** This project was submitted to Hack the 6ix 2021 **

It’s time to take control of your femininity and leverage your purchasing power. It’s time to Reclaim the Pink!

The “pink tax” refers to the extra amount women pay daily as consumers. Although these products are often the same but with different packaging, the price discrepancies show a pattern of gender-based pricing.

By analyzing your product, determining whether this gender-based pricing effects it, and offering alternatives to your product if it does, Reclaim the Pink takes one step closer to ending gender bias and discrimination.

The goal of the Project: Expose gender-based price discrepancies on women’s products Uplift and showcase women-owned businesses (which have been significantly impacted during COVID-19)

Our project battles the “pink tax” by: Allowing users to analyze their products for gender-based pricing Featuring local, women-owned businesses Raising awareness about the “pink tax”

The tech stack of our website consists of HTML and CSS for the frontend, which we designed using Canva and Figma, and JavaScript for the backend of the product checker and chatbot. We also used Git to help with version control and to collaborate on different parts.

One challenge we faced was in creating the backend. None of us were very familiar with JavaScript at the beginning of Hack the 6ix, but we knew that it would be an excellent programming language to code our backend with. This became a great way for us to learn JavaScript more in-depth as we developed our project, so this challenge ended up becoming a great reward.

Some next steps for our project include creating an app version of the product check to implement a scanner to read barcodes in stores. We also hope to allow users from different areas to select their location and get more accurate results for their area. We believe that making the app and website internationally accessible could help empower more women to see if they are unfairly taxed on essential products.

Expanding the product database could also help women check whether or not the 'Pink Tax' is applied to other female-targeted consumer goods (i.e. vitamin tablets, insurance, and services like haircuts). We also plan on expanding the Local section of the website (and eventually the app) so that more women would be able to showcase their businesses. Website visitors would be able to search for local female-owned companies based on their location (users could manually type in their location or allow the website to find their approximate location). Rewriting the whole program in GO and React.js would improve the speed and performance of the website. Overall, we believe this innovative project will help tackle gender discrimination and raise awareness about gender-based pricing!