The Double Tax: What It Really Costs Women of Color to Succeed

Oct 28

Episode 526 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman

Let’s break down the economics of the pink tax—and the double tax, too.

We tell women to negotiate harder, lean in, and ask for what they’re worth. But what if the system was designed to make that impossible? Economist Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman calls it the double tax—the compounded price of racism and sexism that drains women of color’s time, money, and energy just to show up and succeed.

In this episode, we unpack how that hidden tax shows up at work—from policing what constitutes “presentable” to the unconscious stereotypes women of color navigate before they even get the job—and what it means for the ways women negotiate, lead, and thrive. Anna breaks down the numbers and the stories behind this extra burden, revealing why individual fixes aren’t enough and what real equity could look like if we stop asking women to bear the cost alone.

What is the Double Tax?

Perhaps you’ve already heard of “the pink tax”, the higher price tag on standard products (skin care, clothing, etc.) that are marketed to women versus those marketed to men. The “double tax” Anna writes about takes this lifelong expense a step further: women of color pay extra not only for being women but also for being Black. It’s the compounded cost of sexism and racism, and it adds up in a big way.

In her book, Anna follows the money and time spent on this tax from childhood to retirement and beyond. The first moment a young girl gazes in a mirror and even faintly understands that she has to look a certain way to be “presentable,” all the way to the cost of eldercare that disproportionately affects women of color. It adds up to an astronomical expense—and it’s consistently ignored in the wider conversation. The Double Tax brings together all the information Anna has collected and makes it readable so everyone can make informed decisions and push harder for systemic change.

The politics of presentability

It’s no coincidence that Anna kicks off her book talking about Black women’s hair. Beauty ideals hit all women from an early age, but little white girls often don’t incur the same costs. That first time sitting through a hair-straightening session sends a message about the importance of spending time and money on changing their appearance to be more acceptable to the mainstream.

Hair care differs, person to person, but for many Black women, regular maintenance can involve spending a full day (and hundreds of dollars) every few months having their hair braided or otherwise treated. The cost of complying? Lost wages and time. The cost of refusing to play the game? Either implicit bias or potentially even more explicit consequences, like being written up due to “unprofessional” presentation.

It’s about control, Anna explains. Those disproportionately represented in leadership set the standard, so arbitrary and ever-changing rules about what is deemed “appropriate” can often fail to include those with different lived experiences. These rules come to define professionalism across the board.

Hiring stereotypes that leave women of color out

Professionalism expectations affect Black women before they even land the job. When someone is being considered for an interview or position, it’s human nature to acknowledge that the hiring manager quickly develops a lot of unconscious assumptions from the candidate’s resume, LinkedIn, portfolio, and social media posts.

In The Double Tax’s chapters on the workforce, Anna considers the Black woman in her 30s who is applying for a job for which she is fully qualified. Instantly, she’s up against employers’ expectations about a woman of child-rearing age—that she’ll probably leave in a few years to have kids, that moms don’t have as much time or desire to focus on their career, and that they’ll be less committed to the company. But that stereotype is layered upon further for women of color, who are also navigating deep-seated negative biases that suggest that people of color are fundamentally less productive, too. She hasn’t even said hello, and she’s already at a financial disadvantage.

If that Black woman does get the job, those negative stereotypes and others will continue to impact her ability to rise up in the company. Unfortunately, it’s not just white male CEOs who make these assumptions - all people do.

Connection is the key piece we’re missing

If you acknowledge the Double Tax is a problem but still don’t see how it impacts our society as a whole, consider Anna’s Venn diagram of demographics. She explains that people often picture educated Black women on the outskirts of this visual, but they’re right in the middle, with experiences that overlap everyone else’s. They share Blackness with Black men, womanhood with White women, and, often, advanced education with White men. They might be only 7% of the population, but their experiences - and fate - are shared by the vast majority of workers.

When I asked Anna what women who want to focus their ambition and privilege on fixing this issue (like Bossed Up listeners) can do to start advocating for changes that will help Black women and our whole society, she dropped a revelatory wake-up call: White women need to come together ourselves before we can come together for other women.

This isn’t the first time our society’s lack of—and genuine need for—building community has come up on this podcast. In episode 456, How Connection Can Cure What Ails Us, Julia Hotz outlines the many ways building community benefits our society. In episode 497, Where Have All the Good Friends Gone?, I talk about how we can start to regenerate these connections.

As Anna puts it, you can’t build sisterhood across the bridge if you haven’t built sisterhood on your side first. White women don’t connect enough, which means we don’t easily recognize how alike our experiences are in spite of the other features that seem to separate us, like where we live, our politics, or our child-raising or child-free reality. If we fought the self and patriarchy-imposed isolation and started seeing the mutual understanding that Anna shares with every Black woman she passes on the street, then we could start working together for systemic change that will benefit everyone.

