Beyond “Potty Parity”: Public Toilets, Gendered Time Costs, and Institutional Accountability in Everyday Mobility

Abstract

While public sanitation is a fundamental component of urban infrastructure, it is often treated as a discretionary amenity rather than a core public service subject to legal standards of equality and dignity. This article challenges gender-blind approaches to urban planning by examining how inadequate public toilet provision constrains women’s everyday mobility and presence in public space, raising questions of indirect gender discrimination and regulatory responsibility. Drawing on an exploratory mixed-methods study (N = 97), the analysis combines quantitative assessment of access barriers, qualitative user narratives, and time-based measurement of total restroom use duration to examine patterns of use and waiting with particular attention to gender differences. The findings indicate that hygiene-related concerns are reported across both men and women, without clear evidence of a consistent gender-specific pattern, while women are disproportionately affected by throughput failures, long waiting times, and the absence of care-integrated facilities. At the same time, variation in support for gender-neutral toilet solutions suggests that user acceptance may not align with model-based proposals in the literature. These inequalities reflect an institutional accountability gap with legal implications in the governance of everyday public services. By shifting the focus from numerical potty parity to temporal inequality and responsibility, this article contributes to feminist legal scholarship by situating sanitation within questions of temporal inequality and institutional responsibility. While exploratory in nature, the findings offer empirically grounded insights into inequalities in everyday sanitation governance.

1. Introduction

Public toilets are often treated as minor, technical components of the built environment; yet they function as a telling “social mirror” of whose bodies, needs, and dignity are recognized in public space and public services (Molotch and Norén 2010; Davis 2020). When toilet provision is inadequate, the consequences are not merely inconvenient: access becomes conditioned by time, money, and the legal and practical ability to remain in public space without interruption. In this sense, the regulation and operation of public toilets sit at the intersection of gender equality, institutional responsibility, and everyday citizenship.

Under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, Target 6.2, the United Nations commits that by 2030 everyone should have access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene, with explicit attention to women, girls, and people in vulnerable situations. In parallel, sanitation has been framed in rights-based terms: the UN General Assembly has recognized access to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right essential to the full enjoyment of life (UN General Assembly 2010, 2021), a position further elaborated in European human rights frameworks on water and sanitation (UN Human Rights Regional Office Europe 2025; Workman et al. 2021). These developments underscore that sanitation is not merely a policy concern but also a matter of legal obligation and equality. Within the European Union, this rights-based approach is further codified by Council Directive 2004/113/EC, which establishes a framework for implementing the principle of equal treatment between men and women in the access to and supply of goods and services. By defining public sanitation as a necessary service available to the public, the Directive provides a legal basis for challenging systemic disparities. Inadequate provision that results in longer waiting times for women can thus be interpreted as a failure to ensure equal access to a public service, potentially falling under the scope of indirect discrimination as prohibited by the Directive.

The legal claim of this article is not simply that women wait longer for public toilets but that formally neutral sanitation standards may allocate access to public space unequally when they ignore gendered, embodied, care-related, and temporal dimensions of use. Public toilet provision is therefore a legal and regulatory issue because access is produced through building codes, municipal service decisions, procurement and maintenance obligations, equality norms, and institutional accountability mechanisms.

In the literature, the terminology used for these spaces distinguishes between the physical facility and the broader spatial context. The term toilet refers most directly to the fixture and the act of bodily elimination, whereas restroom denotes the larger space in which this activity occurs, typically including sinks and other elements related to personal hygiene. Related expressions such as bathroom, washroom, and lavatory are often used interchangeably but may carry slightly different connotations depending on context, referring either to the function of the space or to its level of formality (Molotch and Norén 2010).

The concept of “potty parity”, introduced by Banzhaf (1990), captures a structural inequality between women’s and men’s access to toilets in workplaces and public venues. The classic design logic of formal equality—based on equal floor area or equal numbers of fixtures—has been widely criticized for producing de facto disadvantage for women. Differences in biological needs, clothing practices, and caring roles translate into longer average usage times and greater capacity pressure, materializing as longer queues and reduced effective access (Banzhaf 1990; Banks 1991). From a legal perspective, this critique aligns with broader debates on formal versus substantive equality, highlighting how ostensibly neutral standards can generate indirect gender discrimination in practice. Banzhaf’s formulations—Restroom Equity and Squatters’ Rights—explicitly frame toilet access as a matter of dignity rather than comfort, while Banks’ account of the historical “gender tax” illustrates how access burdens constrain women’s mobility and participation beyond the toilet itself.

Recent scholarship further substantiates these claims. Lewkowitz and Gilliland (2025) provide a feminist critical systematic review of gendered public toilet provision across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, forming a key theoretical foundation for the present study. Synthesizing 19 empirical studies through a UN standards framework—availability, accessibility, affordability, quality and safety, and acceptability, privacy, and dignity—they demonstrate that cities frequently lack sufficient, reliably open, and adequately equipped facilities. Deficits in cleanliness, privacy, and menstrual hygiene supports shape avoidance strategies and harmful coping behaviors, while trans and gender-nonconforming people often face harassment and exclusion in binary facilities (see also Colliver and Duffus 2022; Godeau 2023; Jones and Slater 2020; Peng and Wu 2023; Ramster et al. 2018). While these experiences raise distinct and important legal questions, the present article focuses on cisgender women’s temporal and care-related constraints, which warrant focused analysis.

