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Same brand, same blades, same job. One razor costs more because it's marketed "for her". This week we're unpacking the pink tax: the gendered price gap, the pinkified and shrunken products, and the lifetime bill for being a woman.

Sarah went hunting on one of the big two supermarkets' websites and the 'women's' was $6.80 more. But hey, at least it comes with a soap bar.

We get into:

• Pinkification, pinkflation and "pink it and shrink it"
• Gendered marketing from the clothes aisle to Lego
• Period products: GST gone in 2019, but affordability is still a real problem
• The Share the Dignity numbers: 64% of respondents have struggled to afford period products, and 21.75% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander respondents couldn't afford them in the last year, compared with 6.9% of non-Indigenous respondents
• A 2025 Australian report estimating the pink tax on everyday products at around $4,300 a year per woman, or about $360,000 over a lifetime (and that's before period products, the pay gap and the rest)
• Why the pink tax is compound interest on patriarchy
• A teaser for a future episode on women pricing their own work (no, you can't pay for tampons with exposure)

What to do: buy as gender neutral as you can, ask "do I actually need the 'for her' version?", and pop an extra pack of pads in the Share the Dignity box at your local supermarket. Partners, this is your episode too.

Glimmers: a new species of wild cat found in Bolivia, and a very large orange cat mistaken for a mountain lion.

Links:
Pink Tax: A Study of Gendered Price Discrimination in Australia 2025 (Karen Bijkersma).
Share the Dignity Bloody Big Survey 2024