “Yo Is This Sexist?” and let me tell you… it is. Now, what better way to start off this week’s video than a personal experience to get us going? So a few weeks ago I woke up and one of my friends was calling me and I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted, but she then asked me to go to the store with her. Once we walked in it became clear as to what she needed to buy which was none other than a Plan B, also known as an ECP or an emergency contraception pill. When we walked down the aisle, I couldn’t help but notice how expensive these pills are as I was looking at all of the women’s products in general, but more specifically the Plan B.It was nearly 50 dollars just for one pill! And I don’t know about you guys, but that seems kind of insane to me, that it’s that expensive for something that can be almost imperative to a woman’s health.

Kristen Brammer: Oh, yeah, I mean, when I was in high school, I had to buy birth control and just because my health insurance didn’t cover it, it was like eighty dollars. I don’t know about you, but as a high schooler, I didn’t have eighty dollars a month to spare.

Megan Branstetter: I did not either. All of this actually reminds me of the PinkTax. We all know what it is, we all are females in this group. We all have to deal with the PinkTax, which is a gender-based price discrimination. They give it to a cute little name even though it’s an insidious plan to trap women into paying more. We pay more for the essential products that we need because we do not have a choice. Are we supposed to go out of our way to purchase men products to avoid the PinkTax? I personally know that I have when I buy razors because women’s razors don’t do the job. Do you two have any experiences where you’ve gone out of your way to avoid the PinkTax or do you just accept it?

Riley Adleta: No, I especially know that I have definitely gone out of my way to buy men’s products because growing up in a family of athletes with my mom, my dad, and sister, we’ve all played sports. My sister is a college athlete and we have both played sports our entire lives! So obviously having  to buy things like deodorant, for example has always been essential. And when you have to go practice to practice every week, stuff like that, you’re going to need a lot of deodorant. I always noticed that when I went to the store to buy some deodorant, my mom would start buying the men’s deodorant. And I thought to myself, Oh, is it for the quality? But now that I look at it, its because the price! You look at men’s and women’s deodorant and even something as simple as that, the men’s was always cheaper than the women’s. And personally, I think the men’s does work much better as well. So it worked out for me, but it was just crazy to me because you really just look at something like that and yeah, deodorant. There it is. Pink tax is working right there.

Kristen: I think with products, I definitely try to avoid it, but in services, I honestly have just accepted it. I mean, a haircut for a girl is like over thirty, forty dollars. And forget it if you want hair color or some sort of treatment. For men, it’s like ten to twenty dollars and they’re out of there in like 20 minutes. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

Megan Branstetter: Another service that comes to mind with the PinkTax is dry cleaning. Do you guys have any idea of how they determine which clothing is chosen to be taxed? How do they choose clothes that are gender neutral? I think the whole thing is outrageous.

Riley Adleta: Yeah, so actually when you said I was wondering the same thing, like it gets me thinking maybe it has something to do with the actual color of whatever it is because  the name Pink tax utilizes color to determine which are men and women products. Because I know a lot of times if you think about it, women are more associated with the color  pink rather than men, you almost always think of the color blue. So it has me wondering if maybe they look at the colors or I’m not really sure because I mean, how do you determine what’s men’s clothing versus women’s clothing? We all wear a lot of similar clothes, like pants like. Is that women’s? Is that men’s? I mean, maybe they look at the colors. I think that’s really tricky, especially with taxing wise, specifically with a service like dry cleaning.

Kristen: Yeah, that’s really an interesting idea because like men and women’s clothing are made out of the same fabrics like the same polyester, spandex, nylon, and whatever else, but if they’re only making that decision based off of color or like who wears it, that’s pretty messed up and unfair. And it reminds me of the products on the shelves of the razors that Megan was talking about earlier, like there could be a razor that’s black on one end and pink on the other, and they’re going to be just a few dollars difference in between the two products.

Megan Branstetter: Yeah, that reminds me of a statistic that I saw that women pay an extra thirteen hundred dollars a year just for the essential products and services that we need. Keeping in consideration of everything that we’ve talked about previously, it reminds me of the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap is the difference of earnings between men and women. Women make only 81 cents for every dollar a man makes. To further my point on that, I think that it is unfair that women are highly taxed on essentials and services while we make less than men. We really also have to consider race too. A woman who is Caucasian makes 81 to 86 cents to the dollar. Other races, such as African-Americans make 62 to 64 cents on the dollar, Hispanics make 48 to 54 cents on the dollar, Asians makes 80 to 87 and so on.  These prices can range depending on which state you live in. It’s just crazy to me to see the comparison between men and women and having race also play a factor in the wage gap.

Kristen: Yeah, that’s really just insane. I saw a video not that long ago about this girl. It was just a funny video, but she applied for a job, got the job, and then she learned what her co-worker got paid. Her coworker was a male. And she did the calculations and she said, “oh, my paycheck is only like seventy eight cents to the dollar compared to his paycheck!” and figured out how much work she had to do in order to meet the amount that she’s being paid each month. It ended up being seventy eight percent. So she only got paid seventy-eight cents to the dollar compared to her male co-worker. And so throughout this whole video, she’s basically just only doing seventy eight percent of her job. She finishes seventy eight percent of her sentences to her boss and other things like that. Eventually her boss asks her in one of their employee reviews and he says, “it looks like you’re not doing one hundred percent of your job. What’s going on?” She was like, “oh, you’re right. I’m not.” basically to make a point to her boss. And then she’s walking at the end of the video with an African-American woman and the woman says, “I mean, you wouldn’t even believe what I make to the dollar.”

Riley Adleta: So that’s actually so crazy.I think I’ve seen a similar video to that, and that’s just that’s insane to me! I like how we can at least be comical about it because I mean we have been living with this life for so long at some point it is kind of a joke! If you look at the gender pay gap, historically speaking, at least it’s been like this for a really long time and even probably worse the further you go back in time. This really affects women starting from day one when you get a job, when you’re almost 18 up until retirement, honestly. And although I believe I really could say we have made progress within the past decade or so, lessening this gap and making it more equal, even then, even now, we do not have the equality that we should between men and women, especially speaking in the economic sense in the working world. But it doesn’t even stop there, we can see these differences between men and women in much bigger picture sense through other aspects.

Megan Branstetter: I completely agree with you Riley! We do not see equality between men and women in the economic sense and probably won’t for a very long time. It just makes me think of the combination between the PinkTax and the wage gap. It reflects on “Othering” that we learned in class by Simone de Beauvoir. She views the “Other” and the “One” as the power constructs. The “One” being whichever first identified more powerful being is constructed, but not without the ‘Other”, which is the oppressing group against itself.

Kristen: Yeah, Simone de Beauvoir had a good point there, her point of women being the Other is the only way that men actually have power and the only way that they are considered as the One. She says in an excerpt from The Second Sex, her book that she wrote, she said “Things become clear, on the contrary, if following Hegel, we find in consciousness itself, a fundamental hostility toward every other consciousness; the subject can be posed only in being opposed. He sets himself up as the essential as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object.” which there she is just talking about men in comparison to women.

Riley Adleta: I think that’s really important to point out that fact that you can see this power construct with men and women and specifically even in just what Simon was saying in that specific passage, as you can see it every day and all the time. And I mean, overall, I really hope that everyone can see why I initially pointed out that everything we talked about today is indeed sexist. Like I said, in the world we live in today, all these things that may be seemingly small and unimportant, like just the prices or accessibility to different health that we have been talking about add up in the end. We can just see that this all provides for a larger, more systematic injustice in the world all together.