How have you encountered the costs of being a woman, or a woman of color, in the workplace and in the world? Our Facebook Courage Community and our group on LinkedIn are great places to start connecting over our shared experiences and building that community Anna so rightfully points out we need before we can start tackling the bigger issues.

Related links from today’s episode:

Job search hacks aren’t everything, but HIRED can help:

[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 526. I'm Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up, and I've got a bold question for you. What if the biggest barriers to women's success isn't just about confidence or strategy or any number of workplace hacks, but about economics itself? Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman’s new book, The Double Tax, pulls back the curtain on the hidden costs that women of color, and really all women pay, just to show up. And trust me, you are going to see your workplace and how you're navigating it differently after this conversation.
Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman is an award winning Ghanaian American researcher and writer. She's a postgraduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School studying public policy and economics, and she's the youngest ever recipient of the CEDAW Women's Rights Award by the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Just a few weeks ago now, she published The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid, which has since received coverage from Marketplace, The New York Times, Forbes, Black Enterprise, and now the Bossed Up podcast. Her first book, the Black Agenda, received widespread coverage from outlets like NPR, Essence, Telemundo, and the New York Times as well.
If you've heard of the Pink Tax, the Double Tax takes this concept a step further and interweaves economics with personal narrative to unpack how women, and women of color in particular, are paying a lot, a very stick steep cost, just for the price of entry into our society and into our world and into our workplaces for sure. So helping me to break all this down is the author herself, Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman. Welcome to the Bossed Up Podcast.
ANNA: Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
EMILIE: And thank you for taking time off of your busy book tour schedule. Congratulations on the new book. We're so excited to dive into it.
ANNA: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to dive in too.
EMILIE: The Double Tax, I am so excited to break down what that really means. But first, what led you to writing The Double Tax now? How did you get to this point?
ANNA: Yes. So you know, the book process, for those who don't know, starts years in advance before you actually see the book show up on shelves. So I had no idea that the book would essentially pop up in this current climate, though it does seem to be speaking to the moment a little bit, if you will. But I would say what inspired the book was a conversation so I was at a speaking gig. I was giving a speech about, you know, why women are important, why women of color are important in the workplace, and sort of the barriers and obstacles that we deal with.
And when I got off stage, a white guy came up to me and said, good speech, good speech. And I was like, thank you, sir. Don't know who you are. Happy to get this unsolicited feedback you're about to give me. And he was like, you know, are you sure that, like, making things better off women of color, more specifically black women, would actually improve things for everybody else's society? And I was like, yeah, I'm like, pretty sure of that like, that's kind of what the speech was about. Hope you were listening. And then he was like, can you prove it? And that's when I was like, I can, but, like, I need you to give me a little bit of a lead time. Like, I need to go get my materials.
But it kind of occurred to me at that point that, like, he was asking that question because the set of facts that he was operating off of were not the same set of facts that I was operating off of. And so I figured, like, why not even the playing field in some sense, with the type of information that we're both drawing from? And so I thought to myself, well, the things that I know, I would love for him to know, too. So how about we throw this all in a book, make it super accessible so folks can check it out both in their libraries and maybe at their doorstep and make it a little bit entertaining. I want folks to not feel like it's a heavy read. And so that's really what inspired The Double Tax. Yeah.
EMILIE: Congratulations. I mean, it's a tough question to get from an economics standpoint. You're like, show me your homework. And you're like, uh, again, you know what I mean?
ANNA: Yeah especially you know that we got numbers. You know, we got to divide. We got a plus. You know, we got to do all sorts of stuff. So what you mean proven? Give me a little bit of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
EMILIE: And so your. Your whole background, you know, spans everything from, like, activism to economics and data and research. Can you give us a little background as to, like, your personal trajectory to being able to answer that question with confidence?
ANNA: That's such a great question. I mean, it's crazy. So, I'm 29 years old. For those who don't know, I feel like I've lived, like, 10 lives a little bit like,...
EMILIE: Your bio reads that way.
ANNA: …yeah, I don't even believe my bio, you know, but yeah, I would say that, like, I've always been somebody who centered my community, right? And I'm just thinking back to when I was a kid in fifth grade, I started a student newspaper. It was the first student newspaper at my school. And you know, some people had issues with it. They were like, oh, she's getting a little too, not political, but it was kind of just like, why is she talking about these issues? Right? But I think I've always been somebody who cares really deeply about the world around me and the communities that I'm a part of. Just making sure that we have all the facts and also that we can use the information that we're provided to make decisions that impact our lives in a positive way.