The categorization of international restroom regulations reveals four distinct legislative philosophies aimed at managing public sanitation and gender-based wait-time disparities. The first approach, “quantitative” regulation, is exemplified by the new 2025 Hungarian standards (Government Regulation Nr. 280/2024) and the Singaporean Code of Practice on Environmental Health (COPEH, 2017 edition), also observed in Australia (National Construction Code Table F4D4). These codes prioritize high-density fixture counts as a preventive measure against system failure during peak arrival rates. In these jurisdictions, the primary objective is to maintain a high throughput capacity that can absorb the sudden surges in demand typical of schools or theatres. Sizing models in these regions are often calibrated to ensure that even under maximum load, the system remains stable and does not reach the critical utilization thresholds that lead to exponential queuing. The second methodology, widely referred to as “potty parity”, is prominent in the building codes of the United States, notably California. It should be noted that from 2026, Californian schools are required to have gender-neutral bathrooms (Lambert 2026). These regulations are explicitly designed to mitigate the waiting time gap by mandating an asymmetrical fixture ratio. This approach acknowledges the biological and behavioral reality that service times for female users are significantly longer than those for male users. By legislating ratios that often approach 2:1 or even 3.25:1 in favor of women, these codes attempt to equalize the physical waiting time rather than just the number of stalls, ensuring that a female patron does not spend a disproportionate amount of an intermission in a queue. Finally, the regulation described as “performance-based”, such as the British Standard (derived from published guidance summarizing BS 6465) in the United Kingdom, focuses on the specific utility and dynamic flow of the building. This methodology utilizes queuing theory to determine requirements based on the intended use of the facility—distinguishing, for instance, between a steady-flow office environment and a pulse-flow theatre intermission. This model acknowledges that while male throughput is vastly accelerated by the presence of urinals, female facilities require a much higher performance ceiling to prevent bottlenecks. The German “qualitative” approach goes beyond numerical fixture counts by mandating detailed functional and spatial requirements for sanitary facilities. In particular, the framework established through the ASR (Arbeitsstättenverordnung) A4.1. standard, in conjunction with related ASR provisions (like A3.4), specifies requirements concerning privacy, gender separation, usability, lighting, temperature, and effective ventilation, while DIN 18040-1:2010-1 (Planungsgrundlagen des barrierefreien Bauens) further reinforces a qualitative logic by setting binding accessibility and ergonomic standards for publicly accessible buildings, including toilet facilities, thereby embedding dignity and functional adequacy into technical regulation.

The following model (detailed in

Table 1. Tripartite regulatory accountability matrix for public toilet provision.

Level	Primary Actor	Domain of Responsibility	Strategic Objective	Example
1. State	Central Government	Regulatory Environment	Establishing enforceable minimum standards and gender equity norms (potty parity).	Implementing regulatory standards to shift from a quantitative to a qualitative methodology in case of number and conditions of public toilets.
2. Local government	Municipal Authorities	Physical and Financial Background	Network planning, urban coverage targets, and sustainable public funding models.	Reversing the contraction of the network in tourism zones and ensuring coverage for demographic groups most sensitive to availability, such as women and the elderly.
3. Operator	Schools, Theaters, Workplaces	Maintenance and Supervision	Ensuring cleanliness, safety, operational continuity, and the preservation of user dignity.	Moving from facility closure strategies (due to vandalism) toward “dignity-first” monitoring and high-frequency maintenance in major transit and cultural hubs.

) for equitable restroom governance integrates international scholarly principles with the urban challenges of a city, establishing a tripartite responsibility system for the provision of public and semi-public facilities. This city functions as a stress test for gendered public services under conditions of tourism-driven temporal compression. The core premise of this framework is that restroom access is not merely a matter of building maintenance but is a fundamental human right and a prerequisite for urban well-being. To ensure effective implementation, the model defines a hierarchical matrix where each level possesses specific duties and measurable outcomes. At the state level, the core responsibility involves the creation of a regulatory environment that sets enforceable minimum service standards. Planning and design scholarship on potty parity emphasizes that formal equal provision cannot be reduced to symmetrical floor area (Anthony and Dufresne 2007). Public toilet design has historically embedded multiple forms of exclusion, and equitable access requires recognizing gendered and care-related differences in use patterns. This implies a regulatory duty to move beyond nominal counts toward performance-oriented standards, such as service capacity, privacy, and safety. Evidence from sanitation research further strengthens the case for rights-like minimums, as privacy and safety are at the core of sanitation-related mental and social well-being. When these are compromised, downstream outcomes include shame, anxiety, and dignity concerns (Gershenson and Penner 2009; Sclar et al. 2018).

In the everyday geography of cities, public toilets are a question of local government capacity and public-space governance. Budapest can serve as a critical case for this study because it is one of Europe’s most prominent urban destinations, ranking among the top 15 European tourist destinations based on international overnights, according to McKinsey’s analysis drawing on Oxford Economics data (McKinsey & Company 2024). However, the public toilet network in this high-traffic environment has contracted and aged, significantly affecting tourism and the time that people, especially older visitors, can spend in the city. Research indicates that women’s travel decisions are more sensitive to toilet availability than men’s, making infrastructure a key factor in sustainable urban tourism (Nagy and Egedy 2024; Nevelyn and Aruan 2020). Institutionally, municipalities should be responsible for the physical and financial background of the network, including coverage targets and funding models that treat access as a public service rather than a privatized commodity. In policy terms, this supports treating maintenance and cleanliness not as optional features but as core service qualities secured through standards and audits.

The third level of responsibility rests with operators and service providers in semi-public settings such as schools, workplaces, and cultural venues. A feminist critical review of public toilet provision argues that closing toilets in response to social problems like vandalism reflects an institutional deficiency, as facilities should be treated as essential public services (Lewkowitz and Gilliland 2025). Instead of withdrawal, maintenance and monitoring regimes should be implemented to sustain usability and dignity. Ultimately, the theoretical success of potty parity depends on the continuous and dignified accessibility of the infrastructure, ensured by the interaction between state regulation, municipal planning, and operational culture.

