Click here to read Top 10 toilet horrors: Times readers kick up a stink

To those not already in the know, Wednesday is World Toilet Day, and for those of us who find ourselves all too frequently standing in line with our legs crossed - particularly those like me whose pelvic-floor muscles have been shot by repeated pregnancies - it seems a good time to address the question of why there are never enough women's loos.

Anywhere. From airports to theatres, supermarkets to pubs, football stadiums to the country's relatively few remaining public conveniences. James Brown said that it was a man's world; he was right when it comes to lavatory provision. “You can judge a nation by its toilets,” says Clara Greed, Professor of Inclusive Urban Planning at the University of the West of England, “and you can assess the true position of women in society by looking at its toilet queues.”

Britain led the world with the introduction of public conveniences, in 1852. Yet in recent years there has been a decline in their availability, by an estimated 16 per cent since 2000. Too many, it seems, have been redeveloped, or boarded up, not least because councils are not required to provide public loos.

Yet a committee of MPs, intent on reversing this inconvenient truth, is recommending that the Government impose a duty on local authorities to develop a public toilet strategy. It is urging councils to pay local businesses to allow the public access to their loos. A number of councils do already, including Richmond upon Thames, where 69 shops, restaurants, pubs, offices and supermarkets are paid £600 a year, plus VAT, for public use of their facilities.

Somewhat contentiously, the MPs are calling for councils “to provide a ratio of 2:1 public toilet provision in favour of women”, quoting expert advice that women go to the toilet more often and for longer, “thanks to a range of sartorial, biological and functional issues”.

I doubt that even this would be enough to relieve the existing iniquitous imbalance on the UK's loo front.

An inbuilt inequality

In the past few months I've queued to relieve myself at Tate Modern, Brighton's recently refurbished Dome Theatre, two restaurants, a shopping centre and a pub. On each occasion a corresponding queue for the gents has been conspicuous by its absence. In fact, apart from at Glastonbury in the late 1980s, outside a row of stinky, unisex long-drops, I don't think that I've ever seen a bloke queue to take a leak.

There is an inbuilt inequality when it comes to public conveniences in the UK, says Greed who, as a founder member of the World Toilet Organisation, honorary member of the British Toilet Association, and member of the revision committee for Sanitary Installations for the British Standards Institute, knows more than most about lavatory provision. “It happens everywhere,” she adds, “from Cardiff's Millennium Stadium to Glyndebourne, Badminton to Ascot, and the situation is particularly bad at sporting venues, especially when they're hosting non-sporting events.”

People assume that this is just because women take longer to use the loo, says Michelle Barkley, the technical director of Chapman Taylor, an architectural practice specialising in the design of mixed-use town centre redevelopment, but this is far from the whole story.

For the record, men take 35 seconds to use a urinal, while women take a minimum of 60 seconds to use a loo. Research undertaken in Japan - constituting what could accurately be described as time and motion studies - suggests that women take twice as long as men to go to the loo, and that's excluding time taken washing their hands afterwards. What most people do not realise, explains Barkley, is that women's lavatories normally contain far fewer “appliances” than men's.

This, she believes, originates from the practice of counting WC cubicles and not urinals when comparing facilities. And for years, architects have allocated equal floor space for men's and women's conveniences in public buildings, even though urinals take about half the space of lavatories.

Building Regulations specify “adequate” WC provision, and have always referred to the British Standard code of practice for the design of sanitary facilities for compliance. The latest 2006 version of the standard requires that the number of appliances (WCs) in women's lavatories is at least equal to the number of those in men's (WCs and urinals).

While the use by designers of this latest version of the British Standard should help to ease the long queues for women in new buildings, Barkley says it will not resolve the problem in existing ones. The Licensing Act 2003, for example, dropped the requirement for adequate lavatory provision in licensed premises, “although pubs and theatres are some of the worst offenders”. Little wonder that British women waste so much time standing in line.

Women spend longer in the loo than men

And you can forget those sexist gripes that what women are really doing is fixing their make-up. Studies prove this not to be the case, insists Greed. Rather, she confirms, it is “biological and sartorial considerations” that force women to spend longer in the loo than men, and this is something that is being acknowledged increasingly outside the UK, particularly when it comes to public provision.

In the US, for example, New York City and 16 states have adopted the “Potty Priority Law”, which recognises that women need twice as many public conveniences as men. New Zealand has even applied human rights legislation stating that no woman should have to wait more than three minutes to relieve herself.

Greed and Barkley are hopeful that recent gender discrimination legislation placing a duty on publicly funded bodies in this country to address whether or not their facilities comply with the Sex Discrimination Act requirement to provide “services of like quality” to men and women will encourage these organisations to improve lavatory provision for women.

“We have to get the gender requirements mainstreamed into the British Standards 6456 on sanitary installations, which set the numbers and ratio of male to female toilets, and this is no easy task,” says Greed.

“Even then the regulations apply only to new toilet development, that is new buildings or those that are substantially refurbished, so they are not retrospective.” There may, however, be a legal challenge on this, she adds, “as many people are very concerned that women are so under-provided for particularly when they have paid for a ticket to a sports or cultural event, and where they do not get equal service to the men in terms of toilet provision”.

But surely even doubling current provision for female loos will only halve the length of the queues? If women take twice as long as men and have about half the facilities, we really have only a quarter of the provision. We could be crossing our legs for a while longer.

For more on World Toilet Day, Wednesday, November 19, visit www.worldtoilet.org

Down the pan

1739

Men and women are offered separate toilets for the first time at a restaurant dance party in Paris

1852

Britain's first public convenience opens in Fleet Street, London

35

Average time in seconds that a man will use a urinal. On average, women take a minimum of 60 seconds to use a loo

2.5bn

Number of people worldwide who do not have access to proper sanitation

Sources: Times database; BBC; World Toilet Organisation

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