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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 03 2019, @11:33PM   Printer-friendly
from the unisex dept.

Submitted via IRC for Soycow

In 1987, a man, a woman, and their daughter attended a Tchaikovsky concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The most notable thing about their outing, all these years later, is something that actually wasn't the least bit unusual: The two women waited in an interminably long line for the bathroom, while the man did not.

What separates their uncomfortable experience from those of innumerable others is that the man in their party was a California state senator. After witnessing just how long his family members had to wait, he introduced legislation to guarantee the state's women more toilets.

In the three decades since, dozens of cities and states have joined the cause of "potty parity," the somewhat trivializing nickname for the goal of giving men and women equal access to public toilets. These legislative efforts, along with changes to plumbing codes that altered the ratio of men's to women's toilets, have certainly helped imbalances in wait times, but they haven't come close to resolving them.

"It still remains a huge problem today, overall," says Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois who has studied the issue for more than a decade. The issue persists for many reasons: the exigencies of real estate, the building codes that govern construction, and, of course, sexism.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/women-men-bathroom-lines-wait/580993/


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04 2019, @12:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04 2019, @12:15AM (#795897)

    I'm not sure what exactly it is that takes women longer to use the bathroom - is it longer average time to finish urination/defecation? Dealing with menstruation means extra activities for women dealing with that, how much more time does that add? Can something be done to streamline these processes? Would adding bidets help, or a different style of toilet (asian style squatters? footrests for better posture?)? Is there a cultural issue here of socializing and other activities being done in the bathroom, slowing overall throughput?
    Does mandating a certain ratio of toilets help anything? Like the Nashville stadium referenced - rather than substantially improving women's ability to access toilets, they simply reduced men's access, making everyone unhappy.
    Gender-neutral bathrooms seem to be a good compromise, and probably simplify the plumbing and architectural decisions a little, but it is probably not helpful in the "large stadium" context, as at a certain point most toilets would be filled with the slowest users. Maybe a smaller urinal-only bathroom and larger stall-only gender-neutral bathroom? (Women /can/ use stalls with a small amount of practice or with the aid of tools, but I don't know that many would be comfortable doing so)