Gender-bias in public bathroom designs
In her book called Invisible Women: Data bias in a world designed for men, Caroline Criado Perez, explains how the world around us is designed for men and half the population, aka women are ignored in most design considerations. In one of her case studies, she delves into gender-biased public bathroom designs.
Have you ever been to a movie or a show where you have to queue for so long as a woman after the show to relieve yourself whereas your male companion goes in and out of the toilet literally in a matter of couple of minutes? And have you ever wondered why it happens?
The problem is the male-biased design. Although designers and architects may think that allocating the same amount of floor space to male and female bathrooms is only fair, in reality it’s anything but fair as they have not considered how females use the bathroom differently from males.
First of all, if you divide the floor space 50/50 for men and women, it means that the number of people who can relieve themselves concurrently is a lot higher in male bathrooms as male bathrooms are divided into urinals which take up lesser space and cubicles whereas female toilets can only have cubicles.
But even if there are equal number of stalls in male and female bathrooms, the issue wouldn’t be resolved as on average women take 2.3 times loner than men to use the toilet. On average there is 20–25% of childbearing age women who may be on their period and therefore need more time to change their tampons and sanitary pads. Additionally, most women need more trips to the bathroom than men as things like pregnancy and urinary-tract infections that are eight times more prevalent in women, reduce females bladder capacity.
On top of all of that, women are more likely to be accompanied by children than men and therefore need more time in the bathroom.
Taking all above anatomical and non-anatomical differences into consideration, it is not difficult to come to a conclusion that allocating the same amount of floor space to male and female bathrooms is anything but fair. This bias in design stems from the fact that women and their needs have been systematically ignored in designing public bathrooms.
The problem doesn’t end here. The author refers to some venues such as the Barbican art centre in London that have decided to create gender-neutral bathrooms, perhaps to accommodate for LGBT individuals without even realising that they have made it twice as bad for women. This is because they have split the floor space into two areas, one area for gender-neutral cubicles and the other one for gender-neutral urinals. YES no joke “gender-neutral urinals”. This means men can use the urinal space as well as the cubicles, whereas women have to share the space that they had to themselves before, with men this time. It makes you wonder how no one has thought about the impact of making such changes on females who more or less take up half the population.
Inclusivity is more than changing the sign on a bathroom from male or female to gender-neutral. An inclusive design means that your product or service is usable and fair to use for all its users which starts from understanding all your users and their needs!
