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

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper reports on a study at a university in Hungary, with both qualitative and quantitative elements. Firstly, a survey was conducted with n=97 participants, to understand the challenges in public toilet provision, with the aim of determining different perspectives of challenges in provision, by gender. n=30 participants provided open answers which were analysed thematically, to give further context to the principle challenges.

The second part was an quantitative study of how long men and women spent in a restroom, to add data to the small, existing sources of data.

The strength of the paper lies in its Introduction, capturing an overview of the existing data and arguments surrounding toilets as gendered architecture, and in the discussion, which reports the grounds for further research, particularly into gender neutral toilets, recognising the different players/drivers (governance/regulation, municipal finances and decision making, continuous maintenance and supervision) and the role they can play in changing both perceptions and gender equality in urban infrastructure. 

The study itself is small and repeats questions and data collection undertaken by others in similar contexts. However, it contributes to the landscape, where data is piecemeal, and does a good job of presenting this landscape, which is of value to other scholars. Nothing new is uncovered by the qualitative analysis: the paper argues that by identifying and presenting problems faced more so by women (perceptions of safety, lack of baby-changing) as going beyond a numbers game (not enough toilets), it broadens the argument for toilet provision as an example of gender inequality: this isn't just about women having to queue. 

A couple of points where reporting of the research study itself could be improved:

The observation that men are most concerned with toilets not being clean enough (compared with women) was not interrogated. Do men experience a higher level of dissatisfaction, or does it rate lower for women because they're more concerned with other aspects? Women also seemed to report this (and only 6 men took part in the qualitative study) so I suspect it is not a significant finding in gender terms, but it is mentioned in the abstract in a way which could make it appear so.

A significant oversight is around the empirical study of time spent in 'the restroom'. It is not clear what 'the restroom' is. The study measure time from entry to exit. Is this a single toilet room / cubicle? Or a multi-cubicle facility, where queueing is also a factor (and therefore the time to 'go' also incorporates the inbuilt gender inequality). Is hand-washing included in the restroom? This detail is critical in being able to compare the times in this study with those in other studies. The difference in timing in how long men/women take to use a toilet/urinal, v.s. the time to use the toilet and wash their hands, is important for architects/designers to design the best layout, and valuable data to add to the existing studies. 

I cannot comment on the statistical analysis which is not my area of study. 

Additional comment:

I have noticed many of the author names, in both in-text citations and in the references, are mis-spelled.

Most concerningly, in table 4, summarising previous research into Dwell time, one of the studies (Nguyen) has no reference. The in-line citation above the table lists (Baillie et al., 2009, Bovens & Marocci [sic] , 2023, Creed, 2007, Nyugen [sic] et al., 2018), but there is no reference for who Creed is, either.

Baillie, Marcoci, Nguyen and others are misspelled throughout.

Author Response

Thank you for the Reviewer for the detailed report and for the suggestions to improve the text. In the following we would like to get into details of the modifications we made on the text.

1. "The observation that men are most concerned with toilets not being clean enough (compared with women) was not interrogated. Do men experience a higher level of dissatisfaction, or does it rate lower for women because they're more concerned with other aspects? Women also seemed to report this (and only 6 men took part in the qualitative study) so I suspect it is not a significant finding in gender terms, but it is mentioned in the abstract in a way which could make it appear so."

Thank you for the notice, in the revised manuscript, we have removed the claim that men are primarily concerned with cleanliness and now present hygiene-related concerns as shared across both genders. We also clarify in the qualitative analysis that both men and women reported such issues, and that the limited number of male respondents constrains gender-based interpretation.

2. "A significant oversight is around the empirical study of time spent in 'the restroom'. It is not clear what 'the restroom' is. The study measure time from entry to exit. Is this a single toilet room / cubicle? Or a multi-cubicle facility, where queueing is also a factor (and therefore the time to 'go' also incorporates the inbuilt gender inequality). Is hand-washing included in the restroom? This detail is critical in being able to compare the times in this study with those in other studies. The difference in timing in how long men/women take to use a toilet/urinal, v.s. the time to use the toilet and wash their hands, is important for architects/designers to design the best layout, and valuable data to add to the existing studies."

We thank the Reviewer for highlighting this important issue. We agree that the definition of “restroom” and the scope of the time measurement required clarification. In the revised manuscript, we have explicitly defined “restroom use time” as the total duration from entry into the restroom area to exit. We have clarified that observations were conducted in multi-cubicle facilities, and that the measured duration includes time spent inside the facility, use of cubicles or urinals, and handwashing. We also specify that waiting time outside the restroom was not recorded, although internal congestion may have influenced overall duration.