And so for me, advocacy was kind of like really where things began, I would argue. So as a college student, I co-founded an organization called The Sadie Collective, which is still thriving today. And so this organization really addresses the underrepresentation of black women and girls, but now really broaden itself to addressing the underrepresentation of minorities, low income students, first generation students. And so, I really have kind of used that, that was like when I was in college. So we got really scrappy when we were putting that together. It was a group of girls and I. And I think that was really kind of when I was like, wait a minute, like, if I can put together an organization, right? Scrappily, I might add, but like, we did it, maybe I can do other things. And so I was part of the digital organizing effort of Black Birders Week. I've helped with black, you know, in Math Week, just like helping all these different initiatives. I've helped do things on campus, off campus.
And I would say, like, you know, at some point in my journey, I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, right? And, and I'll be very honest with folks who are listening. Like, that's not an easy thing to figure out. I want to be very clear that when I was in college, I changed my major five times in one week. And my parents were disgusted, okay? [LAUGHTER] So, they were like, please graduate, because we can't, we can't put this, you know, this. What are we doing here, right? And so, you know, eventually I went back to a subject that I didn't think I could ever study. And this was math. I had, you know, people in the past tell me that they didn't think I was a math girl. They didn't think I was somebody who could do those numbers at a high level. And so I was discouraged early on from pursuing math in college, but decided, you know, on a prayer and a whim, that maybe this is the right path for me not knowing I would stumble into this thing called economics.
And for those who don't know what economics is, economics is really sort of using math to study social problems. That's kind of what we do for a living. And so when I learned that that was kind of what economists did and that a lot of people pay attention to what economists talk about, I thought to myself, well, it seems like economics is the language of power. If you have presidents and dignitaries and school teachers and hospital owners all listening to the same group of experts, perhaps this is something that I might want to do too, if I want people to pay attention to the issues that are affecting my community and beyond.
EMILIE: Yeah, that's so well said. There is so much power and reverence brought to economics because like that gentleman who came up to you and said, prove it, you know, like the data bears out a lot of the evidence behind what The Double Tax is all about. And so your book beautifully weaves together data, personal stories, and actionable advice that I think is really, really makes it a powerful read. So for those who haven't picked up a copy just yet, what is the double tax? How do you define it, the double tax?
ANNA: I would define it as the compounded cost of racism and sexism, right? So, you know, you know, this really affects women of color. But as I make a case for in the book, it actually affects you, especially if you're a woman, right. Of any race, of any background, of any class, you're going to feel the effects of the double tax. Because I like to say that, you know, the fates of women across all different types of backgrounds are essentially linked, right? My fate is your fate and your fate is my fate, because what happens to me ultimately might make its way to you and vice versa.
So I think the way that I think about the double tax is it's really sort of these individual costs at times that women, especially women of color, are dealing with day to day, right, in these different areas of life. So across the book, I kind of use the lifetime of a woman to illustrate how the double tax shows up. We're talking about the first time you encounter your first mirror and start realizing what beauty is and what beauty isn't, or when you're thinking about your career life in terms of negotiating your first salary, choosing your first career choice, right? But also thinking about how you move up the ladder within the organization you decide to sit at.
And then we talk about caregiving, which I think is an understated topic in the mainstream, right? Not in the sense of like, we don't talk about mothers, but we don't talk about what mothers deal with. We don't talk about what caregivers have to actually bear day to day. And then finally retirement, as well as generational wealth and housing, which I think are two topics that go hand in hand. You find out that lots of folks who are taking out money from their 401k to pay for their house can't afford to retire later on in life because that 401k has been depleted. So, one thing that I thought was super interesting is that these individual costs that women of color in particular are dealing with day to day, if left unaddressed, become these societal costs. And of course you see this happening in the workplace, but you also see it happening in other areas of life.
EMILIE: Yes. And I'm acutely living through that motherhood era right now. And as often as I can, I tell everyone on this podcast how much money I spend on childcare, right? Because I think it raises awareness. I'm spending $57,000 this year on child care.
ANNA: What? Sorry, oh my god,
EMILIE: I've got two kids.
ANNA: I just think about right from what?
EMILIE: I know, but like, because that's, that's the response. That's an appropriate response, first of all. But that's kind of the reaction I had when I learned about black women's braids costs, you know, and like just raising awareness by saying, let's do the numbers as Guy what's his name might say on NPR, right? Like, let's do the numbers. Because this s*** adds up. Like, don't get me wrong, super grateful for the care options that we have. Super grateful to be able to have babies and whatnot. But like the policy advice of just have more babies that we're starting to hear from the right is just so short sighted when you cannot make the money work.
