NY considers women's restroom rights

2003.1205

Go ahead, make fun of the fact that several City Council members introduced a bill Wednesday to have more restrooms set aside for women than men in most buildings. To women -- and one male law professor -- it's a matter of gender equity.

"Women need more restroom facilities simply because women take longer," John F. Banzhaf III, a public interest law professor at George Washington University Law School, said Wednesday.

Banzhaf, who has filed several court complaints, wrote recently that these legal cases show that women are standing up for their rights "even if they can't stand up while exercising those rights."

"We would never tolerate a system where women would routinely have to wait five times longer than men to have their blood tested, even if men's and women's blood were tested for different things," Banzhaf argues. "And we shouldn't tolerate a system where women routinely are forced to wait five or more times longer than men to perform a basic and necessary personal function."

So why might women take longer in the bathroom? Because they often have small children to tend to, they wear more clothes, and, as Councilwoman Yvette Clarke put it, there's that anatomical difference.

"We don't have the same type of equipment that men have," Clarke said.





While on it's face unreasonable, even silly, if you consider the "good points" of the argument, that women's clothing are harder to deal with, that they often have small children (a societal issue at stake their as well, it shouldn't be that way), and that they usually have to sit rather than "go & go", then there's something to be said for it... That is, as long as it doesn't unnecessarily burden smaller places where putting in an extra restroom fundamentally changes how the place is laid out