Interview: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman on Her New Book, The Double Tax

Noa Rosinplotz: I want to start by asking you to define the double tax, and talk about how you came up with the term. 

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: The double tax is the compounded cost of racism and sexism. Misogynoir is a long-standing concept that focuses on prejudice and discrimination against Black women, and the double tax is really the quantification of that term.

What I do is I take that lens, which is a really excellent foundation, and say: People are more or less proximate to Black women depending on their racial identity, or gender identity, or socioeconomic status. So we can look at where people sit along this axis of inequality. And by using economics as the lens to unpack misogynoir, we help people who might see the stories that women of color, especially Black people, will share about not being paid enough or not being promoted or having difficulties with childcare and child rearing, and dismiss those stories as one-off anecdotes. What this book makes extremely clear is that actually, nobody is lying about that. In my intro, I say something like, if you’re a Black woman especially, you’re going to be absolutely vindicated by this book. And the same goes for other groups of women too!

And it’s really about what happens when we ignore those costs. The crises that begin with women of color, especially Black women, ultimately end up on everybody else’s doorstep. We’re seeing that right now with the jobs data. This past month, we added 22,000 jobs. But if you have been focusing on Black women’s trends in the labor market, you could have anticipated that. Because Black women were already starting to flounder within the workforce.

Noa: You’re an economist by training, but you talked to a hundred women, mostly Black and white women living in the US, as you were writing this book. And I’m guessing you’ve been talking to a lot more as you’ve been promoting the book. How did these conversations shape your work? How did you think about combining what you learned from interviews with quantitative data? 

Anna: I actually am not a qualitative researcher. So I used this as an opportunity to bring in qualitative researchers that were also women, including Dr. Lauren Mims, who’s a fantastic qualitative researcher who helped me think about how to construct these questions.

I thought it was important to bring in these stories because I don’t think that stories are irrelevant to the way that we understand data. They add color and depth to the numbers that we’re putting out there. So on the one hand, we say, this story is not an isolated incident; it’s happening at scale. And within that, we can show an example of how something would manifest in an individual life. One of my number one goals for this book was I really wanted people not to feel scared by the numbers, and I think that the way to do that is to balance numbers with the narrative.

Economists get a lot of necessary flack for not really citing qualitative work and not taking it super seriously. But qualitative research is really hard! I don’t know why people make it sound like it’s really easy. Bringing those different research methods together made me appreciate that all the ways we ask and answer questions are very complementary. And if we had more communication across the different methods, the questions that we have about society and about our world would actually be answered in a much richer and fuller way.

Noa: Was there anything in particular that inspired you to write this book?

Anna: There was a man I spoke to, a white guy, who kinda was like, how do you know for sure that making things better for Black women would actually improve things for everybody else? I knew the Black Women Best framework that Janelle Jones had coined, and I knew a little bit about the related work that Roosevelt has reiterated in their reports. But it occurred to me in that moment: He didn’t. There’s a baseline of facts that people just don’t have. And I was like, well, you know, you’re making a valid point here. I know that the data exists, but you don’t. So maybe what I need to do on my end as a researcher and someone who’s interested in public scholarship is make that data known, make those facts known, so we all have the same baseline. Whether or not you accept this baseline is up to you, but the baseline will be there. 

Noa: With that in mind, I have two questions now that get more into the substance of the policy in the book. The first is about the wage gap. As you write, in 2023 white women earned 73 cents and Black women just 64 cents for every dollar white men earned. Economist Michelle Holder calls this the “double gap” in wages—Black women face “at least two types of discrimination in wages—racial and gender,” a “compounded cost” that amounted to $50 billion in lost wages in one year. Would solutions like pay transparency laws and raising the minimum wage be enough to move the needle, or is this mostly a challenge of making cultural shifts to ensure that women of color are being paid fairly?

Anna: The core solution is that we need to value women’s and especially Black women’s work. The main way to close the wage gap is to shift the cultural narrative around whose work is seen as valuable in the labor market.