ANNA: That's exactly right. Mixed evidence around, like, why people aren't having kids. So there's certain economists, they're like, look, the norms are changing. That's one of the main reasons why that's happening. But I also do think that the economic and financial constraints on families and on women are also playing a role as to whether or not people want to have kids. When I tell folks, like, on average to raise a child from 0 to 18 is about $300,000, people look at me looking at them, and they're kind of like, um, why isn't anybody talking about this, right? And that to me is like, if you told somebody your child care was $50,000, I bet you somebody be like, I don't know about if that's for me, right? And I think that that's a. We need all the information to make an informed decision. That's all I'm going to say.
EMILIE: Totally. And you don't really learn this stuff until you have kids.
ANNA: No that’s right!
EMILIE: And it feels like, oh, shocking. And you're like, wait, what? And so I think it's interesting when you, you take the data and yes, we, I think we understand on this podcast especially, there's a lot of feminists listening how inextricably linked women of color's experiences are for women broadly. And I feel like the compounding nature of it all really hit home when you look at the full scope of how this stacks up. I was kind of surprised to see beauty front and center because I have the privilege of not really thinking about beauty very often, right? I was kind of raised like, it doesn't matter what you do or don't do and how you look, like, what matters is how hard you work and how smart you are. And then that's not the case when it comes to the politics of presentability, is it? Can you tell me what that's all about? Like, help me understand and raise awareness around that.
ANNA: Great question. I think that it's one of my favorite chapters in the book. So, you know, I love all my children, but that's like a top three chapter for me, because I think that this is, this sort of cost around presentability, at least for black girls, and I would argue for women of color in general, becomes really, really apparent at a very young age. I'm talking like, when you're seven years old and you're sitting down for a perm to straighten out the curls that naturally show up in your hair, you become aware that there's a reason why that has to take place, right? You know, there's a, there's almost like, ah, the trade off becomes immediately clear. Either I do this or I face these consequences, or I face another set of, sort of limitations in terms of where I can move and how I'm accepted and that sort of thing.
And I would argue this extends broadly to women where it's, you know, I would say young girls know when their looks play a factor into whether or not they're invited to a dance or if they're seen as popular, or if people think they're likable, like young girls are not ignorant to that, right? What I think, what I pretty much make a case for in that first chapter titled “Good Hair” is that black girls are especially acutely aware of this. And there's a real cost to essentially meeting that bar that already is moving every single time we talk about beauty standards, every single time we talk about who is considered attractive in society.
And, you know, for folks who are black especially, that comes up in our hair, right? This thing that naturally grows in our hair, in our head, excuse me, having to be managed. Otherwise, there are real life consequences to us not satisfying that beauty standard. So for young black girls, it's, your braids aren't a certain way that is acceptable in your school district. You could get suspended. That becomes something on your record. That becomes something that could affect whether or not you get into a good college or get opportunities later down the line.
EMILIE: Do people ever, like, say, that can't be true? You know? Like, because I think there's a place of ignorance where you're like.
ANNA: That’s why I wrote the book.
EMILIE: Right, absolutely.
ANNA: I think people are almost in disbelief because they want to believe it's 2025. How could we possibly be here?
EMILIE: Like, literally policing people's hair? Like that sounds outside of the scope of reality, but it's not. It's not.
ANNA: And I think a lot of that is about control, right? You know, it's different from me, therefore I don't like it or I don't think it's acceptable. And so I want to control it. And the way I want to control it is I disproportionately make up leadership. I'm going to set rules and standards that are going to define professionalism in the workplace, in the school yard, and I'm going to enforce it differently for different people. And so for black girls, you immediately [SNAPPING NOISE] pick up with the double taxes from when you're a child. And from there, it just compounds. It's not like the cost of presentability disappears once you turn 16. You just become more acutely aware of it, and you're having to spend more because you understand really how steep that cost is.
EMILIE: And it's a literal cost, like, fiscal costs money to manage. All this beauty stuff costs dollars and cents to manage, as you say. And time, right?
ANNA: Time. I think one thing people don't realize is that back in the day before remote work, a lot of black women, when you go to the hair salon, you go get your hair braided. My braided hair took maybe eight hours to get done. So I'm in the, I'm in the day like this eight hours. I'm stretching, I'm moving. But like I know if I get up that's gonna add another 30 minutes. Homegirl is gonna, I'm gonna be there till nine.
EMILIE: Right. And this is happening regularly. It's not like a one, three, once a year. Right.
ANNA: Four or five times a year I'm getting my hair braided and I'm spending $400, right? But the point here is back in the day people were not on their laptops multitasking. So that means that you either have two options. Either I forfeit today's wages because I can't take the day off paid leave for my hair or if I come to the workplace with my hair natural at that time, I could be written up for being unprofessional, my hair being distraction. That could cost me my job, that could cost me a promotion, that could cost me a position, status within the workplace that has even longer term benefit, sorry, longer term costs rather on my well being. And so I think what I say in the book is like when you realize that one like a change of your hairstyle and one fell swoop could literally solve a bunch of economic problems, right? Your objective function is fundamentally different from a white woman. Objective function in this case, like what I mean by that? Sorry, not the economics.
EMILIE: Yeah, give us the economic breakdown. What are we talking about there?
