Although this truism seems to have passed the Barbican’s heavily male-dominated management team by, it is true that the perennial queueing problem is one that men do tend to know about – given it so often spills out of the main bathroom door, it’s hard for even the most oblivious man to miss.2 But fewer people – men or women – know exactly why it happens. There is a tendency (as ever) to blame the women rather than male-biased design. But male-biased design is in fact exactly what the problem is here.
On the face of it, it may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female public toilets the same amount of floor space – and historically, this is the way it has been done. 50/50 division of floor space has even been formalised in plumbing codes. 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.
But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet.3 Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet. Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people.4 Then there’s the 20-25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore needing to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.
Women may also in any case require more trips to the bathroom than men: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections than men which again increases the frequency with which a toilet visit is needed.5 In the face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal (rather than substantive) equality dogmatist to continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair.
It gets a lot worse than supposedly equal provision being in fact male-biased. A third of the world’s population lack adequate toilet provision at all.6 According to the UN, one in three women lack access to safe toilets,7 and WaterAid reports that girls and women collectively spend 97 billion hours a year finding a safe place to relieve themselves.8 The lack of adequate toilet provision is a public health problem for both sexes (for example, in India, where 60% of the population does not have access to a toilet,9 90% of surface water is contaminated10), but the problem is particularly acute for women, in no small part because of the attitude that men can ‘go anywhere’,11 while for women to be seen urinating is shameful. Women get up before dawn and then wait for hours until dusk to go out again in search of a relatively private place to urinate or defecate.12 And this isn’t just a problem in poor countries: Human Rights Watch spoke to young girls working in tobacco fields in America and found that they would ‘refrain from relieving themselves at all during the day – aided by avoiding drinking liquids, which increased their risk of dehydration and heat illness’.13
This affects women’s paid labour: women make up 91% of the 86% of Indians who work in the informal economy. Many of these women work as market vendors, and no public toilets means they have nowhere to go during the workday.14 In Afghanistan, female police officers go to the toilets in pairs, because their changing and toilet facilities (described by an international advisor to Human Rights Watch as ‘a site of harassment’) often have peepholes or doors which don’t lock. The lack of safe toilet provision in fact often prevents women from joining the force at all, and this in turn has had a significant impact on how the police respond to crimes against women and girls.15
Despite women’s arguably greater need for public sanitary facilities, however, men are often the ones who are better provided for. More than half of Mumbai’s 5 million women do not have an indoor toilet and there are no free public toilets for women. Meanwhile, free urinals for men run into the thousands.16 A typical Mumbai slum might have six bathrooms for 8,000 women,17 and government figures from 2014 revealed that the city as a whole has ‘3,536 public restrooms that women share with men, but not a single women’s-only facility – not even in some police stations and courts’.18
A 2015 survey found that 12.5% of women in Mumbai’s slums defecate in the open at night: they ‘prefer to take this risk to walking 58 metres, the average distance of the community toilet from their homes’.19 But defecating in the open isn’t really much safer for women: there is a real danger of sexual assault from men who lurk near and on the routes to areas which are known to be used by women when they need to relieve themselves.20 The level of violation ranges from voyeurism (including being masturbated at) to rape – and in extreme cases, to murder.
Accurate data on the level of sexual harassment and assault faced by women as they seek to engage in what should be a mundane activity is hard to come by, in no small degree because of the shame surrounding the issue. Few women are willing to talk about something they may well be blamed for ‘encouraging’.21 But what data does exist makes it clear that a failure to provide adequate sanitation is a feminist issue.
A 2016 study found that Indian women who use fields to relieve themselves are twice as likely to face non-partner sexual violence as women with a household toilet.22 Following the 2014 murder of two girls aged twelve and fourteen in Uttar Pradesh,23 there was a brief flurry of national focus on the lack of adequate toilet provision for women, and in December 2014, Bombay’s high court ordered all municipal corporations to provide safe and clean toilets for women near main roads.24 Ninety-six potential sites were identified and Bombay’s local government promised 50 million rupees (around ￡550,000) to build new toilets. But a year later, reported online women’s rights magazine Broadly, not a single brick had been laid.25 The fund allocation lapsed in 2016.26
Local governments that fail to provide public toilets may believe that they are cutting costs, but a 2015 Yale study suggests that this is a false economy. The study authors developed a mathematical model linking the ‘risk of sexual assault to the number of sanitation facilities and the time a woman must spend walking to a toilet’, and calculated the tangible costs (lost earnings, medical, court and prison expenses) and intangible costs (pain and suffering, risk of homicide) of sexual assault versus the cost of installing and maintaining toilets.
They applied their model to Khayelitsha, a township in South Africa, which has an estimated 5,600 toilets for a population of 2.4 million, resulting, the authors claimed, in 635 sexual assaults at a cost of $40 million each year. Increasing the number of toilets to 11,300, at a direct cost of $12 million, would almost half the average distance to a toilet and result in a 30% decrease in sexual assault. According to the mathematical model, the reduced social and policing costs more than offset the additional cost of providing toilets, leaving the township $5 million better off. These figures, they added, were conservative, since their costings had not included ‘the many additional health benefits of improving sanitation in resource-constrained urban areas’.27