America’s dry cleaners aren’t happy that President Obama used them as an example in remarks last week about the economic gap between the sexes.
They say the disparity in dry cleaning bills is more complex than the systemized discrimination Obama hinted at in his April 8 remarks about the so-called “pay gap” between the sexes.
The truth is that, as should be obvious to anyone with working eyes and/or the ability to touch, women’s clothes are made with different fabrics, tailored differently and are more delicate. That means it is the garment – not the person’s gender – that results in higher dry-cleaning bills, as Nora Nealis, executive director for the National Cleaners Association, wrote in a letter to Obama.
Dry cleaners’ automated finishing equipment was made to support men’s clothes. But just in case Obama or anyone else in his administration would ask why dry cleaners don’t invest in new equipment to accommodate women’s clothes, Nealis had the answer.
But I doubt this distinction would make it into Obama’s rhetoric, given his propensity to continue using the misleading figure that women only make 77 cents for every dollar paid to men.