ANNA: What you are optimizing for. It could be done [SNAPPING NOISE] in like just a hairstyle change. You're going to go ahead and just do that rather than okay, maybe I need to consider, you know, managing my natural hair this way today. And I don't know how much. And the thing too is like you're having to deal with like, natural hair maintenance for black women, we know that we're upcharged at least $0.20 per ounce on average. Right. And then black hair products, products that tend to work on women of colors, hair types. I don't know folks on this. Asian American women can't just use white girl hair products, right? Because their hair texture is different from yall. So they're also going through some sort of trial and trial period, you know, trying to figure out what products work best for their hair. So my point here is just like that cost of presentability becomes super obvious at a very young age. Which is why I open the book up with it and I talk a little bit about my own experience as a young girl trying to navigate that cost.
EMILIE: And it's real and it compounds and it doesn't go away. Time and money. And when you said, written up for your hair, I thought, you know, we like to think in 2025 that's not happening. Like it's not an overtly racist policy, but it doesn't really have to be to be impacting, disproportionately impacting women of color, right? It can be something as subjective as you don't look very presentable today, period, full stop.
ANNA: And I would say that extends to white women, right? So you, if you can police me for my hair, I can police you for your shoulder, I can police you for the length of your skirt, right?
EMILIE: You're bringing me back to my high school dress code violations as a child girl. But yeah.
ANNA: Right? I can police you for anything. Everything's fair game. And I think that's kind of what I talk about in the double tax. If you allow for discrimination to be happening, you know, proxy by hair, someone can proxy anything and say, you know, I just don't think women should have the ability to dress how they would like to dress. And I can just pick something arbitrarily and say that that signifies that you're unprofessional too. And then that just, there's a, it's a very slippery slope from there.
EMILIE: I think we're like living through this very slippery slope moment in America right now too, where that handwives tale doesn't seem so far fetched, right? Like, where is the line of presentability? That's really interesting. I want to also ask you about workplace choices that feel like individual choices, but collectively they mean so much more, right? So you talk about like resume whitening and how this impacts sort of stereotypes employers might be bringing to even just the job search process or the hiring process. What does that mean to you? What does that look like?
ANNA: Yeah. So I think the workplace chapters were fun to write, mainly because for those who don't know, I'm a PhD student, so I study the workplace. That's what I do in my spare time is what I like to say. My PhD is my side hustle. Don't tell my advisors. But that being said, I feel like the way I think about the workplace arc in the book is that employers don't know anything about us before we apply for a job. They're making a lot of guesses based off of your resume, based off of maybe what they see on LinkedIn. They'll go onto your social media at times to see if they can gauge where you're at. And that leaves a lot to be assumed, right? And that can be for better or for worse.
Usually it's not for, it's not for better. When it comes to certain groups, right? And one thing that we know is that employers tend to think that, you know, women have a certain set of family plans, right? That you may or may not have kids in the future and that, you know, moms tend to not have a lot of time. And so I'm going to assume that you might be less productive when you start getting to your child rearing years, right? And therefore that justifies why I don't think you should be getting paid as much as the man. That's the thinking that they're going with.
EMILIE: And it's not even like conscious thinking sometimes, right? Sometimes it is very conscious and sometimes it's not. But it's still the thinking. It's still like, happening.
ANNA: It's still driving outcomes, right? And then I think what is sort of what makes this the double tax is that for black folks in particular, there is a lot of theories that are constructed to basically show that black people are fundamentally less productive than white people. So now let's, let's just put a black woman in the middle of that. So you think that I already may have kids, so you're going to already dock my pay based off of that. Now you all, I also belong to another group where you think we're just less productive than our counterparts. I'm gonna dock your pay off of that. So I'm now being docked twice, whereas, like, white women might be docked once and black men might be docked once. As a black woman, I'm gonna be docked twice.
EMILIE: And do we see that borne out in the data too? Like we see those numbers in the pay gaps and in the wage gaps, right?
ANNA: That’s right. And I would also argue that, like, we know from some research that black people are penalized for salary negotiations. So you also hear people say things like just ask for more. But for some black women that we spoke with, asking for more could cost you the job.
EMILIE: Right. And it seems like that assertive, we talk a lot about the likability, leadership, double binds and how because being seen as assertive is a good thing, usually for a white male, right? It's a dangerous thing for a black male. And it's a tricky thing for women and women of color, right? And I always say it's like tap dancing on a tightrope, but for women of color, it's like a juggling act on top of that, right? You're just like, how do I come across? As, I'm a boss, I'm a leader, I'm someone who you can trust to run this team. But also, I don't want to push too hard. God forbid you should think I'm an angry black woman.