This article contributes to feminist scholarship on public services by reframing unequal access to public toilets as an institutional accountability gap with legal significance, rather than a narrowly technical issue of fixture counts or spatial design. While potty parity has been instrumental in exposing formal inequalities, it often leaves unexamined the institutional arrangements through which legal responsibility for access, maintenance, and usability is allocated—or deferred. We argue that gendered disparities in toilet access persist because institutions systematically fail to account for embodied, care-related, and time-sensitive needs in everyday public space.

A central contribution of the article is to conceptualize waiting time as a form of temporal governance. Queues are not accidental outcomes of demand but the product of planning standards, regulatory thresholds, and operational decisions that allocate time unevenly across users. When women disproportionately bear longer waiting times to meet a basic need, this constitutes a systemic failure in provision in which time costs are externalized onto women’s bodies and daily routines. From this perspective, waiting time becomes a legally relevant variable through which inequality is reproduced in ordinary public services. Public toilets thus operate as low-salience gendered institutions: their legal significance is obscured by their apparent mundanity, even as failures in provision undermine dignity, safety, and equal access to public space.

The empirical component of this study is exploratory in scope. Its relevance lies less in identifying entirely new patterns than in the way these patterns are interpreted. The analysis brings together user perceptions, qualitative accounts, and time-based observations to examine how access to public sanitation is shaped not only by physical provision, but also by the temporal conditions under which facilities are used. In doing so, this article situates everyday experiences of waiting and access within a broader framework of institutional responsibility and substantive equality.

2. Methods

Based on an extensive review of both domestic and international research, the empirical component of this study comprised two complementary research phases. First, we developed a self-administered questionnaire designed to address the most frequently identified shortcomings in public toilet provision highlighted in previous studies. In addition to basic sociodemographic variables, the questionnaire included items assessing experiences related to public toilet use and attitudinal statements concerning adequacy, accessibility, and dignity. Attitudinal items were administered exclusively within the Hungarian subsample. The empirical component of this study was designed as an exploratory, mixed-method inquiry, combining self-reported experiences with observational time-measurement data. Rather than aiming at statistical generalization, this study seeks to contribute empirically grounded insights into how public toilet provision is experienced and negotiated within a specific institutional and cultural context. The findings should therefore be interpreted as context-sensitive patterns rather than universal claims. The questionnaire was distributed primarily among university students within the framework of academic research activities. To broaden the age distribution of respondents, additional participants were recruited via social media platforms. Data collection took place in October 2025.

The second research phase focused on the temporal dimension of gender differences in public toilet use. For the purposes of this study, “restroom use time” was defined as the total duration from entry into the restroom area to exit. Observations were conducted in multi-cubicle facilities within university buildings at Széchenyi István University in Győr, and the measured duration therefore includes time spent inside the facility, use of cubicles or urinals, and handwashing. Waiting time outside the restroom was not recorded, although internal congestion may have influenced overall duration. As such, the measure captures total experienced use time rather than isolating specific components such as fixture use or handwashing, which may limit direct comparability with studies that focus on individual elements of use. Data collection took place during class breaks, with the aim of estimating both the average number of users and the average duration of use by women and men. This dual-method design allows subjective experiences to be interpreted alongside observed usage patterns.

The hypotheses guiding the questionnaire-based study were as follows:

H1. 

Women report lower perceived safety in public toilet use than men.

H2. 

Women express stronger agreement than men that additional women’s toilets are needed.

H3. 

Limited access to public restrooms negatively affects human dignity.

The time-measurement study tested the following hypothesis:

H4. 

On average, women spend more time using public restrooms than men.

3. Findings

3.1. Questionnaire Survey

The questionnaire sample consisted of 97 respondents, of whom 27.8% were men (n = 27) and 72.2% were women (n = 70), indicating a pronounced female overrepresentation. In terms of age distribution, the majority of respondents belonged to the 18–29 age group (63.9%, n = 62), followed by the 30–44 age group (15.5%, n = 15), the 45–59 age group (14.4%, n = 14), and respondents aged over 60 (6.2%, n = 6). Cross-tabulation of gender and age revealed that the 18–29 cohort dominated among both men and women. Overall, the demographic structure of the sample is asymmetric with respect to both gender and age, a limitation that should be considered when interpreting the findings.

Statistical analyses were conducted using Jamovi (Version 2.7). An exploratory factor analysis was performed on the questionnaire items, followed by reliability testing. The internal consistency of the resulting scale was borderline acceptable (Cronbach’s α = 0.601; McDonald’s ω = 0.640). Although these values fall below the conventional threshold of 0.70, they are considered acceptable for exploratory research, particularly given the limited number of items and the gender imbalance of the sample. Nevertheless, the results should be interpreted with caution.

Across all gender comparisons, statistically significant differences between men (1) and women (2) emerged only for four items, and these effects were confirmed using Welch’s one-way ANOVA (i.e., without assuming equal variances), as shown in

Table 2. Gender differences in public toilet perceptions and needs.

