Taxing women’s bodies: the state of menstrual product taxes in the Americas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The taxation of menstrual products has been identified as unfair, imposing economic burden on people who menstruate based simply on a biological difference. These taxes have been described as major contributors to menstrual poverty. Although they have been debated among governments, and a focus of political activism, academic literature has largely neglected the issue. Here I comprehensively reviewed the status of menstrual product taxes for all countries and populated territories in the Americas in 2022. Data from 57 countries and territories, and 78 states (those of the United States and Brazil) were included. Since 2012, 10 countries and territories have eliminated taxation on menstrual products—Jamaica, Canada, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Ecuador, and Barbados. Nevertheless, menstrual product taxes were still applied in 63.2% of locations in 2022, with an average tax rate of 11.2% (ranging from 1.0% in Costa Rica to 22.0% in Uruguay). The average woman of reproductive age in the Americas experienced a menstrual product tax rate of 5.8% in 2022. In sum, despite activism and progress, most of the region continues to employ discriminatory taxation against people who menstruate, with particularly high taxation rates concentrated in South America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".