Pink a Price

Inspiration

As young women, all three of us have directly experienced the effects of Pink Tax. While brainstorming ideas, we thought about what real issues we and others face in day-to-day life, so we could make a meaningful and significant project. One of the ideas that spoke the most to us, and hasn’t been addressed enough, was Pink Tax. We have noticed how pink razors targeted towards females were more expensive than identical neutral-colored ones targeted towards males, and realized the need to take action.

What it does

Currently, we have a website that compares product pricing for men and women, helps users identify products with the pink text, and calculates the markup. A key component of our website is the satirical remarks. The snarky comments criticize the unnecessary markup in prices justified by the smallest features targeting female consumers.

How we built it

We built it through prompt engineering Claude Code to create the website template. Then we added the logo and satirical remarks. We web scraped using Bright Data to compare online products from Amazon. To host our website publicly, we deployed it on Vercel and connected it to a GoDaddy domain.

Challenges we ran into

We initially found it difficult to narrow down ideas involving web scraping. We had to learn about web scraping, its functionality, and how to implement it, on the day of the hackathon without prior experience. We also didn't have much experience with prompt engineering, so we initially found it challenging to formulate our ideas into steps Claude can take. We realized that debugging between AI models is very different, so we had to learn the best ways to debug GitHub Copilot and Claude Code separately. Another challenge was figuring out how to connect our local working website to a public domain, which also involved experimenting with various web hosting platforms.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Technically, we are very proud of being able to web scrape successfully for our website. We are also extremely proud of our unique and meaningful project idea, and we hope to expand it in the future. We are proud of persevering through challenges and debugging code for the website to run as we wanted. And we are happy and grateful to have used the resources given by sponsor-mentors, such as Bright Data and GoDaddy, to turn our idea into this project.

What we learned

We learned that time management is extremely important in such a fast-paced timeline. We learned that collaborating on a project is important to keep us sane during a hackathon, and showed us the true joy of such an experience. We also learned technical skills like web scraping, using APIs, web hosting, and prompt engineering.

What's next for Pink a Price

The next thing we will do is expand our website to include a wider range of products from a variety of stores (right now, the website only supports products on Amazon). Additionally, we will make the website more personalized to our users by integrating an AI agent that can support them for more specific queries beyond the simple checkbox filters, such as finding eco-friendly and ethically-made alternatives. Additionally, we compared descriptions between products, but we have noticed that some items are priced higher for men because of their material differences. This is also true for items priced higher for women. In the future, we will ensure that there is a true/deserved pink tax by taking into account worthy material and quality differences. In order to make a scalable difference, we also plan to partner with nonprofits and add a petition on our website for more equitable policies and mobilize the community to raise awareness and urge companies to be accountable.