Variable	Gender	N	Mean	SD	F	df1	df2	p
To what extent do you feel safe and secure when using public toilet facilities?	Male	27	3.26	1.059	13.89	1	43.7	<0.001
	Female	70	2.39	0.967
Have you ever been unable to change a child’s nappy because of a lack of changing facilities?	Male	27	1.81	0.396	6.33	1	59.2	0.015
	Female	70	1.57	0.498
How important do you think it is to have gender-neutral or unisex toilets?	Male	27	1.67	0.920	18.30	1	72.4	<0.001
	Female	70	2.71	1.416
Do you agree that public buildings need more women’s toilets than men’s?	Male	27	2.52	1.252	17.06	1	35.1	<0.001
	Female	70	1.44	0.828

Notes: Perceived safety was measured on a 1–5 scale (1 = not at all safe; 5 = completely safe), with higher scores indicating greater perceived safety when using public toilets. The importance of gender-neutral/unisex toilets was measured on a 1–5 scale (1 = not at all important; 5 = very important), with higher scores indicating greater perceived importance. Agreement that public buildings need more women’s than men’s toilets was rated on a 1–5 Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree), with higher scores indicating stronger agreement. The nappy-changing item was coded dichotomously (1 = yes (negative experience); 2 = no); therefore, lower mean values indicate more frequent reports of having been unable to change a child’s nappy due to the absence of changing facilities. Gender comparisons were conducted using Welch’s one-way ANOVA because homogeneity of variances was not assumed; reported degrees of freedom are Welch-adjusted.

. Women reported lower perceived safety when using public toilets, and this difference was statistically significant; F(1, 43.7) = 13.89, p < 0.001. For the dichotomous item on having encountered a lack of diaper-changing facilities (coded 1 = yes and 2 = no), women’s lower mean indicates that women more frequently reported this service gap. Women also rated the importance of unisex toilets higher. Finally, women expressed stronger support for the statement that more women’s toilets are needed (interpreted according to the item’s coding, where lower scores reflect stronger agreement); F(1, 35.1) = 17.06, p < 0.001. No other questionnaire items showed statistically significant gender differences, suggesting that gender differentiation in this sample is concentrated specifically in perceived safety, care-related infrastructure, and preferences about inclusive provision and women’s capacity.

A linear regression predicting agreement that more women’s toilets are needed (N = 90) from gender, age group, and the reverse-coded experience composite explained 23.8% of the variance (R² = 0.238). Gender was a significant predictor (b = −0.920, SE = 0.281, t = −3.28, p = 0.002; β = −0.358), indicating that women reported lower item scores than men, consistent with stronger agreement that additional women’s toilets are needed (given the item’s coding, where lower scores indicate stronger agreement). Age group was not associated with the outcome (b = −0.075, SE = 0.112, t = −0.67, p = 0.506; β = −0.065), and the experience composite was not a significant predictor (b = 0.104, SE = 0.069, t = 1.52, p = 0.131; β = 0.171).

When respondents were asked whether queues in front of women’s toilets reflect an architectural or design problem, gender differences were observed only at the trend level and did not reach statistical significance (F(1.95) = 3.75, p = 0.056). Although women reported higher average agreement scores than men, both genders largely converged on the interpretation that prolonged waiting times are attributable to planning and design deficiencies rather than biological factors.

Composite toilet-use experiences were first examined in bivariate association with overall satisfaction/perceived safety. Because the experience index was coded 1 = “yes” and 2 = “no” for each adverse event (thus higher composite scores indicate fewer reported difficulties), the correlation is expected to be positive if fewer negative experiences co-occur with higher satisfaction. Consistent with this interpretation, SUM Experience was positively associated with SUM Satisfaction (Pearson’s r = 0.33, p = 0.001; Spearman’s ρ = 0.35, p < 0.001; N = 90). To assess whether this relationship persisted after accounting for key demographics, we estimated a linear regression model with SUM Satisfaction as the dependent variable and SUM Experience as the focal predictor, controlling for gender (male = 1, female = 2) and age group (1 = 18–29, 2 = 30–44, 3 = 45–59, 4 = 60+). The model explained 13.5% of the variance in satisfaction/perceived safety (R² = 0.135; N = 90). Higher SUM Experience (i.e., fewer reported difficulties) significantly predicted higher satisfaction (b = 0.382, SE = 0.156, t = 2.45, p = 0.016; β = 0.293), while gender and age group were not significant predictors in this specification (ps > 0.24). Collinearity diagnostics indicated no multicollinearity (VIFs = 1.08–1.42; tolerances = 0.705–0.926).

An exploratory bootstrap mediation analysis (5000 samples) tested whether age-group differences in satisfaction/perceived safety (SUM Satisfaction) operated indirectly via reported toilet-use difficulties (SUM Experience). Age group significantly predicted the reverse-coded experience composite (a-path: b = −0.504, SE = 0.166, 95% CI [−0.815, −0.168], p = 0.002), indicating that older age groups reported fewer “no-problem” responses (i.e., more difficulties). In turn, SUM Experience positively predicted satisfaction/perceived safety (b-path: b = 0.470, SE = 0.123, 95% CI [0.239, 0.723], p < 0.001), such that fewer reported difficulties were associated with higher satisfaction. The indirect effect of age on satisfaction through SUM Experience was significant (indirect effect = −0.237, SE = 0.095, 95% CI [−0.439, −0.071], p = 0.012), whereas the direct effect of age on satisfaction was not significant once experiences were included (c′-path: b = 0.274, SE = 0.263, 95% CI [−0.243, 0.781], p = 0.297). Given the cross-sectional design and ordinal age-group coding, these mediation findings are interpreted as exploratory and mechanism-consistent rather than causal.

3.2. Qualitative Findings

The open-ended responses provide insight into how respondents culturally and socially interpret the absence or inadequacy of public toilets. Rather than merely reflecting infrastructural deficits, these narratives reveal how sanitation becomes entangled with issues of care, safety, dignity, and everyday vulnerability. Thirty respondents (24 women and 6 men) provided evaluable open-ended responses to the question concerning inconvenience caused by the lack or inadequacy of public toilets. Thematic content analysis with multiple coding revealed that difficulties related to toilet use are context-dependent rather than unidimensional.

