The Truth About Gender-Based Pricing at the Dry Cleaners

Executive Director of the National Cleaner’s Association, Nora Nealis, responded to President Obama’s reference to dry cleaning and gender pricing with the following statement: “As an industry, dry cleaners do not charge more for a woman’s shirt than a man’s shirt, they charge more for a hand ironed shirt than they do a machine pressed shirt. The price is in the math as calculated by the labor required not the gender of the client! Simple math. Hand ironing takes more time and requires more skill, and therefore costs the cleaner more to produce.”

First, an explanation for the difference between pressing and hand finishing. Most garments require
a combination of machine pressing and hand ironing to achieve the desired finish. A commercial laundry
has special “assembly line style” machines that can press a typical button-up cotton shirt without any
hand ironing. With these machines, units can press hundreds of shirts an hour. This “mass production”
keeps cleaning costs lower. It takes multiple machines and operators to finish one shirt. One part presses
the body of the shirt, another the collar and cuffs.

The shirts are pressed while they are wet between hot, nearly 400°F, metal plates. This gives shirts a
crisp and somewhat stiffer look and feel. Most synthetic fabrics melt and distort in the high temperatures
used by the automated shirt laundry presses, which are designed to get the wrinkles out of thick cotton
shirts, requiring a great deal of heat, steam and pressure. If a women’s shirt meets the criteria and size
(up to 20 inches across) to fit the commercial presses, then it absolutely can be pressed and priced the
same as a man’s laundered shirt.

So I’d like to finish with the Obama letter from the National Cleaners Association for a final point. Nora Neilis asks: “I’m sure you’re wondering, why don’t manufacturers make a machine to press women’s shirts? It’s simply economics for a small business. Like most male professionals, you wear a shirt most every day. That means you have lots of shirts that need to be cleaned and pressed by the end of the week. It makes sense for a dry cleaner to purchase a machine that costs upwards of $50,000 to press those shirts, correct? By contrast, how often does the First Lady or your average American woman wear a simple, cotton boxy shirt?”