are public bathrooms sexist?

women's right to poop is the last frontier in the feminist fight.

If women can’t go to the bathroom as easily or often as men, are we really free?

The topic of men peeing whenever they want and wherever they want, came up in this week’s episode of Synced and it made me reflect on the more subtle ways that the patriarchy operates in our daily lives.

We’ve made a lot of progress on feminism, but one win we still have yet to achieve, is bathroom equality, otherwise known as “potty parity.” It’s kind of unusual that we all just accepted that answering nature’s call is more challenging for women. And because we’ve co-signed that sexist premise, very little public policy has been interested in correcting this basic inequality.

“Potty parity” hasn’t been achieved because urban infrastructure is just not built with women in mind. Public bathrooms are hard to come about, and this oversight disparately impacts one gender over the other. Bathroom deserts are unjust to women, because it’s harder for us to go the bathroom in the wild. We need to wipe, we often bleed, and we also make up the majority of seniors and disabled people. It’s also more of a safety risk for us to expose ourselves in public than it is for men, especially for marginalized groups of women. We’re also most often the ones accompanying children, and become responsible for finding a safe space for their basic evacuation needs too. So, it’s a lot!

But even when bathrooms are available to women, we wait in line on average 34 times longer than men. And this isn’t because women’s bathrooms are smaller, it’s because they’re often the same size, which isn’t equality because we don’t have the same anatomical and biological needs. Parity doesn’t always mean equality, especially when you’re talking about genders with very different bodily realities. As feminist author Caroline Criado-Perez puts it, it’s just another example of the way that we can fail women when we’re just trying to give them what men have, rather than determining their needs based on their experience.

“It may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female public toilets the same amount of floor space (…) However, if a male toilet has both cubicles and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square foot of floor space in the male bathroom than in the female bathroom. Suddenly equal floor space isn’t so equal.” -Caroline Criado-Perez

While workplaces and the private sector are forced to provide restrooms, the same standard doesn’t apply to our public spaces. The best organization I’d never heard of before going on this urination deep dive, is The American Restroom Association (ARA). They’ve been quietly fighting for “potty parity” legislation to address this gendered asymmetry of wait lines in private and public restrooms. One of their big recommendations is more unisex bathrooms, which trans folks have been demanding for years.

Photo by Abstral Official on Unsplash

Ultimately, no woman can escape potty inequality. Even those who climb their way to the top face the same sexist bathroom code than the rest of us. Female lawmakers didn’t even have a bathroom on the House floor until 2011, and they’ve had to fight for every-bathroom related advancement since then. I still remember watching Anderson Cooper and Bernie Sanders start the 2016 presidential debate without Secretary Hillary Clinton after a bathroom break, because it took her a few more seconds to get back on stage. “You know, it does take me a little longer. That’s all I can say.” she told Cooper after he made a quip about her joining them late. Trump, who was the Republican frontrunner at time, even made a sexually degrading remark about her needing to use the bathroom for longer.

And just like everything else, the lack of bathroom equality has even more devastating consequences for women in developing countries. There’s an enormous correlation between the availability of toilets and the rates of girls education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many female students can’t attend school when they get their period because they lack access to infrastructure that would support them while they menstruate. In Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed almost 25 000 Palestinans, one of the least talked about hum fundamentalan rights abuses inflicted on those who are still alive, is pregnant women’s access to safe bathrooms. Dr. Bassam Zaqqout, a doctor who treats 2-3 pregnant women every day in the largest refugee camp in the south of the region, says that this has kept all women in fear. “Thousands of people have access to only one bathroom at a time, so you can imagine the situation these women are in,” Dr. Bassam Zaqqout told TIME.

Public bathrooms may not be the sexiest issue, but they’re a feminist issue. That’s why it’s no coincidence that Iceland leads the way. According to the “Public Toilet Index,” the country is leading the rest with 56 public toilets per 100,000 residents. That’s seven times more bathrooms than the U.S. has!

Urban infrastructure is never neutral or accidental. Our cities are shaped by our values, and the only way to lessen inequality is to ensure that our decisions on public infrastructure meet the needs of everybody. Better spaces for women, mean better spaces for all of us.