Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm joined by Anna Gifty Apoku Aju-Ajuman, soon to be Dr. Apoku Ajamin.

Wow. She's working on a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard. She is out with a book now called The Double Tax, How Women of Color are overcharged and underpaid. So Anna, tell us a little bit about what you're working on and what led you to write the book. Yes, so first of all, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super, super honored. This is an awesome podcast. So thanks for having me and allowing my voice to be amplified.

Hi, everybody.

My name is Anna.

I'm a PhD student at Harvard.

But I'm also just a girl from around the block, honestly.

I'm just like someone who watches Love Island probably too much and is just trying to make a living.

I'm watching too many edits on TikTok right now.

So anyway, that's all to say that, you know, what I do usually for my work is I study

race, gender, and the economy, which I know right now is sort of a hard thing to study because

there's a lot of forces working against it.

But I also think that because there's a lot of forces working against it. But I also think that because there's a

lot of forces working against it, it's that much more important for us to actually really focus on.

So this book is sort of a manifestation of that where I'm thinking about sort of the question around

why is it so expensive to be a woman in America and beyond. And how do those expenses sort of pile up when we start

to cut across things like class and race? And so in the book, what I basically dig into is sort of

these different phases of life that women tend to experience and how the cost that arise in those

phases of life really kind of mark the ways in which life is expensive

for women, especially from a very young age. And so what folks don't know is that, you know,

when you read the book, it's, you know, there's a lot of different chapter titles, that sort of

thing. But I initially thought about the lens of first. So sort of thinking about your first

mirror, your first paycheck, your first paycheck,

...