When asked what she does for work, Lee Syminton answers, “I design toilets.”

She explains this is a rather good conversation stopper, despite her failing to mention the fact that she is director of an architectural firm and works as a lecturer in design and the built environment at Curtin University.

The sound of a pencil meeting paper breaks through the silence of the almost empty meeting room. 

Ms Syminton smiles as she sketches on a roll of tracing paper she seems to carry wherever she goes. What takes shape is an intriguing unisex bathroom design that has recently caught her eye.

She has often pondered why there is such a noticeable difference in lines to the bathroom for men and women, despite the National Construction Code increasing the number of toilets for women in a range of different venues. 

This particular issue remains as the elephant in the room, whether it’s because it is rather indelicate table talk or because it’s just another one of those accepted conundrums.

The history of toilet inequity

This is not just an issue of long lines for women in a hurry to relieve themselves. The discriminatory accessibility of toilets is embedded in our history and is seen across the globe.

Professor John F. Banzhaf III of George Washington University Law School claims to be the “father of Potty Parity” – a movement formed in the US to address the length of women’s bathroom lines as a form of gender discrimination.

In the Victorian period, a concept called the “urinary leash” was perpetrated by purposefully limiting the number of public facilities for women so they were constrained only to move short distances from the home.

In 2017, a woman in Amsterdam was fined for relieving herself in an alleyway. There were 35 public urinals for men in the city, and only three public toilets were accessible for women.  

In India, a lack of public sanitary facilities for women is an issue of life or death particularly in rural areas. Here, women are forced to hold on for as long as possible, even limiting food and drink intake, before using a field as their toilet at night time.

In 2014, two young women were found the morning after they relieved themselves in a field. Attacked, gang-raped and hanging from a mango tree.

A proposal for change

The Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) is in the process of producing a proposal to change the adequacy of female public sanitary facilities in Australia. It hopes to address long queues for women’s bathrooms, specifically in theatres, by increasing the number of female toilets (closet pans) required in the National Construction Code.

Gary Rake, chief executive of the Board, says this is an important issue that should be put under the spotlight.

“Without being disrespectful to gender diverse people, if we thought in binary terms, very close to half the population experience this problem,” he says.

An advanced draft of the analysis, provided by Mr Rake to help explain the proposal, is responding to multiple requests for change.

The report showed evidence of females spending 47 per cent longer in bathrooms than males and visiting bathrooms 1.3 times more than men, with reasons to go other than toileting, such as menstruation, pregnancy and helping children or elderly people.

The probability of females queuing was 34 times that for males yet an average toilet facility can have up to 20-30 per cent more male toilets, influenced by the mix of stalls and urinals. 

In a theatre of 5000 seats, women are waiting up to 10 minutes longer than men.

Overall, the analysis determined: “The benefits [of increasing the number of women’s toilets in theatres] are at least six times greater than the costs”.

Barriers to change

Although architects are aware of the issue, Professor Richard Blythe, pro vice chancellor of humanities at Curtin University and an expert in architecture, says the costs of bathroom facilities are a major barrier to building more for women.

He explains that they’re very expensive in buildings and that’s why there’s always pressure to reduce the number of toilets or to keep the number to the building codes’ requirements: “It’s the most expensive part of the building because it’s so highly serviced.”

Professor Blythe says that dramas also arise in discussions about the built environment over “legacy issues”, because some buildings are older, with more problems, and are significantly more expensive to fix.

“Retrofitting toilets is even more costly than building new ones,” he says. “If you’re going to adjust more than a certain amount of the building, then you’re required to upgrade the entire facility to meet the new code.”

But what does it mean to actually change these codes to build more toilets for women?

Mr Rake has the answer. He says changes to the code are difficult because the process to fix issues involves commissioning a research project focused on the facility involved.

“Under our rules, we’re not allowed to set about solving that until we’ve produced evidence to back that up,” Mr Rake says.

“Unfortunately, this makes the change process a little bit slower and more cumbersome, even though broadly, the community would say ‘this is real, get on and solve it’.”

Solving Potty Parity

Often at large events requiring portable toilets, the facilities are unisex. A spokesperson from Portable Sanitation Association International says more unisex toilets help reduce lines to women’s bathrooms, even suggesting European style urinals to decrease wait times overall, adding: “Unisex restrooms help. While not common in the US, many European countries also take advantage of free-standing urinal banks. These free-standing urinals also help cut down on overall lines.”

Although identifying some issues with unisex toilets surrounding women’s safety and Australians having to adjust to the change, Ms Syminton also considers the benefits of unisex toilets.

“Maybe it is better to just put them all unisex,” she says.

Mr Rake says he doesn’t think this will solve the issue and maintains increasing the number of toilets available for women is the way to go. He explains that, at the moment, we’re dividing the total by the expected number of male and female users and that just introducing a third category of bathroom labels wouldn’t change the overall number of facilities available.

What’s next?

Parts of the ACBC’s work will be up for public consultation from May to June.

Mr Rake was asked whether the board would be looking to make similar changes for other venues, such as sports stadiums.

“There’s always potential for it, we don’t have a current proposal for those. When we looked through the [National Construction Code] tables, the one that had the most obvious disparity that we could address was a single theatre,” he says.

Professor Blythe says although the issues surrounding toilets may appear to be mundane, there is a very serious side to the issue.

“It actually holds the keys to all kinds of cultural assumptions and beliefs and ideas that we fabricate as part of our cultural condition, and they sit with us in very deeply embedded ways that are shocking to people,” he says.

With so much resting on the improvement of the toilet world, it will be interesting to see whether the wait for change will be shorter or longer than a bathroom queue during a theatre intermission.