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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/
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 04 2019, @12:24AM (1 child)
Let's run a mental model for number 1:
Guy: unzips, flops it out, hoses down the trough, back in, zip up, (optional: thinks about washing his hands but there's a queue for the one remaining working hand dryer so decides not to), waits for someone to open the door so he doesn't have to touch the handle, clocks out
Chick: waits, opens door, looks at seat, cleans seat, takes down/up a bunch of interlocked articles of clothing, crouches over the seat (probably hovering in a horse stance as after spending 30 seconds trying to clean the seat gave up), may have to remove sanitary pads, sprays the bowl, pat dry off to avoid wet spot 'down below', possibly replaces sanitary pad, pulls clothing back into position, adjusts clothing back into place, does a quick private makeup and hair check with compact/mirror, checks phone for messages, final dress check to make sure no wet spot 'down below', flushes toilet, opens door, [at this point, the bottle neck is over, so anything following adds to latency, but doesn't affect overall throughput], washes hands, dries hands, one last check in full size mirror, clocks out
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Monday February 04 2019, @06:45PM
That fact that getting the urine into the urinal successfully is completely optional also helps.