ANNA: That's right. I think you've hit the nuance on the head, right? Where there is some research that shows that, like, when black women are assertive, they're somewhat awarded for it. But to what degree, right? Because when I talk to black women who are at, like mid-career level, who are still trying to climb the ladder and get to higher heights, their team members are doubting their ability to lead. And I think fundamentally it's about, I don't think this woman, I don't think this woman of color, I don't think this black woman is a rational human being that can make rational decisions on behalf of this organization, on behalf of my team. I think that something about their identity makes them a little bit less rational than me. I'm talking from a perspective of maybe a white guy, right? And so therefore I am using that to justify why I shouldn't trust this person with this task. Or I feel like I should overcome this task that this person has assigned to me with my own ideas and my own thing.
And I would say that I think a lot of times when we have these conversations, they're happening along gender lines. So we're talking about, oh, there's a gender gap. There's a gender gap in promotion, that sort of thing. But I think the nuance that the double tax introduces is that this also happens amongst women. There's certain groups of women that also believe, I don't think that that girl knows what she's doing. I don't think that woman knows what she's doing. And this is something that came out in some of the conversations we had with black women where they were saying, you know, I'm navigating the patriarchy too, right? White women, I'm navigating the patriarchy. I'm navigating the patriarchy, but I'm also navigating white women, right? And I was like, oh, girl. Like, that's the little. [CLAPPING NOISE]
EMILIE: Well, I mean, I think everyone can just, in their mind's eye, imagine like the office. Karen. I don't know if you use that language, right?
ANNA: It's not all y', all, right?
EMILIE: Of course, it's not every one of us.
ANNA: It's too many.
EMILIE: Yeah. And there's a lot of powerful white women in corporate America who use their little fiefdom to keep other women down,
ANNA: Including white women.
EMILIE: And so it's, it is like internalized patriarchy in that organizational setting is a very interesting thing.
ANNA: And it's so short sighted, you know what I'm saying? Like, we're tethered, right?
EMILIE: Well, that's, that brings us right back to your first question from that gentleman. And then you were saying in the very beginning, and I want to come back to that idea is that like, none of us are free until all of us are free. Sure. But like, how do we make that connection for folks that when black women are living at this intersection of bias and living under these, like, double taxes, socially, politically, organizationally, why would it benefit the white woman in the office and why would it benefit the white dude in the C-suite to see this reversed?
ANNA: Yeah, it's, it's a couple things. One, I think if you think about all of our experiences as sort of circles that overlap, right? In a Venn diagram, black women are dead center. They are the intersection. And what that means is that there's no aspect of our life that does not touch your life. I'm black. That relates to black men. I'm a woman, that relates to white women. I am highly educated. That relates to white men, right? I am maybe poor, middle class, working class. That relates to quite a few groups across our [UNINTELLIGIBLE] I’m a mother. I'm a breadwinner, that relates to a bunch of people.
So I think that, you know, a lot of times what people think is if we're looking at this Venn diagram as sort of our illustration, that black women are actually outside of the diagram, they're somewhere over there. They're an isolated group that we shouldn't really be paying attention to because they only represent about 7% of our population. But what we're starting to see, at least on a nationwide scale, is this conversation that black women actually have a lot to reveal about our society and where our society is headed, right? And so it's very much about we get hit first and hardest because whatever economic shock is coming to the country and then everybody ends up feeling some version of it. Maybe white men feel the least amount at, uh, the highest level, but all their workers feel it, right? Like it's not that you're just living in isolation as a man on a yacht or whatever. On that yacht, people have to work for you, no? If they can't make a living, they not showing up to work. What are you talking about right now?
[LAUGHTER]
EMILIE: And so what I hear you getting at is like, the policy changes that support women of color are going to support by default a whole bunch of other populations of people, everybody.
ANNA: Whole host of people, especially white women. I think a lot of people think that DEI is very much about black people. It's about white women. If we look historically, affirmative action helped white women. DEI policies help [INAUDIBLE]...
EMILIE: Yes.
ANNA: So, you know, a lot of these things that may have had us in mind really were ultimately about uplifting white women. So you getting rid of the DEI industrial complex is you really eating into the outcomes of white women, right? These gender initiatives were really like, under DEI, if you get rid of DEI, those gender initiatives also disappear. And so even in the book, I say, you really don't want these DEI initiatives to leave because they support veterans, they support the disabled, they support returning moms, they support first gen, they support white women.
EMILIE: Yeah, well, the outcomes show that, like, it's white women who made the biggest gains with these kinds of programs, right? So I wonder for the women who are listening, majority of whom are probably white women, we're all leading from the middle for the most part, right? We're in the juggling act of work, family, crunch time, career mode. Regardless of whether or not we wear hats, like roles, like mother, that we're balancing. Maybe it's caring for aging parents, maybe it's just being an activist in our community, whatever it might be.
How can we manage from the middle to advocate for some of this stuff? Like, what does that look like when you don't have 100% of the power? You're not in the C-suite. You've got some power and a lot of ambition. How do we collaborate and sort of come together to advocate for this stuff? And what does that look like actually? What are we even advocating for? Those are a lot of questions. Sorry. Take whichever one you like.
ANNA: No, no, it's good. It's great. Yeah. No, I think that you kind of answered the question in the question, which is you come together. So I have a hot take and maybe I might get in trouble for this. So, hopefully this isn't hurt book sales. I think that white women don't come together enough. That's my hot take. Okay. I remember after the election, that was.
