After researching pink tax, I proceeded to look up projects centered around pink tax and if there was any I could use for as inspiration.  Unfortunately there wasn’t many projects I could find but there were a significant amount of social experiments on pink tax.  The first one that stood out to me was organized by Liz Plank’s “Flip the Script” where she randomly got a stranger who was male, Alex, to be part of her experiment.  Before they began the pink tax experiment, Liz asks Alex if he thinks products marketed towards women are more expensive than products marketed towards men.  Alex responds with “I’d imagine they’re the same price per ounce”, little did Alex know that he was completely wrong (bustle.com).  Proceeding with the experiment, Liz and Alex had to purchase 5 products that are marketed towards their gender.  Those products would be the same brand, size/ounces, and similar ingredients and that, “the only difference that could be present in the price is who it’s marketed to.  After purchasing the products, they found that Liz paid $42.69 while Alex paid $37.42 which is a $5 difference which concludes that women are definitely paying more than men for similar products.  

    GirlTalkHQ, a women’s news media site that hopes to inspire and empower their audience with positive news, also created a social experiment where they highlighted unfair pricing between genders, other known as pink tax.  Their experiment took place at the coffee shop, Tokyo Smoke, in downtown Toronto.  GirlTalkHQ, designed a menu that consisted of gendered prices according to the customer’s gender.  All items that were being sold were the same except this time the prices were labeled under “W” and “M” which represented women and men to address gender marketing.  Once the experiment began, consumers realized that men were paying significantly less than women, which emphasises the unfair gendered market.  Some reactions and responses were “so, not only do we sometimes have to pay more for things, but we get paid less for doing the same job” which was said by a woman, and “I thought we were past that” says a man (ctvnews.ca).  It is evident that there is discrimination present and unfortunately inequality still exists even in the most progressive countries, Canada, where this experiment was held.  I especially liked this experiment because these were strangers who were immersed in this project and it proved that pink tax is not only very real but also discrimination was recognized.

    After looking at more social experiments, I began researching specifically pink tax projects because there were limited experiments out there.  I came across a student’s portfolio, Andrea Corasanti, who designed a “pink tax app” followed by some experimental art pieces that I found were really powerful.  Her pink tax app served as a shopping planner app where users could search for a product and then would be categorized as the woman, male, and best price equivalent.  There is also a store feature and brand feature to help narrow down the products that the user could want.  As for her experimental art pieces, they were images of a possible scenario where women would be charged more for everything in their daily lives.  Some of those images were a close up of two parking meters, one gray, the other pink. The gray one charges $1 an hour whereas the pink one charges $2 dollars an hour.  Another image was of a gas station where the men price would be $2.45 and women would be $5.45.  I thought the images were powerful because it blatantly addresses gender inequality in a simple and sleek way.  As for the app, I thought it was great as well and it actually was a lot more similar to my idea than I thought.  After looking more at her project, I realized that Corasanti and my project had a lot of similarities but what I wanted mine to be more than a shopping tool but to be a mobile movement of fighting back pink tax.