Humans of East: Nora Alferman

Sophomores recently began presenting their multi-genre project for their English classes, which requires them to research a topic of interest and format it into an essay with three other mini, creative projects. For her project, sophomore Nora Alferman decided to research the pink tax, which is the up-charge found on products marketed toward women.

Q: How would you explain pink tax?

“It’s not exactly a real taxation that the government does. It’s not really involved with the government at all. It’s more of companies up-charging products made for women or more feminine people in general. So, generally, something intended for men would be a lot more cheap than something intended for a woman.”

Q: Why did you decide to do your MGP project over pink tax?

“Since it was a project that all [sophomore English] classes had to do, I was talking to my friends, and we were all talking about what topics we wanted to do. I was going over mine, because I had a couple other ideas, and I said something like Pavlov dogs, and they were like ‘oh yeah that’s cool.’ Then I said ‘or pink tax,’ and they all just looked at me and were like ‘what’s pink tax?’ I looked at this group of girls who had obviously been affected by pink tax who just didn’t know, and I thought that was kind of screwed up, so I decided to do [my project over] that.”

Q: What was the process of researching pink tax like? What information did you find out?

“Honestly, it was kind of a frustrating process.There are plenty of articles about it, but when you Google ‘pink tax,’ one of the first articles that comes up is an article written by a man about why pink tax isn’t real. I was reading it and fact checking this article to find credible sources and stuff, and I was like, ‘This is all just lies written by a man who has not been affected by pink tax.’ So that was kind of the biggest thing that I learned and, honestly, it kind of pissed me off. I didn’t like it. But other stuff were mostly articles that were credible and accurate that were written by both men and women. The only issue I came across was that a lot of articles were about the same thing, so I had to [research] different sections on different topics.”

Q: Why do you believe that pink tax is unfair?

“You shouldn’t have to pay more money because you’re a woman, it doesn’t make sense. Like, the prime example is that women’s razors, marketed toward women, are the exact same as the razors marketed toward men, but they’re usually twice as much.”

Q: Do you consider yourself a feminist?

“I would. I understand why people don’t like the word ‘feminist’ because it’s become something that people generally don’t like, but I do consider myself a feminist. It kind of frustrates me, especially when men say that feminism isn’t needed because I see these examples everywhere of why we need feminism and why things are still unfair. People just assume that because women got the right to vote and women can have jobs and stuff like that everything’s fine. But everything’s not fine, and this is a really good example of why feminism is still needed.”

Q: If you could, how would you solve the problem of pink tax?

“It’s more about holding the companies accountable that make the product. One of the things I noticed was that with small convenience stores who sell these products, you can’t be protesting these stores because they’re just trying to stay afloat and sell their products. The ones that are deciding the prices more are the companies that make these products, and the companies that make these products know that women will pay more for the exact same thing. So it’s more about holding the companies accountable for up-charging [feminist targeted] products.”