Rome was the first society to use public bathrooms – for men. While there were no public toilets or restrooms available to women a slave girl sent to the market might have risked being mugged or sexually assaulted out of necessity. By the 1700s urinals, made as permanent concrete structures, were available in many towns and cities throughout the U.K. – once again exclusively for men. There were no public bathrooms for women until the Victorian era. Prior to that it was said that women were tied to a “urinary leash” whereby they had to stay close to home in case they needed a bathroom. They avoided eating and drinking while in public places or were forced to “hold it” until they reached home. The custom at the time was that respectable women should not be seen unaccompanied on Victorian streets. They should be either in the company of a gentleman or confined to their homes. Notions of shame and respectability were still very much the custom at the time and the thought of a respectable woman being seen to enter a public facility on a public street was viewed as simply too shameful.
In time municipal toilets, comfort stations or restrooms were pushed by progressive reformers and elite women’s groups. Standards varied widely between classes with facilities of different quality (and corresponding charge) for gentlemen and men, and for ladies and women.
Women were still not permitted to visit pubs, coffee houses or restaurants, and since any woman in a public place would have to be accompanied by a man their lack of presence in public places influenced the facilities which were installed. For example the facilities built in 1900 in Leicester Square, London provided for forty urinals or cubicles for men and only ten for women.
Many facilities for women were situated underground partly because of the belief that there was a strong association between the public toilet and the female body and sexuality and that positioning the amenity in a discreet location avoided a woman from being seen while entering.
Many women shunned the new facilities because they were thought to be dangerous, distasteful or a threat to their modesty.
In New York women generally avoided the new facilities as they were too small to accommodate the large dresses of upper-class women, were unheated and the cubicles lacked privacy.
Historically the inequity of public toilet provision for women dates back to the U.K.’s 1875 Public Health Act whereby most of the engineers, architects and decision-makers were men, who had very little concern with women’s needs. Initially this legislation also allowed local municipalities to charge a fee for toilets with the exception of urinals meaning only women were required to pay. The act has since been revised to conform to equality legislation, resulting in charges for both men and women.
In the U.S. public toilets or “comfort stations” were generally located underground major public squares. However, as Baldwin (2014) has pointed out public comfort stations were not popular for women due to concerns relating to safety, inadequate privacy and cleanliness.
While public toilets or restrooms allowed women and girls to spend greater amounts of time in public places they imposed a gender divide which largely remains today.
The ongoing problem of the inadequate number of facilities and fragmented nature of policy has had a particular impact on women. Women are predominantly caregivers, make up the bulk of older people and may need to make several trips as part of their overall journey to child care, schools, the supermarket and medical services as well as their workplace meaning they require greater numbers of public toilets in a greater number of locations. Research has also shown that women self-restrict accessing public toilets largely in response to lack of cleanliness while across the life course, many women have experienced perceived gender disparities in their ability to easily access public toilets.
According to scientific studies women spend one and a half up to two times as long on the toilet for practical reasons. They may be dealing with menstruation and menopause than people of other genders. This can mean that women need longer and more frequent access to public toilets.
In contrast to a urinal, a door must be opened and closed twice, and a toilet seat may need cleaning.
Women’s clothing often takes time to unfasten, remove or replace in order to use the Western style toilet.
Studies have also shown that women are more likely than men to wash their hands and to use the hand dryer.
Where the net number of toilets for women is smaller than that for men, not only can this create queues but also congestion inside the facility. This includes taking turns to use the sink to wash hands, the hand dryer and the mirror and blocking the entrance before systematically passing responsibility down the line for propping open the door.
Moreover, many of the available studies exploring the difference between male and female do not consider the time spent waiting in line.
Aside from the lack of facilities in comparison to men there are also design considerations which impact on women. Women are more likely to be caring for small children in the confined space of a cubicle. Women with babies requiring a nappy change need baby change facilities. They are also more likely to be carers for people who need assistance with toileting which can again be problematic in confined spaces or where there is a requirement to navigate staircases or narrow entries and corridors into dirty, often locked public bathrooms. Women more commonly carry shopping and handbags or need to remove heavy coats but there are rarely hooks to hang items in the cubicle leaving users to juggle things or to place them on a wet or dirty floor. Women will often access toilets in pairs or groups with other women due to safety concerns or for social reasons such as waiting in the queue together. In private night time venues such as bars and clubs women may be inclined to use the toilets with other women not only for social protection but to ensure that they are not suddenly alone if their friends have moved elsewhere. In addition, women may spend longer inside the facility to attend to their personal appearance in the mirror. All these issues point to a need for planners and designers to consider a more equitable rather than an equal provision of facilities to accommodate the specific needs of women.