3. "I have noticed many of the author names, in both in-text citations and in the references, are mis-spelled. Most concerningly, in table 4, summarising previous research into Dwell time, one of the studies (Nguyen) has no reference. The in-line citation above the table lists (Baillie et al., 2009, Bovens & Marocci [sic] , 2023, Creed, 2007, Nyugen [sic] et al., 2018), but there is no reference for who Creed is, either. Baillie, Marcoci, Nguyen and others are misspelled throughout."

Thank you for identifying these important inconsistencies. All reference errors have been corrected in the revised manuscript. Author names (e.g. Baillie, Marcoci) have been standardized throughout, and missing references have been added. We have also ensured full consistency between in-text citations, Table 4, and the reference list.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The core idea is highly original, from a feminist legal studies perspective. The core commitments of the article - "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" and reconceptualising waiting time as a form of temporal goverance are interesting. However, I cannot recommend publication.

To be publishable in this journal, the discussion section (section 4) should be expanded, and the discussion should be connected to the article's legal and regulatory content (section 2) in much more depth. In particular, there is a significant literature on queueing/waiting which could be incorporated here.

More also needs to be done to explain the context in which your respondents were engaging with the questionnaire. Without an understanding of the political and cultural context in Budapest, it is difficult for a reader to evaluate the significance of your arguments.

Author Response

Thank you for the Reviewer for the report, in the following we would like to explain the modifications we made on the text to be more suitable for the Journal.

Report: "To be publishable in this journal, the discussion section (section 4) should be expanded, and the discussion should be connected to the article's legal and regulatory content (section 2) in much more depth. In particular, there is a significant literature on queueing/waiting which could be incorporated here."

Reply: We thank the Reviewer for this important suggestion.

First, we have explicitly integrated insights from queueing theory into the interpretation of the empirical results. The revised Discussion now frames restroom use as a service system in which waiting time depends on arrival rates, service time, and capacity (Gross et al., 2008; Kleinrock, 1975). This allows us to explain how even modest gender differences in usage time can lead to disproportionately longer queues under peak conditions. We also connect these findings to existing urban and feminist research on public toilet provision (Greed, 2019), thereby situating the empirical results within a broader interdisciplinary framework.

Second, we have strengthened the connection between the empirical findings and the regulatory models presented in Section 2. In particular, the Discussion now explicitly contrasts quantitative approaches based on fixture counts with performance-based regulatory models. Building on the empirical evidence, we argue that numerical parity does not ensure equal access when differences in service time are taken into account, and that performance-based approaches—focusing on waiting time and throughput—provide a more appropriate basis for evaluating substantive equality in sanitation provision.

Third, we have further developed the legal interpretation of the findings by conceptualizing waiting time as a form of temporal governance. The revised Discussion demonstrates how formally neutral regulatory standards may produce unequal outcomes in practice when they fail to account for differential usage patterns. In this sense, unequal waiting times are interpreted not as incidental outcomes, but as indicators of institutional performance and potential gaps between formal and substantive equality in public service provision.

These modifications strengthen the analytical contribution of the article by linking empirical observations to queueing theory, regulatory design, and legal concepts of equality, thereby responding directly to the Reviewer’s request for a more integrated and theoretically grounded Discussion.

In particular, we highlight an empirical finding that adds nuance to the existing literature on gender-neutral toilet provision. While recent modelling studies suggest that gender-neutral or partially flexible configurations may improve system efficiency and reduce waiting times, our survey results indicate that male respondents expressed significantly lower support for such solutions. We have this point in the Discussion to emphasize the gap between theoretically optimal design solutions and user acceptance. This allows us to frame gender-neutral provision not only as a technical or regulatory issue, but also as a question of social perception and institutional implementation. We believe this strengthens the contribution of the article by linking empirical findings to ongoing debates in both planning and legal scholarship.

Report: "More also needs to be done to explain the context in which your respondents were engaging with the questionnaire. Without an understanding of the political and cultural context in Budapest, it is difficult for a reader to evaluate the significance of your arguments."

Reply: We agree that clearer contextualization was necessary to support the interpretation of the empirical findings. In response, we have revised the manuscript in several ways.

