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For women across New York City and beyond, it basically amounts to being taken to the cleaners. Women’s shirts often cost much more to launder than men’s, even if they are smaller and made of the same cloth.
Many women grudgingly accept the higher prices, much as they accept the perennial lack of pockets in their pants and the lengthier lines outside their restrooms. But not Janet Floyd, a 44-year-old mother, community volunteer and newly minted missionary for gender equality in the wash place.
Ms. Floyd’s crusade began in November, when, she said, she and her husband brought their nearly identical blue Brooks Brothers oxfords to be laundered at Best Cleaners in Chelsea. The shirts came back clean, but Ms. Floyd discovered that hers cost $8.75, his $7.
“We had the same shirts I paid more and his was larger,” recalled Ms. Floyd, who wears a size 4 petite (her husband, Joe, wears a 15.5-inch neck and 33-inch sleeve). “That’s what was so infuriating.”
Ms. Floyd said that when she called the cleaners to inquire, she was told that despite her request for laundering, her shirt had been dry cleaned, which is more expensive, because Best does not launder women’s shirts. The man who answered the phone at Best on Monday confirmed that policy, but the prices he quoted ($5.50 to dry clean a woman’s shirt, $1.75 to launder a man’s) were lower than Ms. Floyd paid, perhaps because she had her shirts hand-pressed.
Whatever the explanation, Ms. Floyd was incensed, and mentioned her pique at a cocktail party. “That’s so true,” a friend said of the price discrepancy. “But everybody’s too busy to do something about it.”
Not Ms. Floyd, who has an economics degree, has served on the board of the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food, and, with her two children off to college, recently started her own market-research firm. Going back to work would mean more trips to the cleaners, and she hated the idea of paying more than a man.
So she began calling cleaners all over Manhattan 50 over 18 days. She made lists and charts of what they charged for laundering and dry cleaning men’s and women’s shirts and pants. Then she analyzed the results, which she has posted on her Web site, www.floydadvisory.com.
Women and men paid more or less the same for dry cleaning, Ms. Floyd discovered, but for laundering, men paid an average of $2.86 and women $4.95. Of the 50 places surveyed, 8 did not launder women’s shirts at all, and 9 charged the same regardless of the owner’s gender.
“I was so amazed by this,” Ms. Floyd said. “What is confusing is that the market wouldn’t correct itself, with women saying ‘I’m not going to pay for this.’ ”
Asked to explain the price discrepancy, several launderers cited the size and shape of their industrial pressing machines. They were built for men’s shirts, they said, explaining that the smaller, tapered women’s garments were often ill-fitted for the big, manly presses or were otherwise too delicate. That meant hand-pressing, which is more labor-intensive.
“They won’t fit the machine; they would rip,” said a woman at Alpian’s Garment Care in Midtown East, where it costs $9 to launder a woman’s shirt, $2.75 a man’s.
New York’s city code prohibits gender-based pricing, and in 1998, the City Council passed a bill banning “the public display of discriminatory pricing based on gender.” But nothing prevents cleaners from charging different amounts for shirts that require different amounts of work, which is how they typically explain the seemingly gender-based price gaps.
Last year, the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs issued 12 gender-pricing violations, according to a spokeswoman, who said that “at least three” went to dry cleaners (the others were mostly hair and nail salons, perhaps Ms. Floyd’s next project, though with nails, it is often men who get charged more).
Unsatisfied by the hand-pressing explanation, Ms. Floyd set out to find a unisex pressing machine. Sure enough, Unipress Corporation in Tampa, Fla., sells such a machine for $21,500, less than half the $50,000 it charges for the man-sized machines.
But Tom Stites, the company’s sales manager, said the unisex machine pressed about 30 pieces an hour, whether frilly blouses or extra-large button-downs, while the more typical industrial press machines could do 100 per hour. Still, he said, demand for the unisex machine was growing.
“They give all these excuses, but the machines are out there,” Ms. Floyd said.
In the meantime, she has been taking her shirts to London Cleaners on East 33rd Street, five blocks from her home. For hand-pressing, which the Floyds prefer, they charge her and her husband $7 a shirt.
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