Two broad problem domains emerged. The first concerned deficits in minimum operational standards, including the absence of basic amenities (e.g., toilet paper, soap, and handwashing facilities), hygiene and cleanliness issues, and lack of privacy. These problems were predominantly reported by women. The second domain involved barriers to access and use, such as distance, unavailability, insufficient capacity, long queues, and reliance on commercial “workarounds” (e.g., cafés or paid toilets). Notably, menstruation and childcare-related challenges appeared exclusively in women’s responses, underscoring gender-specific vulnerabilities. Responses to the question regarding desired improvements emphasized functionality (more toilets) and quality (better maintenance), complemented by calls for accessibility, safety, and digital solutions. While male respondents tended to focus on basic usability and infrastructure, female respondents framed public toilets as a broader public service encompassing safety, care, and user experience.

Table 3. Perceived barriers and challenges in public toilet usage.

Theme (Code)	Definition	Illustrative Quotation	Mentioned by
Privacy breach	Situations where privacy is compromised (e.g., doors not locking, gaps, and audibility).	“During my monthly periods, I am forced to use public toilets. For me, the most distressing thing is when the cubicle isn’t fully enclosed, or when what’s happening inside or in the neighbouring cubicles is directly audible.”	female, age 25–34
Hygiene breakdown	Lack of cleanliness or supplies preventing use or causing distress (e.g., no paper/soap, smell, and contamination).	“Often there is no toilet paper or soap available.”	male, age18–24
Forced commercial workaround	Reliance on cafés/venues or paid access due to absent/closed toilets.	“I think it’s really awkward when you only go into a place (restaurant, café, etc.) because you need to pee—which is a basic human need. Not to mention that in many places, you even have to pay for it.”	female, age 18–24
Care burden	Constraints related to caregiving (e.g., child assistance and nappy-changing facilities).	“When you have a young child of the opposite sex, it is impossible to manage in 95% of toilets—because they still need to go to the toilet with you. As a man, I can’t take my daughter into the men’s, but I can’t go into the women’s with her either.”	male, age 36–45
Waiting/queues	Long lines, time loss, inability to wait, and disrupted activities.	“There are often so few toilets available (especially women’s toilets) that there simply isn’t enough time to wait in the long queue.”	female, age 18–24

summarizes the main themes emerging from the qualitative responses, illustrating how everyday experiences of public toilet use cluster around recurring problems of privacy, hygiene, access, care, and waiting time.

3.3. Time-Measurement Study

The phenomena of women spending a long time in the toilet, which has been documented in the literature (Baillie et al. 2009; Bovens and Marcoci 2023; Greed 2019; Gwynne et al. 2019) was also confirmed in our research: women clearly use the toilet for longer than men. Our own research and previous studies together confirm that providing the same number of toilet cubicles for women actually creates inequality, as the number of people who can be served per unit of time is significantly lower for women due to the longer time required. The international research results and our own research are summarized in

Table 4. Reported time spent in the restroom in different research studies.

Research Study	Average Time for Men	Average Time for Women
Bovens and Marcoci (2023)	~60 s	~90 s
Baillie et al. (2009)	~60–80 s	~120–130 s
Gwynne et al. (2019)	~136 s	~166 s
Own results, 2025	~126 s	~159 s

below.

The time-measurement study was conducted in a public university building in Hungary, Győr. Data collection took place in October 2025 during a high-traffic 40 min interval between 11:30 and 12:10, encompassing both class transitions and the official midday break. The methodology combined gender-disaggregated user counts with chronometric measurements of individual usage time from entry to exit. In total, 24 male and 32 female users were observed. Male usage times ranged from 31 to 228 s, with an overall mean of 121.25 s (131 s during peak break periods). Female usage times ranged from 73 to 231 s, with an overall mean of 136.63 s and a peak-period mean of 181.67 s.

On average, women spent approximately 15–20 s longer in the restroom than men. While this difference appears modest at the individual level, it has substantial cumulative effects during peak periods, contributing to disproportionately longer queues. These findings clearly support Hypothesis H4. Although the average difference in individual usage time appears modest, its relevance becomes more pronounced under peak-traffic conditions, where even small temporal disparities may accumulate into structurally unequal waiting experiences.

4. Discussion: Public Toilet Access as a Regulatory Problem

4.1. From Formal Parity to Substantive Equality: Waiting Time as Indirect Disadvantage

The empirical findings can be read against the normative background of equality law. Article 23 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union requires equality between women and men to be ensured in all areas. While the Charter does not itself establish a specific regulatory regime for public toilets, it provides a rights-based frame for assessing whether formally neutral service standards produce gendered disadvantage in practice. The results of this study are best understood not as isolated observations but as indicative of broader structural dynamics in the provision of public sanitation. While the measured differences in usage time between men and women may appear relatively modest at the individual level, their significance becomes more apparent when considered in relation to fixed spatial arrangements and peak-period demand. In such contexts, even small temporal differences may accumulate into systematically unequal waiting experiences, suggesting that access is shaped not only by the number of facilities available but also by the temporal conditions embedded in their design and operation. This pattern can also be interpreted using insights from queueing theory. Restroom use can be seen as a service system in which waiting time depends on arrival rates, service time, and available capacity (Gross et al. 2008; Kleinrock 1975). When demand approaches system limits, even small differences in service time may lead to disproportionately longer queues. This helps explain why the modest time differences observed in this study result in more pronounced inequalities in experienced access. Similar dynamics have been identified in urban research on public toilets, where longer service times for women are linked to persistent queuing disadvantages (Greed 2019).