EMILIE: I have been complaining about that on this podcast for over a year. I'm like, where are all my friends? Where have all the, why can't we just get together for a low key. Nobody needs to clean their house to perfection before we get together. Yes.
ANNA: I think all women are suffering because of that, because you guys do still make up a substantial, you know, share of our electorate, of our country. And so I think, I'll say this. The men who want you to lose, not saying all men want you to lose, but the men who want you to lose are keeping you in isolation.
EMILIE: That's really powerful. Yeah.
ANNA: And I really think that the number one lesson I've learned from my short life, especially in the last few years, is that there's not enough white women talking to other white women. Because if there were, you guys would see one how alike you guys are. Like the kind of struggle that you're going through together, you wouldn't be, I feel like a lot of times, you know, when I talk to white women, they're like, yeah, sometimes it just feels like, you know, that's unnecessary tension at times. I hear you. But I think that. That sisterhood is very much about coming together in one accord.
I can say definitively as a black woman, sure, there's discord at times, but there's a mutual understanding with any black woman I come across. We understand what we're going through, and I think that white women should have something very similar. You can't build sisterhood across the bridge. If you haven't built sisterhood on your side of the bridge first. Super hard to do, right? Because what even are you using as an example for what you can? So I hear a lot of white women be like, how can I be an ally? How can I show up? And it's like, do you show up for the people? Are you holding the women on your side of the fence accountable? If not, you trying to come over to my side, it's gonna fall flat. But also, you're not even going to be in a position where you can do that effectively.
EMILIE: Yeah, that's interesting. White women organizing more white women.
ANNA: 100%. For good causes, please. Not for harm.
EMILIE: Right. And to see their gender as salient, to see their futures as inextricably linked, that's the thing that's always bugged me in. In social science research is like, women writ large don't see their womanhood as all that relevant, right? Especially when there's, like, something else to attach their identity to, like being from the south or being a gun owner, right? Or like being a Jeep driver, whatever the insert, you know, the identity is here. Like, white women do not see that womanhood as super central to their identities. And that is economically not accurate, because being a woman, as you say, in the very introduction of your book you write, I think in your opening introduction to your nieces or your, your dedication, right? “Womanhood is expensive. So ask for more. And then some.” Which I'm like, that's the whole premise of your book. And I, and I really don't even think there's an awareness. Maybe the pink tax raised some awareness.
ANNA: Yes, a little bit awareness. Right. But I think you're right. I think this conversation about the cost, about the cost around being a woman is something that people are afraid to have a conversation about. I think people are afraid, you know, people are happy to say, you know, let me use economics to optimize my life so I can, you know, navigate womanhood a little bit easier. But I think people are afraid to say there's parts of being a woman that are expensive, and I think that we should do something about it. If you, if you talk to a mother, she's not going to be like, raising my kid is so d*** expensive because there's a stigma attached to calling out the expenses that we deal with. We're almost assumed to just accept and eat the cost because if we don't then it becomes a, you know, it becomes a question of whether or not, like, are we, are we grateful for, you know, right? That's just really what it's about.
EMILIE: Maybe you can't cut it. Like, you're not allowed to be a mother and complain about motherhood, right? You're not allowed to be a woman who's beautiful and complain about the cost of entry to being that beautiful, right? Like, if anything, when I was reading about beautiful beauty in your book, I was thinking women don't just, like, have to perform beauty to have privilege and have, like, the cost of entry to society, but they get s*** for caring about how they look the whole time, right? There's people listening who are like, I don't. I would never spend that much money or time on my hair, right? I would never spend that much money or time, like, on my presentation. And I think it's like, hubris that's driving this. What would you say to men, or people, or even women who say all of this is performance that women don't have to do, they're choosing to do it?
ANNA: I would say, then close the curtain. If the curtain can't be closed, maybe this is not a performance. Maybe this is somebody's livelihood? I would have to say that, like, we can't close the curtain on this. So the changes that need to fundamentally happen begin with addressing where things have gone awry. And I think that this is the first time we're starting to have a nationwide conversation about these costs. Like, women don't have to do this.
EMILIE: Well, I almost, I'm almost thinking about that, like, manosphere bulls*** narrative. There's like, I forget what they call them, but, like, the 8% ruler that, like, 80% of women only go for 5% of men or something, and they're all Becky's or something. You know what I mean? Like, and that they just, like, spend money on their superficial looks and how s***** that is. And aren't they dumb for doing so? And I'm just like, wait a minute, how do you even, like, reason with that philosophy?
ANNA: I think my overall thought here would be that women cannot afford to not engage in this. There is a cost to pay if we don't engage. And that cost, I would argue, is people will ask us to incur the cost that we forfeited in addition to facing stigma for not doing this, right? Maybe, motherhood is like, a really great example of this, I think. I say in the chapter women. Women pay a price if they choose motherhood or if they don't. Like, we lose either way, right? Either you choose motherhood and you incur all the costs that come along with that. You're punished in the workplace for choosing motherhood, or you don't choose motherhood and people shame you for the rest of your life. And that can result in other costs where you, you pay for therapy, you have you know what I'm saying? Like, you're having to perform in other ways to signify that you are a caring individual.
