The 'attention tax' is a constellation of compulsory, gendered expenditures — financial, temporal, cognitive and emotional — that women incur merely to access, remain in and advance within public economic life. Unlike conventional taxes levied by the state, the attention tax is exacted by social norms, organizational cultures and structural inequalities, and it is largely invisible in macroeconomic accounting. This chapter synthesises evidence from labour economics, sociology, public health and feminist political economy to define, taxonomise and quantify the attention tax, estimate its aggregate cost to individuals and national economies, and evaluate the policy landscape for its reduction. We find that the attention tax suppresses women's effective wages, occupational attainment and entrepreneurial participation by amounts comparable in scale to formal discrimination — yet attracts a fraction of the policy attention. We conclude with an evidence-based policy matrix and a call for new measurement frameworks that make the attention tax legible to policymakers.

Keywords: attention tax; gender wage gap; emotional labour; safety tax; domestic cognitive load; feminist economics; unpaid work.