A core theoretical contribution of this article is to conceptualize waiting time as an outcome of governance rather than an incidental inconvenience. The time-measurement study confirms that women spend longer on average using toilet facilities than men, while the queuing simulations demonstrate how even modest differences in service time produce disproportionate waiting under peak conditions. From a legal perspective, these findings point to issues that go beyond questions of design efficiency. Rules on public toilet provision are usually based on simple numerical standards, such as the number of facilities or their size, and are intended to apply equally to all users. However, these rules do not consider that different groups use toilets in different ways and for different lengths of time. As a result, arrangements that appear equal on paper may lead to unequal outcomes in practice. In this sense, longer waiting times for certain groups can be seen as a gap between formal equality and actual access to a basic public service.

Survey responses further indicate that users themselves interpret long queues in front of women’s toilets as a consequence of planning and design failures, rather than biological inevitability. This perception is analytically significant, as it aligns subjective interpretation with objective modeling results. Together, these findings illustrate how regulatory standards and capacity planning practices function as mechanisms of temporal governance, allocating time costs unevenly across users. Consistent with feminist analyses of time as a political resource, women’s prolonged waiting emerges here as a routinized outcome of institutional decision making rather than a naturalized feature of public space (Anthony and Dufresne 2007).

This interpretation is consistent with substantive equality theory. As Fredman (2016) argues, equality should not be reduced to formally identical treatment but should address disadvantage, stigma, participation, and structural change. Applied to public toilet provision, this means that equality cannot be assessed merely by asking whether women and men are allocated the same number of facilities. The relevant question is whether regulatory standards accommodate embodied, temporal, and care-related differences in use, reduce disadvantage in effective access, and enable equal participation in public space. Waiting time is legally significant because it makes the unequal effects of formally neutral standards measurable.

4.2. Gendered Safety and Dignity: Empirical Evidence for Sanitation as a Governance Issue

The empirical findings of this study substantiate feminist claims that public toilet provision operates not merely as technical infrastructure but as a gendered public service with implications for safety, dignity, and participation in public life. Quantitative results show that women report significantly lower perceived safety when using public toilets than men, alongside stronger support for the need for additional women’s facilities. These findings empirically reinforce arguments that sanitation access is closely linked to dignity and embodied vulnerability, rather than comfort alone (Banks 1991; Molotch and Norén 2010; Matiti and Baillie 2011).

The qualitative narratives deepen this connection by illustrating how privacy breaches, inadequate enclosure, and hygiene breakdowns are experienced as threats to bodily integrity, particularly in menstruation-related contexts. Such accounts align with conceptualizations of sanitation insecurity, in which fear, shame, and anxiety emerge when privacy and safety cannot be taken for granted (Caruso et al. 2017; Sclar et al. 2018). Importantly, the convergence between women’s reported experiences and statistically significant gender differences in perceived safety suggests that these concerns are not idiosyncratic but structurally patterned. In this sense, the empirical evidence supports the framing of sanitation as a matter of institutional responsibility, rather than individual adaptation.

An interesting point of tension emerges when the present findings are read alongside recent formal modeling work on potty parity and gender-neutral restroom design. Farajollahzadeh and Hu (2025) demonstrate, using a utility-based model that incorporates waiting time, safety, and gender identity, that fully converting all facilities to unisex restrooms may be neither efficient nor fair. Instead, they show that partial flexibility—such as converting some men’s restrooms into unisex facilities—can outperform both fully gender-segregated and fully unisex systems and may even generate Pareto improvements benefiting all users. By contrast, the survey results in this study indicate that men expressed significantly lower support for gender-neutral or unisex toilets than women, suggesting a gap between model-based efficiency and perceived acceptability among users. empirical research from multiple national contexts indicates that resistance to gender-neutral or unisex toilets often reflects specific, addressable concerns rather than a principled rejection of inclusive provision. Qualitative research from Western Australia shows that while gender-neutral toilets are widely recognized as a means of improving safety and reducing bullying for sexuality- and gender-diverse users, their introduction is frequently constrained by privacy and confidentiality concerns, perceived resistance from parents and students, building code requirements, and financial or spatial limitations, highlighting the importance of careful regulatory framing and design choices in implementation (Francis et al. 2022). Similarly, research on public toilet provision in the United Kingdom demonstrates that user support for inclusive toilet configurations is strongly shaped by perceptions of safety, management quality, and cultural norms, suggesting that governance arrangements, clear communication, and design features prioritizing privacy and comfort are critical to securing legitimacy across different user groups (Bichard and Ramster 2025). Taken together, these findings support the view that lower levels of support for gender-neutral toilets—particularly among men—should be understood as an implementation and governance challenge that can be mitigated through legal clarification, pluralistic provision models, and privacy-centered design, rather than as a substantive obstacle to pursuing gender-just access. Rather than resolving this tension, the present study highlights it as a critical area for further research. Future work should examine how perceptions of safety, privacy, and fairness mediate support for gender-neutral designs across different user groups, and how institutional communication, design features, and governance arrangements might bridge the gap between theoretically optimal solutions and socially accepted ones.

4.3. Care-Blind Infrastructure and Institutional Accountability

This study also demonstrates how public toilet provision systematically marginalizes care-related needs, reinforcing gendered inequalities. Quantitative results show that women were significantly more likely to report the absence of nappy-changing facilities, while qualitative accounts reveal how caregivers struggle to navigate facilities with dependent children. These findings echo feminist critiques of public infrastructure that is implicitly designed for autonomous, able-bodied adult users, rendering care work and dependency invisible (Lewkowitz and Gilliland 2025).