Men tend to use urinals and separate toilets in cubicles and given that space in a standard amenities block is generally dedicated equally to both sexes this has resulted in almost twice the number of toilets provided for men than women. Overall, an average toilet area can accommodate 20 to 30% more toilets for men for urinals and cubicles than for women.
So there is less area for women to relieve themselves in the women’s toilets, which means fewer women can use them at any one time.
The literature relating to public toilet provision can generally be found in the fields of medicine, sociology, town planning, building and plumbing fields historically dominated by men who set provision standards.
Some have claimed that surveyors, engineers and construction professionals responsible for public toilet policy and implementation are generally middle-class males whose life experience, age and health characteristics do not lend themselves to a holistic view of the different needs of different people when it comes to understanding the complexities around public toilet provision.
As a result design standards and provision of facilities have to a certain degree reflected male requirements. Edwards (1998) has referred to this imbalance as “organised irresponsibility” whereby local government authorities in neglecting the needs of women have resulted in policy which is misdirected and unsatisfactory. Moreover, this fragmented lack of “joined up thinking” between different departments has resulted in the complaints of women being trivialised and medicalised rather than authorities being held more accountable for failing to provide adequate provision.
In Japan ratios of 3:1 have been mandated in favour of women in busy areas while in the U.S. parity regulation based on ratios of 2:1 are now established in over twenty states.
In Hong Kong, building regulations require that there must be 1.6 female toilets for every one male toilet in public places.
In the U.K. there have been calls to put in place a ratio of 2:1 in favour of women since they are likely to outnumber men to a ratio of 65:35 in shopping areas and up to 80:20 in busy shopping malls yet in town centres provision more typically favours men 70:30.
But so-called “potty parity” laws, a term for more equitable provision of separate toilet facilities for men and women, typically apply only to new construction or substantial renovations, leaving many existing inequalities in favour of men unchanged.
There is even evidence that some Commonwealth countries have adopted British regulations, building codes and toilet standards leading one expert to quip “we exported gender inequality and toilet queues to the rest of the world.”
Moreover these developments have invariably taken place against a backdrop of pre-existing cultural and religious attitudes leading to discrimination in terms of public toilet provision for women made worse by colonial patriarchal standards.
There have even been reports of women being arrested in China for “picking quarrels” by accessing men’s toilets to draw attention to the gender bias relating to the uneven numbers of toilets provided for women in comparison to men.
There have also been cases in Amsterdam of people protesting over a woman being fined for urinating in a public area where there were thirty five urinals for men and only three public toilets for women.
As Lowe (2018) has said in her book No Place to go: How Public Toilets have failed our Private needs: “I grew up being socialised to expect a line for the bathroom. I spent decades so desensitised to the indignity that I never questioned it.”
The urban governance and town planning professions require greater numbers of women in senior positions to counter the considerable degree of autonomy and discretion around where and whether to provide facilities, with little or no requirement for public participation in the process.
As a result we tend to see queues outside the public women’s toilet or restroom in almost every setting, with a few exceptions suggesting it is a global phenomenon. A lack of provision, toilet closures and poor management and maintenance leads to social exclusion particularly for women, older people, people with disabilities, people with medical conditions, women with children, people using public transport and tourists. As one prominent advocate has said “to change policy one must change the policy-makers.”
Women need to use the restroom more than men because of menstruation or childcare, and they need more space once inside because they don’t use urinals. History has shown that the provision of public toilets is of critical importance in terms of creating successful public spaces for people in urban environments but the subject remains in many ways distasteful, embarrassing and restrained and is a cause backed by few champions. Elected officials are not voted into office on a platform of improving public toilet amenity and in many ways restrooms, bathrooms or public toilets are still regarded as dirty and smelly and sites for social and sexual anxiety. Fear of open dialogue around “disgusting” settings has meant that as one report put it “those with more power need public restrooms less and those with less power need them more.
Moreover, many State and municipal authorities promote agendas relating to 24 hour cities and thriving night time economies, healthy and active lifestyles and encouraging the use of public transit to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality yet all of these ambitions have invariably not been matched by the provision of additional public toilets.
A failure to provide toilets in public areas may be seen to ignore the benefits of provision in terms of health, wellbeing, equality and social inclusion. Conducting detailed spatial analysis of the macro level of provision across a local authority jurisdiction and using CPTED to inform location and design of existing and new facilities along with central government support is a good place to start in terms of meeting demand.
Any historical understanding of the public toilet discourse has exposed the inequalities women have faced in terms of being denied access to a suitable number of cubicles or being denied access altogether. We must always be mindful that half of the world’s population approximately four billion people lack safe sanitary standards with more than half of that figure drinking water from a source containing human waste.