1. We have clarified the empirical context of the study in the Methods section. We now explicitly state that the questionnaire was distributed at national level, primarily among university students and supplemented via social media recruitment, while the time-measurement study was conducted in a university setting in Győr. This makes clear that the data do not represent a single urban case, but rather reflect patterns observed within a broader Hungarian context.
2. We have strengthened the description of the institutional and usage context in which respondents engage with public toilets. The revised text now emphasizes that the study captures experiences in educational and urban settings, where access is shaped by a mix of public and semi-public provision and by everyday constraints such as peak-period use and limited capacity.
3. We have clarified the role of Budapest in the manuscript. Budapest is introduced in the Introduction as an illustrative theoretical example of broader urban challenges—such as tourism pressure and ageing infrastructure—but it does not constitute the empirical basis of the study. To avoid misunderstanding, this distinction is now explicitly stated in the Limitations section, where we emphasize that the findings are not city-specific but context-sensitive.We have refined the framing of the contribution to make clear that the article does not aim to provide a case study of a single city, but rather to offer empirically grounded insights that can inform comparative analysis of sanitation governance across different institutional and cultural contexts.

We believe these revisions provide a clearer account of the empirical setting and strengthen the reader’s ability to interpret the findings in their appropriate context.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The amendments add rigour to the argument, context to the experiments, and accurate summaries of the findings, which demonstrate nuanced understanding of the data collected and how it can be interpreted. Corrections to the references are helpful and point to the most recent leading comparable studies. A strong paper, which I look forward to seeing published, and citing in my work. 

Author Response

Thank you :)

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I note the changes you have made in response to my suggestions. However, the changes made were limited. In particular, Section 4 has not been substantially expanded, and the article still says very little about why the argument here is a legal or regulatory one. I asked for more detailed discussion of the legal and regulatory context of the issues discussed here i.e. why are questions of public toilet use of interest to an audience of scholars of law or regulation? Certainly you have added a few new sentences on questions of temporality but without much reference to e.g. legal theory. I encourage you to take the time to develop the article with this particular journal in mind.

Author Response

Thank you for the second review. 

We agree that the previous version did not sufficiently explain why public toilet access should be understood as a legal and regulatory issue, rather than merely as a matter of urban planning, infrastructure, or user convenience. In response, we have substantially revised and expanded the legal and regulatory framing of the article, with particular attention to Section 4.

First, we have clarified the central legal claim of the article in the Introduction. The revised manuscript now explicitly states that the issue 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 fail to account for gendered, embodied, care-related, and temporal dimensions of use. We also explain that public toilet provision is legally and regulatorily significant because access is shaped through building codes, municipal service decisions, procurement and maintenance obligations, equality norms, and institutional accountability mechanisms.

We have added a broader legal-source background. The revised manuscript now engages more explicitly with UN and EU legal frameworks, including the United Nations human rights framework on water and sanitation, the UN Special Rapporteur’s 2017 report on service regulation, the UN Special Rapporteur’s 2018 report on accountability, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and Council Directive 2004/113/EC on equal treatment between women and men in access to goods and services. These additions clarify that inadequate public toilet provision may raise questions of effective access, dignity, indirect discrimination, service regulation, and institutional accountability.

We have strengthened the legal-theoretical framework. In Section 4.1, we now connect the empirical findings to substantive equality theory, drawing on Fredman’s account of substantive equality to explain why formally identical provision does not necessarily produce equal access. Waiting time is framed as a legally relevant indicator because it makes the unequal effects of formally neutral standards measurable. In Section 4.3, we also draw on Fineman’s vulnerability theory to explain why care-blind infrastructure should be understood as a failure of institutional responsiveness rather than as a matter of individual inconvenience.

We have restructured Section 4 around a more explicit legal and regulatory argument. This structure is intended to show how the empirical findings connect to equality law, human dignity, service regulation, accountability, vulnerability theory, and standard-setting.

In Section 4.3, we return to the model in Table1 to show how different service failures correspond to different levels of regulatory responsibility: state-level standard-setting, municipal planning and financing, and operator-level maintenance and supervision. This allows the article to identify where the accountability gap arises within the regulatory structure.

We have added a new Section (4.4 Regulatory implications: from fixture counts to performance standards). This part draws on Scott’s theory of standard-setting in regulatory regimes and explains why public toilet provision should be understood as a standard-setting problem. We argue that regulation should move beyond static input standards, such as fixture numbers or floor-space allocation, toward performance-oriented indicators of effective access, including waiting time, throughput, territorial coverage, opening hours, cleanliness, privacy, safety, accessibility, care-integrated facilities, and complaint or corrective mechanisms.

We hope that these revisions respond directly to the reviewer’s rightful concern by making clear why public toilet use is a matter of interest to scholars of law and regulation.

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your response. I can see that you have included some primary legal sources and clarified your argument as requested.