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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: 2) by choose another one on Monday February 04 2019, @10:44AM
Ain't the U-bend that's the problem.
I got me a Victorian house with original Victorian (we think) WC. Pull the chain (not lever) on that thing and about five gallons comes out of the wooden (lead lined) cistern down 6ft of big fat lead pipe, never needed more than one flush, but on the modern one upstairs a big dump often takes 3 or 4. The old WC still has a U-bend, still goes out through same 4in waste pipe.
The difference is between Victorian engineering focused on doing the ****ing job properly, once, and modern engineering focused on getting rid of a standard-sized eco-poo in the most efficient way and **** everyone who doesn't conform to average. Note that the Victorian engineering is also still working after 100+ yrs (at some point the cistern float has been replaced with a plastic one, but that is about it).