The other aspect is the policy steps we can take. We know that the Paycheck Fairness Act, on the table in Congress, needs to pass to provide stronger protections against workplace discrimination based on sex. 

Pay transparency is also important on an individual level. It’s super uncomfortable, but extremely important for people to talk about how much they make. Let the young person who comes into the office know how much you made when you were starting, or how much you’re making now. Doing that raises the pay floor for everyone who comes after you.

I’m a union gal, collective bargaining is my jam. We know from the data that folks from marginalized groups in unions make more money. And let me speak directly to students: If you’re a grad student, you should be in your union, please. 

Noa: In the book, you mentioned some unexpected places where the double tax emerges, like beauty and hair care. One thing I really liked about this section is that you make it very clear that the money that women, especially Black women, spend on beauty and hair care isn’t about preferences. You write: 

These expenses—buying hair and other beauty products, traveling to buy said products, and spending time using these products—make up the cost of presentability: the price tag of investing in attraction. Women incur these costs because our survival often depends on how our appearance is interpreted and validated by society. 

Could you talk more about that cost of presentability?

Anna: People are really liking that chapter right now, and I’m so glad. What I argue in this chapter is that all women have to face that cost of being attractive, and even men to some extent. However, women of color face a steeper cost, especially Black women, because that beauty standard that a lot of us are trying to reach for is not rooted in our communities and lived experiences. This is where I argue that The Double Tax for Black women shows up in how much more we have to spend on our hair. 

In  some places, my natural hair, the way it grows, is unprofessional. My braids, for example, are about $350-400, with tips. And I had to sit in the braiding chair for eight hours. Someone might be giving up eight hours of lost income, in addition to the cost. But if changing your hair can address stigma, and save you your job, or get you a new one, it’s worth it. Even just maintenance costs more: It’s 20 cents more per ounce for leading brand coily hair products versus straighter hair products, and those products are harder to find, because the shelves are not stocked with us in mind. 

Noa: Are there any other unexpected or surprising costs that women of color face, especially Black women, that you learned about when you were writing the book? 

Anna: The mothering chapter radicalized me! When I saw the prices for childcare, I said, ain’t no way. We’re talking about a second mortgage for many families. What I really left with is that society punishes you if you choose motherhood or if you don’t. You see a lot of these single thriving childless women be shamed on the internet incessantly because they’re not birthing a kid every two seconds. And then moms face a lot of workplace discrimination, and pressure to be with their kids and sacrifice individuality. 

Childcare, having a baby, getting an ultrasound, these things cost money. And Black women are already getting paid less, getting promoted less, and coming from less wealth. 

In my opinion, we’re not having an honest conversation about how all of these costs burden women, mothers especially, and ultimately burden society. And this is why I’ve been telling folks, if you’re a man, you 100 percent need to read this book. 

Noa: What, if anything, gave you hope for the future as you were writing this book? 

Anna: This book is dedicated to my nieces. I said to Tia, Yaya, and Gigi: Womanhood is expensive, so always ask for more. I hope women who are younger than me can read this book and make better decisions about their lives and hopefully better decisions that impact their community. 

When I was younger, I would’ve really appreciated a book like this. It’s really about leaving you with a sense of understanding of yourself, but also an understanding of how you relate to the rest of the world and how the world is sort of constructed. And I think understanding those things allow you to really show up as your best self, but also as a person who can empathize with other human beings and work with other human beings to make everybody’s collective experience better. And that is ultimately what gives me hope: Knowing that people are already arriving at that conclusion even after reading or hearing a little bit about the book.

You can preorder a copy of The Double Tax: How Women of Color are Overcharged and Underpaid, and read more about Anna’s work as a writer, researcher, and PhD student at the Harvard Kennedy School.

On Wednesday, September 17, The 92nd Street Y will host a conversation between Anna and Chelsea Clinton about The Double Tax. Tickets are available for both virtual and in-person.