‘Pink tariffs’ plague US fashion

Welcome to The American Thread, a recurring column on the fate and future of fashion in the US, written by Vogue Business editor-at-large Christina Binkley. To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.

I’d love to speak with someone who was in the room years ago when US policymakers decided to charge women higher tariffs than men for fashion.

‘Pink tariffs’, they call them. The US is the only nation that charges gender-based tariffs on apparel, I’m told by global trade experts, none of whom seem to know why, nor how they started. It’s been going on for decades — since at least 1989, though they may date back earlier.

Women pay on average 3 per cent more in tariffs than men, but it’s sometimes much more. Last year, the tariff for a pair of women’s cotton underwear was $1.15, for instance, versus 75 cents for men’s cotton briefs.

Those fees add up, and they’re one of the reasons that women pay more for their clothes than men. Women paid $2 billion more in these tariffs in 2018 than men, according to the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington DC think tank, and bear 66 per cent of the apparel tariff burden.

“Isn’t it outrageous?” asks Ed Gresser, director of trade and global markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, who has been sounding the horn on pink tariffs. He mentioned them to me when we were chatting about US President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to raise tariffs across the board. If that happens, the inequity is likely to compound.

Yes, it is outrageous. Especially since, thanks to the gender gap in pay, women in the US generally earn 84 cents to a man’s dollar. We earn less and we pay more.

Two US Representatives, Lizzie Fletcher of Texas and Brittany Petterson of Colorado, have proposed a bill that would require the US Treasury Department to study pink tariffs, in hope of developing a more equitable regime.

“Pink tariffs reflect a disparity in our trade system and a larger, systemic issue. And although the tariff system isn’t something most of us are thinking about when we are shopping for products, we are experiencing the impacts in our carts in the form of higher prices,” Fletcher said in an email this week. “This is a cost of being a woman that we should address.”