Wiping out carefully constructed fears around the need for segregated bathrooms can deliver productivity and eliminate the queue for the ladies' loo. Credit:Simon O'Dwyer But it doesn't have to be like this. New Belgian research from two queue theorists tell us we will be done with queuing as soon as we are done with gendering toilets. They say that when we move to fully unisex toilets, waiting times for women will drop from over six minutes to less than 90 seconds. They've done a full mathematical breakdown of every possible permutation, and the results will make every woman who has queued for the toilet cheer loudly. Wouter Rogiest, an academic at Ghent University, spends most of his time researching queues in computer networks. So he's been quite surprised at the attention his research with colleague Kurt Van Hautegem on revolutionising toilet queues has attracted. "We felt that always applying this to digital systems, you never have any societal messages to bring. Toilets are overlooked, and there are lots of problems with toilets, especially for women. "It should be a system for serving customers, but this system is against women."

Male, female and unisex toilets? Most of us already deal with gender-blind toilets at home. Credit:iStock Exactly. So what's the plan? Rogiest says it's about the architecture, and Katrina Bradley could not agree more. She's the partner at Bain in Sydney's Governor Phillip Towers who led a refit for the entire office – and that meant a rethink of how they used space for employees as well as those who visited, including breastfeeding mothers and their babies. But that also meant the degendering of bathrooms. No catastrophes have ensued. Not a single person has complained about the bathrooms, a series of private toilet cubicles each with its own basin, in the area of the office where clients come in for meetings. Was it to address issues of gender? Not exactly. More to address the bottom line.

"People were more concerned about the other problem, which was coming out of meetings and queuing, not having sufficient facilities," says Bradley. "I've been at enough conferences where there were queues out of the door during coffee breaks and during lunchtimes, and so we just thought, 'Why not design bathrooms which can be used by any gender and avoid having to queue?'." That's capitalism for you – wiping out all those carefully constructed fears around the need for segregated bathrooms in order to deliver productivity even during the breaks. She confesses floor space was in short supply, and while it's difficult to get floor space to multitask, genderless toilets made that possible. Rogiest's thesis focuses entirely on floor space and design. Although they experimented with the Bain model – that is, a cubicle for every person and no urinals – it didn't have the best outcome for waiting times. The most efficient model provided two cubicles and one urinal, so a set of three.

"If you want to use surface most efficiently and have the most people pass through in a given time, it is most efficient to provide urinals … we see this at work in [Belgian] rock festivals, because the organisers want to use the available surface as efficiently as possible," he says. I tell him I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea of passing men at the urinal. He's unfazed. Since the study went online he and his colleagues have had thousands of social media comments, the vast majority of which have been very positive, although he does admit a few men complained about the possibility of having to wait and a few women complained about the prospect of mess. And as he points out, most of us already have to deal with gender-blind toilets at home, mess, queue and all. He tells me about an email he received from a woman in the US to say how much she appreciated the study. Her workplace didn't take into account her change of gender, so she was forced to go home to use the toilet as many as three times a day. Rogiest's study helped her deal with her employers, who decided to accommodate a gender-neutral toilet. Again, no catastrophes ensued. But it's going to take some time to make the change. So, until we have redesigned every bathroom everywhere, here is some advice for women who on how to cubicle crash: eyes down, rush in, use the facilities, rush out. Never make eye contact. Don't answer questions or respond to comments. And in the meantime, as women are forced to queue for ridiculous lengths of time, we should all remind venues of all kinds that time is money. There's a real cost benefit in getting women out of the bathroom and into the bar.

Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology and a Fairfax Media columnist. facebook.com/jennapricejournalist

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