Although caregiving responsibilities are not exclusive to women, their unequal distribution means that deficiencies in care-integrated sanitation disproportionately constrain women’s mobility. The empirical evidence presented here supports the argument that exclusion operates not only through overt barriers but through omission: the failure to incorporate caregiving into design standards effectively limits who can remain in public space with dignity. This reinforces earlier claims that toilet provision reflects broader gendered assumptions embedded in planning and governance practices (Greed 2019).

The relationship between reported experiences and overall satisfaction provides empirical grounding for the concept of an institutional accountability gap. The positive association between fewer reported difficulties and higher perceived safety and satisfaction indicates that everyday service conditions directly shape users’ evaluations of dignity and adequacy. Regression results suggest that these evaluations are driven more by concrete experiences than by demographic characteristics alone, while the exploratory mediation analysis highlights how accumulated access difficulties disproportionately affect older users through reduced satisfaction.

The legal significance of these service failures can be understood by returning to the tripartite responsibility model set out in Table 1. That model distinguishes among the state as standard setter, the municipality as the institution responsible for territorial coverage and financing, and the operator as the actor responsible for maintenance, supervision, and day-to-day usability. The empirical findings give this theoretical framework concrete content. Long waiting times point to deficiencies in state-level standards where adequacy is defined primarily through fixture counts rather than throughput or peak-period performance. Care-related exclusions and uneven territorial availability point to municipal failures in network planning and public service financing. Hygiene breakdowns, privacy problems, and closures point to operator-level failures in maintenance, monitoring, and user protection.

This reading is reinforced by the United Nations’ service-regulation approach to the human rights to water and sanitation. The 2017 report of the Special Rapporteur emphasizes that regulation is not confined to economic or technical oversight but forms part of the legal architecture through which the human rights to water and sanitation are progressively realized. In this framework, regulatory arrangements must define the standards according to which services are provided, identify the institutions responsible for monitoring compliance, and align regulatory objectives with human rights standards, including availability, accessibility, quality and safety, acceptability, privacy, and dignity (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation 2017). The tripartite matrix in Table 1 can therefore be read not merely as a policy typology but also as an accountability framework for service regulation.

The subsequent accountability report further clarifies the legal relevance of this framework. Accountability in the context of water and sanitation depends on the definition of responsibilities, the monitoring of performance, and the availability of effective remedies (UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation 2018). When urban sanitation systems fail to address gendered time costs, care-related needs, safety concerns, or minimum standards of usability, the accountability gap identified in this study arises precisely at the intersection of the three levels identified in Table 1: state rules may be under-specified, municipal provision may be territorially or financially inadequate, and operators may fail to secure continuous, clean, safe, and dignified access. In such circumstances, inadequate toilet provision cannot be understood merely as poor service quality. It becomes a failure of service regulation and institutional responsiveness that undermines effective access to sanitation as a human rights-related public service.

These findings resonate with arguments that the privatization, neglect, or withdrawal of public toilets constitutes a deficit in public service governance rather than a neutral response to cost or vandalism (Lewkowitz and Gilliland 2025; Molotch and Norén 2010). By empirically linking waiting times, safety concerns, hygiene deficits, and care-related exclusions to user satisfaction, this study demonstrates how low-salience public services reproduce gendered inequalities through everyday institutional practices. Public toilets thus emerge as sites where accountability is diffuse, responsibility is fragmented, and inequality is normalized through routine encounters.

This phenomenon can be further understood through Fineman’s vulnerability theory. Fineman (2008) argues that vulnerability should not be treated as an exceptional condition attached only to specific dependent groups but as a universal and constant feature of the human condition. This perspective is particularly useful for analyzing public toilet provision because sanitation needs expose the embodied and dependent nature of all users, even if these needs become more visible in relation to menstruation, pregnancy, childcare, disability, ageing, or caregiving. From this perspective, the problem with care-blind infrastructure is not simply that some users have additional or special needs. Rather, the regulatory baseline itself is constructed around an insufficiently embodied and insufficiently relational model of the public-space user: an autonomous adult who can move through public space without interruption, without care responsibilities, without bodily vulnerability, and without dependence on adequate public facilities. Such a model obscures the fact that public sanitation is part of the institutional environment through which individuals acquire or lose practical access to public life. Fineman’s vulnerability approach therefore supports a regulatory shift from treating public toilet users as abstract, autonomous individuals to designing institutions around ordinary dependency, embodiment, and care.

4.4. Regulatory Implications: From Fixture Counts to Performance Standards

Scott’s (2010) theory of standard setting in regulatory regimes further clarifies why public toilet provision should be understood as a regulatory problem rather than as a purely technical matter. Standards are not limited to formal legal rules; they include the norms, goals, objectives, and behavioral expectations around which a regulatory regime is organized. Applied to public sanitation, fixture ratios, waiting time thresholds, hygiene requirements, privacy standards, opening hours, accessibility criteria, and complaint mechanisms all function as regulatory standards because they define what counts as adequate and dignified access. Building on this standard-setting perspective, the regulatory implication of this article is that adequacy in public toilet provision should no longer be assessed solely through static input standards, such as fixture numbers or floor-space allocation. These indicators remain relevant, but they are insufficient where the legal concern is effective and equal access. A performance-oriented approach would require regulators to ask whether the existing configuration enables users to access sanitation within a reasonable time and under safe, private, hygienic, and dignified conditions, including during predictable peak periods.

