Is girl math foidslop?

Girl math is a way of explaining away purchases. If you pay with cash, it doesn't count. If something costs under five dollars, it's basically free. If you return something, you made money. If you bought concert tickets months ago, the concert itself is free by the time you go. The more you wear something, the cheaper it gets, until a $300 coat costs pennies. If you want to run your own purchases through it, there's a girl math calculator.

It seems to have started as a recurring bit on a New Zealand radio show, where callers told the hosts what they'd bought and the hosts worked out why it was fine. In August 2023 it jumped to TikTok, partly because it fit so neatly next to girl dinner, which had been everywhere a month earlier. Within weeks banks and brands were doing girl math posts, and boy math showed up as the comeback, mostly as jokes about men rounding their height up to six feet.

Not everyone found it funny. Some people pointed out that a trend about women being bad at money is a pretty old joke with a new name, and some financial advisers warned that it was a handy way to talk yourself into debt. A lot of the women posting it meant the reverse: it's a joke about the mental bookkeeping everyone does, and calling it girl math is just the format.