It's not crazy, it's accounting: what “girlmath” teaches us about bias

2023 was, by most accounts, the year of the girl: girl dinner, girl math, Barbenheimer, and a wave of internet culture built for and about young women. Girl math went viral for its own kind of purchase “justification”: an item worn often costs less each time you wear it, and a return is basically profit, among many more. The joke was filmed straight to camera, often with a partner or friend on hand to play the “rational,” “financially literate” counterpart to the woman's logic. It built a community as much as it drew backlash, but nobody looked closely at what the “math” was actually doing. Drawing on mental accounting, Foucauldian and institutional perspectives on accounting, feminist and postfeminist theory, and work on accounting as a gendered practice, this paper argues that girl math is not merely an instance of Thaler's mental accounting but a form of accounting in its own right: informal, local, community-driven, and performed publicly on TikTok; separated from formal accounting not by its logic, but by who is recognised as doing the counting.