Public toilet regulation should therefore incorporate measurable indicators of effective access, including maximum acceptable waiting times, throughput capacity, territorial coverage, opening hours, cleanliness and maintenance standards, privacy requirements, lighting and safety criteria, accessibility for older and disabled users, care-integrated facilities, and complaint or corrective mechanisms. Such indicators would translate the abstract legal values of dignity, equality, accessibility, and accountability into operational standards capable of being monitored and enforced.

The tripartite accountability framework developed in Table 1 clarifies how these standards should be allocated institutionally. At the state level, regulation should define minimum requirements that go beyond fixture counts and include temporal, safety, privacy, accessibility, and care-related dimensions of access. At the municipal level, public authorities should be responsible for needs assessment, spatial coverage, funding models, opening hours, and network planning. At the operator level, responsibility should focus on everyday usability: cleaning, maintenance, supervision, signage, safety, and accessible complaint channels.

This reframing also changes the meaning of potty parity. Potty parity should not be understood merely as a fixed numerical ratio between women’s and men’s toilets. It should be understood as a regulatory principle requiring equal effective access. Depending on the context, this may require additional women’s facilities, gender-neutral or flexible provision, improved maintenance, better territorial distribution, or care-integrated design. The appropriate regulatory response therefore cannot be reduced to one universal design solution. It must be based on the assessment of actual use patterns, waiting times, safety concerns, privacy needs, and the distribution of care responsibilities.

Because this empirical study is exploratory, this article does not propose a single binding threshold for acceptable waiting time or a universal fixture ratio. Its contribution is instead to identify the variables that regulation should treat as legally relevant. Waiting time, hygiene, privacy, safety, care-related usability, and accessibility should be understood not as optional quality features, but as indicators of whether public toilet provision satisfies the requirements of effective, equal, and dignified access.

4.5. Limitations

Several limitations of this study should be acknowledged when interpreting the findings. First, the empirical data are based on a relatively small, nonrepresentative sample (N = 97), with a pronounced overrepresentation of women and younger respondents. While this limits statistical generalizability, this study was explicitly designed as an exploratory, mixed-method inquiry rather than a population-level assessment. The sample composition is analytically relevant insofar as it reflects those users who are the most exposed to everyday public toilet constraints in educational and urban settings, but the results should nevertheless be interpreted as indicative patterns rather than universal claims. Second, the survey data rely on self-reported experiences and perceptions, which may be shaped by recall bias or subjective interpretation. However, this limitation is partly mitigated by the integration of qualitative narratives and objective time-measurement data. The triangulation of methods allows subjective accounts of safety, dignity, and inconvenience to be examined alongside observed usage durations and queuing simulations, strengthening confidence in the consistency of the identified patterns even if precise effect sizes cannot be generalized. Third, the time-measurement study was conducted in a single institutional setting during a specific high-traffic interval and involved a limited number of observed users. Although these observations align with both the survey findings and international research summarized in the article, they cannot capture the full diversity of public toilet contexts, user groups, or temporal rhythms. The queuing simulations similarly rely on model-based assumptions about arrival rates and service times; while these assumptions are grounded in empirical measurements, they remain simplifications of complex real-world dynamics. In addition, the time measurement captures total restroom use duration and does not distinguish among specific components such as waiting, fixture use, and handwashing, which limits direct comparability with studies that isolate these elements. Fourth, this study focuses primarily on women’s experiences of public toilet provision, with limited empirical engagement with the experiences of transgender and nonbinary users. Although the broader literature clearly documents the exclusion and vulnerability of these groups, the present analysis does not claim to address these dimensions in depth. This focus reflects both the composition of the sample and the specific research questions guiding this study, but it also points to an important direction for future research that would require distinct methodological and ethical considerations. Finally, the empirical material is embedded in a specific national and urban context. While Budapest is introduced as an illustrative example of broader urban challenges, it does not constitute the empirical basis of this study. The questionnaire was distributed at national level and the time-measurement study was conducted in a university setting in Győr. The findings should therefore be understood as context-sensitive rather than city-specific, contributing to comparative feminist analyses of public services.

5. Conclusions

This article has examined public toilet provision as a low-salience but consequential public service through which gendered inequalities are routinely produced and normalized. Drawing on mixed empirical evidence, it has shown that women’s access to sanitation is disproportionately shaped by longer waiting times, care-related exclusions, and heightened concerns about privacy and safety. These patterns are not incidental but emerge from regulatory standards, planning practices, and operational decisions that systematically fail to account for embodied, care-related, and time-sensitive needs.

Interpreted through a legal and governance lens, the findings point to an institutional accountability gap in the provision of everyday public services. While sanitation is increasingly recognized within human rights and equality frameworks, responsibility for ensuring gender-equal access in practice remains fragmented and weakly enforceable. The persistence of care-blind infrastructure and the acceptance of unequal waiting times illustrate how formal equality can coexist with substantive gender disadvantage. By conceptualizing waiting time as a form of temporal governance, this article contributes to feminist legal scholarship on substantive equality. Unequal time burdens operate as a de facto allocation of costs that disproportionately constrain women’s mobility and participation in public space yet remain largely invisible in regulatory assessment. Treating time as a legally relevant dimension of access highlights the limits of numerical parity and underscores the need for performance- and outcome-oriented standards.

From a gender justice perspective, the analysis suggests that public toilet provision should be understood as a matter of legal obligation rather than discretionary policy. Ensuring equal and dignified access requires enforceable regulatory standards that integrate care-related needs, address temporal inequality, and clarify institutional duty. More broadly, this study demonstrates how seemingly mundane public services function as sites where gendered inequalities are reproduced through everyday governance, reinforcing the importance of bringing such infrastructures within the scope of legal scrutiny.