Potty politics: Why women are pissed off about restrooms

On a recent Saturday morning at Barriques, a popular coffee shop in downtown Madison, patrons waited in one of two lines.

The first line began at the cash register, snaking past the display case of brioche and raspberry scones, the fair-trade chocolate bars and the bags of whole beans. In this line, customers waited their turn, ordering macchiatos, yogurt parfaits and morning buns.

The second line formed just across the room, near the stairs. In this line stood three women, arms crossed, shopping bags at their feet. They waited patiently for the locked restroom to open. The adjoining room, marked “men,” sat empty.

On some counts, Wisconsin is a national pacesetter when it comes to women’s rights. Wisconsin was the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote. Two years later, in 1921, it became the first state to pass a law granting women full equality with men under civil law.

And Wisconsin, it turns out, is a leader in “potty parity,” a term familiar to architects and lawmakers and all but unknown to the lay, lavatory-using public.

Definitions vary, but potty parity essentially ensures women and men have equal access to restrooms and wait equal lengths of time.  Wisconsin modified its Commercial Building Code in 1994, mandating more toilet facilities for women than for men in certain types of buildings, such as theaters and stadiums. But lines still form outside women’s restrooms. And some people are, well, pissed.

Potty parity advocates aim to end lines at the loo. Photo courtesy of Melanie Burger

“It’s tangible evidence of gender discrimination,” says Kathryn Anthony, a self-described “potty parity crusader” and architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “But people often dismiss the issue. They say we’re just powdering our noses.”

She has a long list of reasons why women often find lines at the loo: Women have more clothing to remove. They use bathrooms for other activities, such as breast-feeding and feminine hygiene needs. They often accompany young children to the bathroom.

And, Anthony says, many buildings simply don’t have enough fixtures for women. In some cases, old plumbing codes are to blame. Buildings constructed decades ago weren’t required to have an equal number of women’s and men’s bathrooms because women weren’t in public as much as men.

Modern buildings with bathrooms of equal size don’t guarantee equal access, either. Toilet stalls require more space than urinals, so even relatively large women’s restrooms often have fewer fixtures than men’s rooms.

The problem with waiting, Anthony argues, isn’t just inconvenience — or incontinence. Waiting to use the bathroom can cause serious health problems, like cystitis and urinary tract infections, particularly for pregnant women, who need to visit the bathroom more often than men.

There’s also a psychological component. “We shouldn’t have to feel like second-class citizens,” Anthony says. “Potty parity means equal speed of access. It should take a woman just as long as it takes a man to find an available toilet stall.”

To create parity, Anthony and others argue, women need more toilets. That’s where building codes come into play. Wisconsin follows the International Building Code and the state’s Commercial Building Code, which require approximately double the number of toilet fixtures for women as for men in large spaces of assembly: places like theaters, museums, libraries, stadiums and amusement parks.

So why are Wisconsin women still waiting in line?

One reason is that new building codes don’t apply to old structures. Buildings constructed in Wisconsin before March 1, 1994, don’t need to meet the restroom parity requirements mandated by the state’s Commercial Building Code.

And even in newer Wisconsin buildings, particularly bars and restaurants, often women still wait for the loo. Bars and nightclubs are only required to have one men’s and one women’s toilet per 80 people; for restaurants, the number is two gender-specific bathrooms per 150 people. Barriques is a good example. The café has a capacity of 120, so it meets the two-bathroom requirement. But since its bathrooms are gender-specific — one is designated male, one female, even though they are identical locking stalls — lines form at busy intervals. And, because women take longer, they’re the ones who wait.

“I always feel a little silly staring at an open, empty restroom, thinking, ‘Oh, no, I can’t go in there because there’s a sign that says ‘men’ on the door,’” says Ari Eisenberg, a history doctoral student at UW-Madison, about the Barriques bathroom. “I’ll say to the woman ahead of me, ‘The men’s bathroom is open, do you want to use it?’ And if she says no, it’s always a little baffling to me. Ultimately, they’re just individual rooms with toilets in them, which you can lock.”

Some women, including Eisenberg, have no qualms about using a single restroom marked “men,” as long as it’s empty. But Robert Brubaker, the program manager at the American Restroom Association, doesn’t think that’s the answer to long lines at women’s restrooms.

Instead, Brubaker has lobbied the International Code Council, which oversees the International Building Code, to increase the number of restrooms required in bars and restaurants, and ensure these establishments have the necessary toilet fixtures for both women and men.

Most of Brubaker’s proposals have “stalled” in public hearings — “the restaurant industry comes in and says adding more bathrooms will cause all sorts of businesses to fail,” he says gloomily — but he was buoyed by a small but significant victory last spring. Thanks to the American Restroom Association, future versions of the International Plumbing Code will allow buildings with one women’s bathroom and one men’s bathroom — including places like Barriques — to covert both into “family restrooms.”