I think the issue with making it seem like, oh, women are performing these costs out of choice is that it just leaves no room for the fact that, like, our humanity is constantly contested. Us being human is constantly contested. And that contested aspect of it are these costs, like, in order to, like, compensate for the ways in which our world doesn't serve us, we have to incur these costs. So for black women, I just say. For women of color, I just say these costs are just steeper. But it's like the world saying, you're not human. If you want to be more human, you're going to have to satisfy the beauty standard if you want to be more human, you're going to have to become a mother if you want to be more human, right? You're going to have to be a kid.
EMILIE: Yeah. Well I almost think when you say that, it all comes back to me for safety, right? Like there's an aspect when you say moving through the world, I think, like without being victimized by our like, racist, sexist world, right? Like there are certain people who look shady and suspicious, right? And that's where the beauty standards come into play too. We're not just talking about, she looks presentable for this interview. It's also like, does she or he look suspicious enough to be like on the receiving end of violence? You know? And so to be seen as human requires a steeper cost.
ANNA: Yes. And that price is for many women of color, the double tax. I would argue for white women it's the pink tax. And we are dealing with this price daily. And by saying that, I think a lot of times people think these costs are just happening one time. But as we've just discussed, I can be a 70 year old white woman dealing with the cost of beauty because people have beef with women's wrinkles. Dealing with the cost of caregiving because I have to take care of my aging parents dealing with the cost of motherhood. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't go away. It compounds over the course of your life. And if those costs go unaddressed as an individual, you pass that down, you pass that receipt down to the next generation. And so now when you think about that, think about a whole bunch of women being subject to that cost and having to pass it down. That's that societal cost that ends up costing all of us at the end of the day.
EMILIE: Okay. Amazing. Anna, if our listeners take one thing away from this conversation or your book, I'm already thinking like, second guessing my facial that I have scheduled for next week. I'm like, wait, no, this is a good thing. I shouldn't feel bad for caring about how I look. It's an investment. But also my husband should have to pay for facials to look, you know, presentable and up. Like this is bulls***, right? And maybe I'll, I'll contribute to my 401k the same amount as my facial costs as like right. So what should we take away from this message other than how crazy the world is and how whack things still are?
ANNA: Yes. Maybe I'll say something that's less economic-y. Just feel like we're having like a really layered conversation here that I think is really important. I want to start by saying that, this is not your fault. Yeah. And I just want you to let that sit for a second.
EMILIE: Right.
ANNA: These costs that you bear day to day, these pressures that you face day to day, it's not your fault, right? The society that we're in never had us in mind. And a lot of what we're doing is just trying to compensate for our absence from the initial plan, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing I'll say is that it is not in your best interest as a woman to see another woman lose, regardless of where she comes from. And it's really important. I think people talk about solidarity cheaply, but solidarity is costly. It's costly because it requires risk and it requires stakes. But it ultimately is the greatest form of showing humanity for another person that you can, right? Saying that I'm standing with you. I'm standing alongside you. You fighting this fight. I'm fighting alongside you. And I think that a lot of times women are fractured across different dimensions of identity because people define womanhood very narrowly for different aspects of womanhood, right? And so it's actually incumbent on us to challenge those narrow definitions and to really come together so that these costs that we're all dealing with at varying degrees can be eradicated once and for all.
EMILIE: I love it. Anna, thank you so much for sharing that. Where can our listeners keep up with you and get a copy of The Double Tax?
ANNA: So I'm on Instagram, very unhinged, at Its Afronomics. I post videos on there about our economy and politics. So if you like this conversation, this was such a great conversation. So layered, so nuanced. Feel free to join me on there.
I'm also on Bluesky, the same handle, ItsAfronomics. And then if you want to buy the book, AnnaGifty.com we have copies to sell. I'll be on tour in a couple of different places. So I think I have St. Paul left and LA, and then if you're international, I'll be in the U.K. and Germany later on this season.
EMILIE: So, yeah, amazing. Anna, thank you so much and good luck on the book tour. I know how exhausting that can be, but this was such a great conversation. Thanks for bringing it to us.
ANNA: Thank you
EMILIE: For links to everything Anna and I just mentioned. Head to bossedup.org/episode526. That's bossedup.org/episode526. There you'll find a blog post summarizing Anna's key points, as well as a fully written transcript, if that's your thing. And now I want to hear from you. What do you make of this conversation? What do you make of the whole concept of the double tax? Have you experienced the high cost of being a woman in the workplace and being a woman of color in this world, I want to hear from you.
[OUTRO MUSIC IN]
As always, let's keep the conversation going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and as the original motto goes, set way back in 1896 by America's first Black Women's Club, let's keep lifting as we climb.
[OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]