Moreover it is estimated that more than half of the world’s schools lack hand-washing facilities with soap and water for students. Safe, clean facilities can affect attendance rates particularly for women and girls and along with older people and people with disabilities remain one of the most affected groups where facilities are lacking in public areas. We should also be mindful that 297,000 children under five, more than eight hundred per day, die annually from preventable diarrhoeal diseases due to poor sanitation, poor hygiene, or unsafe drinking water.
Inclusion and equality means that women’s facilities need to be provided at a greater ratio than men’s. Moreover, there remains a need for greater research into the different needs of women and different user groups more broadly which can contribute to innovative design which is inclusive, safe and accessible and reflects the diversity of the town or city. Everybody should care about toilets because access to sanitation is a human right that entitles everyone to have physical and affordable access to sanitation that is safe, hygienic, secure, and socially and culturally acceptable, and that provides privacy and ensures dignity. As the COVID pandemic has reminded us all human health depends on access to public toilets because ultimately everybody’s health is at risk without them.
References
1.Greed C. (2003) Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets. Oxford: Architectural Press.
2. Ibid
3. Knight G. (2006) The Public Toilet: A Woman’s Place, Designing Privacy into a Public Facility, Thesis for Industrial Design Engineering.
4. Penner B. (2001) A World of Unmentionable Suffering: Women’s Public Conveniences in Victorian London’, Journal of Design History, Volume 14 No.1.
5. Baldwin P. C. (2014) Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932. Journal of Social History, 48(2), 264–288
6 http://www.ech2o.co.uk/public-toilet-provision-gender-and-menstruation – Retrieved August 2022.
7. Baldwin P. C. (2014) Op. Cit.
8. Cavanagh S.L. (2010) Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality and the Hygienic Imagination, University of Toronto Press Inc.
9. Camenga D.R. Brady S.S. Hardacker C.T. Williams B.R. Hebert-Beirne J. James A.S. Burgio K. Nodora J. Wyman J.F. Berry A. and Low L.K. (2019) The Prevention of Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms Research Consortium. U.S. Adolescent and Adult Women’s Experiences Accessing and Using Toilets in Schools, Workplaces, and Public Spaces: A Multi-Site Focus Group Study to Inform Future Research in Bladder Health. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(18):3338.
10. Anthony K. H. and Dufresne M. (2009) Potty Privileging in Perspective: Gender and Family Issues in Toilet Design. In Gershenson O. and Penner B. (Eds.), Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
11. Ghent University (2017) “No more queueing at the ladies’ room: How transgender-friendliness may help in battling female-unfriendly toilet culture.” Science Daily, 14 July.
12. https://theconversation.com/why-queues-for-womens-toilets-are-longer-than-mens-99763 – Retrieved July 2022.
13. Judah G. Aunger R. Wolf-Peter S. Michie S. Granger S. and Curtis V. (2009) American Journal of Public Public Health, October.
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15. https://theconversation.com/why-queues-for-womens-toilets-are-longer-than-mens-99763 Op. Cit.
16. Greed C.H. (1995) Public toilet provision for women in Britain: An investigation of discrimination against urination, Women’s Studies International Forum, Volume 18, Issues 5-6, September.
17. Ibid
18. Greed C. (2003) Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets. Oxford: Architectural Press.
19. Edwards J. (1998) Local authority performance indicators: dousing the fire of campaigning consumers. Local Government Studies 24: 26 / 45 in Greed C. (2003) Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets, Taylor and Francis.
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21. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/1887471/loo-queues-reduced-womens-toilets-outnumber-mens?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article&campaign=1887471 – Retrieved July 2022.
22. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/politics-sanitation-why-we-urgently-need-more-public-toilets – Retrieved August 2022
23. Case M.A. (2010) “Why Not Abolish the Laws of Urinary Segregation?,” in Molotch H. and Norén L. eds. Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, New York University Press.
24. http://www.ech2o.co.uk/public-toilet-provision-gender-and-menstruation Op. Cit.
25. Ibid
26. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/politics-sanitation-why-we-urgently-need-more-public-toilets Op. Cit
27. Boffey D. (2017) Protests planned at Amsterdam urinals over lack of women’s toilets. The Guardian, September 21, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/21/protests-planned-amsterdam-urinals-women-toilets – Retrieved August 2022.
28. Lowe L. (2018) No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs, Coach House Books, September.
29. Greed C. (2003) Public Toilets in the 24 Hour City 2003 World Toilet Summit.
30. Greed C. (2003) Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets Op. Cit.
31. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-21/public-urination-should-only-be-a-crime-in-a-world-with-plenty-of-public-bathrooms – Retrieved July 2022.
33. https://washdata.org/ – Retrieved June 2022.
34. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water – Retrieved June 2022.
