We Must Wipe Out ‘Pink Taxes,’ Tampon Taxes, and Period Poverty

Posturing in black evening wear as sophisticated music plays, celebrity Amber Rose toys with a diamond-encrusted pendant. The video—produced by Period Equity, a feminist public interest law firm that brings class-action lawsuits to eliminate sales taxes on menstrual hygiene products—ends with Rose opening the pendant to reveal a single tampon as a voiceover asks, “Where else would you keep something 36 states tax as a luxury?”

Menstrual rights are human rights because—as the United Nations Population Fund explains—”menstruation is intrinsically related to human dignity.” The imposition of consumption taxes on tampons and other menstrual hygiene products discriminates against women and girls by making it more costly for them to access goods that are essential to their dignity.

‘Pink Taxes’ and Tampon Taxes

California made news a few years ago when it followed the lead of several states that had already eliminated their tampon taxes, but many US states today still impose sales tax on menstrual products by failing to include them in product categories—like medical and health supplies—that are frequently tax-exempt.

“Pink tax” elimination, though, was the big news out of California last month. The state expanded its Gender Tax Repeal Act of 1995, barring discriminatory gender-based pricing of services such as dry cleaning and haircuts, to cover consumer products such as razors or health and beauty products.

Pink tax elimination is sound social policy but not tax policy at all, because this catchy term refers to pricing. All else being equal, businesses may no longer place a disproportionate economic burden on California women by charging different prices based on the gender to which they’re marketed—pink razors for women priced higher than identical blue or black razors aimed at men, for example.

Period Poverty and Human Rights

Public awareness of the need to eliminate gender-based pricing and taxation has been rising over the past decade. Access to good menstrual health is now recognized as a fundamental human right for the 800 million people around the globe who are on their periods at any given moment. UNICEF recognizes that “meeting the hygiene needs of all adolescent girls is a fundamental issue of human rights, dignity, and public health.” The United Nations’ sustainable development goals, which “provide a blueprint for progress across all areas of life,” specifically address period poverty.

Period poverty—that is, lack of access to sanitary products, menstrual hygiene education, toilets, or waste management—is a serious issue in the developed world as well as for low- and middle-income nations. As people struggle to afford menstrual products, their economic and safety vulnerability increases, and they miss school and work.

Public and private efforts to address the problem are accelerating. The first global forum on period poverty will be held in Australia this month. “End Period Poverty” awareness campaigns are gaining momentum at charities like Girlguiding. In the tax policy sphere, we can do our part by working to reform tax and fiscal policy so that they no longer exacerbate period poverty.

A general view of atmosphere as THINX lights up the Brooklyn Bridge and UN Secretariat Building to draw attention to period poverty on March 8, 2018, in New York City.

Photographer: Andrew Toth/Getty Images for THINX

Tampon Taxes and Gender Justice

When a consumer-level tax—such as sales tax, value-added tax, or goods and services tax—falls on menstrual products, that political decision adds another barrier between a poor person and basic human rights. And the voting public shares some of the responsibility for the disaster that is period poverty.

Progress toward eliminating the tampon tax has been made in several US states, even though the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board (a multi-state effort aimed at uniformity) merely provides a uniform definition of “feminine hygiene products” and offers states the ability to toggle taxability on or off.

States choosing to toggle tampon taxation off should be named and praised. They include California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island, as well as Washington, D.C. Looking abroad, it took Australia 18 years to stop classifying menstrual management products as “non-essential” while exempting condoms and sunscreen as essential. Contrast that with India, which scrapped its GST on period products just a year after it was introduced.

Further sampling of the global stage: Canada recently exempted period products from its GST and harmonized sales tax. After its exit from the EU, Britain ceased taxing tampons as luxury items. Germany recategorized tampons from luxury goods (taxed at 19%) to “essential” (taxed at 7%). As far back as 2014, Kenya repealed its tampon tax.

Debating Tampon Tax Policy

Critical tax theory analysis is rarely concerned with legislative intent. In our era, most overt discrimination has been scrubbed from tax codes, but discriminatory impact often remains. Tax justice scholar Beverly Moran reminds us to call out “the myth of gender neutrality” in the tax laws.

Two other scholars of critical tax theory, each a significant contributor to the field of gender tax justice—Bridget Crawford and Miranda Stewart—have publicly debated whether tampon tax elimination is good or bad tax policy. Stewart calls eliminating tampon taxes misguided—a “cheap, marginal, and easy” political distraction from gender issues that are more efficiently and effectively addressed on the government spending side.

But Stewart forgets her own warning that, when “the task of reducing inequality and poverty has been shifted entirely to the spending side of fiscal policy,” it will run head-first into “the goal of fiscal discipline [which has been used] to cut expenditures … in health, education, [and] safety net protections.”

Crawford looks instead to the bigger picture: “Understanding access to affordable menstrual hygiene products as a human rights issue, the sales tax emerges as a key obstacle to gender equality and human rights.”

Many tax systems still treat “as luxuries and not necessities” menstrual hygiene products that “over half the world’s population use … for multiple days every month for at least thirty years.” For that reason, tampon tax elimination is central to the support of human dignity even if it isn’t the most tax-efficient option.

My view? We must eliminate pink price discrimination and tampon taxation to demonstrate that menstrual rights are recognized under the law as human rights. And we must devote public resources—intellectual, financial, and human capital—to smart programs to eradicate period poverty around the planet.

This is a regular column from public interest tax policy analyst Don Griswold, who’s also a senior fellow at the Digital Economist. Look for Griswold’s column on Bloomberg Tax, and follow him on LinkedIn.