Okay, here’s something I have been noticing for a while now - I first noticed it maybe a couple of years ago but have been actually consciously checking it for the last few months.
The distance to the women’s restroom seems to be shorter than the distance to the men’s restrooms in the vast majority of cases, at least in the US.
What I mean is that if there’s a hall that goes to the restrooms, the women’s door always seems to be first. Since I’ve started noticing, this seems to hold true in office buildings, restaurants, bars, pretty much everywhere - the men’s room is an extra few steps. Check this out - I bet you’ll see the same thing.
To make this a GQ thread rather than a MPSIMS thread, my question is this - assuming restroom design and placement is not just random, is there a building code that actually specifies which will come first? (I find that hard to believe.) If not, then why is this so often the case? Male architects trying to be nice to women? Just the way it’s always been done?
I would say in my experience this restroom placement is overwhelmingly the case, maybe as much as 90-95% of the time.
Well, my experience has been that most male and female restrooms are presented side by side (usually with a water fountain in between) so I suppose it would just depend on which side you approached first.
Also, IANA Contractor, but I am fairly certain that the plumbing needs for male vs female bathrooms are not all that different. Fixtures, yes, but supply pipes and waste pipes? No.
I’ve often noticed that, in bars, the women’s washrrom is closer to the main rooms than the men, probably about 75% of the time. I certainly have no interest in passing a line up of men after heading to the “pool” after a few drinks, YMMV.
Dr_Paprika’s post gave me a thought. The women’s restroom often has lines. In a bar setting, you would want the wall next to it to be longer, to give that line a place to wait and not block the main traffic. If the bathrooms are near the end of a given wall, that implies that the women’s room will come first.
“is there a building code that actually specifies which will come first?”
No.
Nor is your observation much more than just an observation. The code in most states dictates only a total number of ‘facilities’ for the expected occupancy of the building. The occupancy expected is based on a strange formula that varies according to the type of building, but in every case is hinged to the square footage – the bigger the building, the more toilets. That much seems to make some sense. After that, it is an open field – there is no specification for the most part as to balance, so if one is buillding, say, a 10,000 square foot cock-fighting arena, one might leave an allowance for one women’s toilet, against the assumption that there will be very few female patrons, and meet the code requirements by providing fifteen fixtures in the men’s room.
History, and a few visits to such things as hockey games in major arenas, has taught us that we have vastly underestimated the amount of time a woman can spend in the bathroom, and the designers are beginning to redress this lack, if only because the women get tired of waiting in line and invariably storm the men’s rooms rather than piss on the floor. Some day we’ll get it right.
In many establishments I have noticed that the women’s restroom is located at the end of the hall, while the men’s restroom is located somewhere in the middle. I have often wonder why this is the case, and then it dawned on me: it offers more privacy for the women. If the women’s door were located in the middle of the hall, many men (while walking to the men’s room) would try to catch a peek inside the women’s restroom when the door was open. This can’t happen when the women’s restroom is located at the end of the hall.
Where I work, the toilets are side by side in the stairwell, with the gent’s closest to the door on each floor, so the only time that the ladies is closest to you is if you are coming down the stairs…
My own observation has been the opposite (ladies’ rooms farther away than men’s rooms) but I’ll offer a guess anyway.
If a man passes a ladies’ room on the way to the men’s room and the door is ajar, what does he see? Just a bunch of sinks and stalls.
But if a woman passes a men’s room in the same situation, she could possibly see urinals (in use :eek: ) which could be embarrassing for either or both parties.
Total WAG.
Grim