With the current most common bathroom design, women wait an average of six minutes to go while men wait just 11 seconds

As I’m writing this, my plane is boarding and I need to pee. I can see from where I’m sitting (cross-legged) that the line to the women’s bathroom spills out onto the concourse. Women walk over quickly then their footsteps suddenly slow in disappointment as they see the wait ahead.

Two feet over, the entrance to the men’s bathroom looks like a semi-abandoned, perfectly-preserved relic. I watch a man disappear in and come back out again so fast that he can’t have possibly waited (or washed his hands).

I can either hold it or risk missing my flight. I decide to do the first, then use the onboard wifi to research the gender disparity in bathroom wait times.

In 2017, two professors at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the University of Ghent used a mathematical model for queueing. The formula is more than 100 years old and still used by call centers to figure out how many operators are needed to achieve minimal wait times.

The professors’ equations made some assumptions though; that frustrated people did not leave the queue (I have done this many, many times) and it assumed that men spend the same amount of time in the urinal as in the bathroom stall (hmmmmm … no) but their overall results are still fascinating.

They studied different bathroom layouts by using a computer to simulate wait times by gender. We’ve illustrated them below to see what would reduce the gender disparity when it comes this most basic function of human life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration: Mona Chalabi

The first layout, shown above, has a 50/50 split in floor space between the men’s and women’s bathrooms. It’s a common design and a deeply flawed one, because women wait an average of six minutes 19 seconds to use the bathroom, while men wait just 11 seconds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration: Mona Chalabi

The second layout gives more floor space to women and, 20% more bathroom stalls. As a result, women’s wait times plummet to two minutes 18 seconds, and men’s wait times rise to 39 seconds – that is still a huge gender gap in pee times, though.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration: Mona Chalabi

Next, researchers considered gender-neutral bathrooms. Using only stalls would mean equal wait times for both men and women (two minutes 10 seconds) while using a combination of stalls and urinals results in the lowest combined wait time overall (one minute 27 seconds for women and 58 seconds for men).

Gender-neutral bathrooms are not just a matter of efficiency, they are also a matter of civil rights. Transgender people, nonbinary people and those who do not conform to gendered norms of appearance might not be safe in single-sex spaces where they are at risk of verbal and physical assault.

But it is a shame that the researchers did not consider a bathroom layout with men’s, women’s and gender-neutral facilities. There are some people (including those with the gender identities mentioned above) who might still feel more comfortable using a divided bathroom facility, especially one that is unavailable to cis men.

I would benefit from the lower wait times of gender-neutral bathrooms. This might all seem trivial, but it is not. I get urinary tract infections. If I don’t pee when I need to, I can get so sick that I can’t work. And I can’t afford to take any time off, since I’m wasting so much time in line for the bathroom.