Why Women Have to Wait in Longer Bathroom Lines Than Men Do

#toilettes #femmes #sexisme #architecture

Then, “the main concern of the male city fathers was to provide toilets for men, whose role in public space was accepted and indeed regarded as important to the industrial economy,” writes Clara Greed, an urban-planning scholar in the United Kingdom, in her contribution to the 2010 academic anthology Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. “From the outset,” she explained, “public toilet provision for women was seen as an extra, as a luxury, or as problematic in other respects.”

As plumbing codes took shape in the following century, they generally overlooked women’s needs. As Greed and others have noted, this was probably not a coincidence, given that architects, engineers, and code officials have historically been much more likely to be men.