President Donald Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10 percent on Chinese goods. The tariffs, which went into effect March 4, are expected to cost American households between $1,600 and $2,000 a year. Tariffs are typically passed onto the consumer by companies forced to pay increased rates on a long list of goods.

But multiple studies on tariff rates and their impact have shown that tariffs don’t always fall equally on all consumers. A 2018 study by the U.S. International Trade Commission found that lower income consumers pay a larger share of their wages in tariffs. What’s more, the report found, women shoulder more of the tariff burden, paying more than men for gendered products such as clothing and shoes.

“It is very strange and hugely inappropriate that the U.S. government should be having differential tax rates that attack women more than men for essentially the same things,” Ed Gresser, vice president and director for trade and global markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, tells Women Rule.

Gresser also researched the gender imbalance in tariff rates. He found that in 2022, average tariff rates for women’s clothing were higher than men’s, at 16.7 percent compared to 13.6 percent. This equates to a $2.7 billion gender gap.

Gendered tariff rates have a decadeslong history. They were first introduced in 1930 with the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act — a law that expanded the list of goods subject to tariffs — with rates for apparel and footwear being separated by gender.

“That law, and then the tariffs that came from it, were not inherently designed to be biased,” Katica Roy, gender economist and CEO of tech company Pipeline, tells Women Rule. “The issue is that the outcome is.”

Democratic Reps. Lizzie Fletcher (Texas) and Brittany Pettersen (Colorado) reintroduced the Pink Tariffs Study Act on March 11, a bill that would require the Treasury Department to study tariff rates to see if they demonstrate a gender bias.

“Women disproportionately pay, on average, three percent more in tariffs than men, but the difference is sometimes even greater,” Fletcher writes in a press release.

“Now, as President Trump has imposed tariffs and started a trade war with our trading partners, it is even more important that we understand how higher tariffs will raise costs for everyone, and women in particular.”

If enacted into law, the bill will provide some much-needed data, according to Gresser.

“There is a pervasive problem in American goods tariffs: regressivity,” Gresser says. “Consumer goods products that are cheap and simple and mass market are very systematically taxed at much heavier rates than very comparable luxuries.”

Roy says that Trump’s tariffs will disproportionately impact women due to a number of other factors. For starters, women still make less than men, on average earning about 84 percent of what men earn. Gender pay setbacks such as wage gaps and “pink taxes” — when goods marketed to women are priced higher than men’s — exacerbate the impact of tariffs.

Single-parent homes are among the most vulnerable to tariffs as the majority of them are led by mothers. Single mothers have an overall poverty rate of 28 percent.

“We know that a parent’s financial standing has a direct impact on children’s future financial standing,” Roy says. “So by holding breadwinner moms back, we’re doing a disservice to our economy now, but also to our future labor force.”

Roy and Gresser both see the Pink Tariffs Study Act as a strong first step in remedying the issue, but the research needs to be followed by further legislative action.

Two possible solutions, Roy says, include either removing gender as part of the statistical calculation for tariff rates or opting to charge the lower rate of the two.

“We often think of our policies as gender neutral, but in fact, they’re gender ignorant,” Roy says.

View this article on Politico.