Last week we were in Venice, at St. Mark’s Square, visiting the famous Doge’s Palace. After appreciating the many elaborate rooms and masterpieces of art, it was time to experience one of its more practical attractions, the bathroom. It was an open unisex area, with common sinks for handwashing, and two stalls for men and two for women. While men breezed in and out of their half, at least 10 women stood waiting in line.

Sometimes a man’s stall lay tantalizingly empty, but despite our grumblings and schemes of sneaking into the other side, none of us was prepared to bear the wrath of the tough-looking bathroom attendant. She had seen plenty like us and worse, and she was not going to take any crap — metaphorically speaking.

For as long as there have been specific places designated as the right place to go, and that too as the right place for women to go, there has been a line of anxious women. Now, lineups outside women’s bathrooms in public places are common the world over, from Calgary’s Stampede grounds and Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall to New Delhi’s Habitat Centre. This phenomenon is matched only by men hanging about outside the women’s bathroom, waiting for their female companions.

Retail anthropologist Paco Underhill in his book Call of the Mall makes this observation: “Women use the bathroom more than men. They spend more time in them, too. These must be little-understood truths; otherwise, there would be twice as many ladies’ bathrooms as men’s.”

Women do spend more time inside bathrooms as a whole — fixing their look, talking to others, changing diapers, washing their hands thoroughly — but they also spend more time actually inside the toilet stalls. Women have smaller bladders than men, need to help small children do their stuff, experience more irritable bowel syndrome, require more time to undress to pee, not to mention change sanitary napkins. Pregnant women need to go more often, and for many women who have had children, a hearty laugh is enough to set them off. As the population ages, there will be more elderly women with issues of incontinence.

An insufficient number of women’s toilets in public places may sound like a laughable or frivolous issue, but it is neither. It’s much like what is said about money: it’s not important until you don’t have enough. Waiting in line for the ladies room has been an accepted fact of life for years — from elementary school to the workplace and nearly every place we travel to — but should it be? Would we be so blasé if women had to wait longer for a hospital room? Longer for a spot in college? To buy their groceries? Yet here is a situation we face daily and usually with resignation.

Several places have already recognized the need for potty parity. States such as New York, Virginia, Texas and California have passed a bathroom equity bill, demanding a 2 to 1 ratio of women’s toilets in public places. Hong Kong and Singapore also have such laws. And law or no law, Japan, perhaps in its quiet eastern wisdom, already provides more women’s toilets in some public places. On a global level, the World Toilet Organization has discussed the issue of potty parity — or as The Economist more eloquently refers to it, porcelain parity — at a recent World Toilet Summit.

But most countries do not share this perspective and automatically designate equal floor space to men and women, which — given their greater need — is actually unequal. And in less developed countries lacking in overall bathroom facilities, men at least have the option of going in the open, whereas even there women are restricted by modesty and safety.

If a sign of a society’s progress is equal rights and equal opportunities, then we should strive for a future where women spend as little time waiting as men.

This summer, when we are attending a lovely evening concert and we quickly nip out at intermission, walk briskly around the corner and bang into the end of a long lineup for the toilet, we will face a fundamental question: to pee or not to pee. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to wait shoulder to shoulder with our sisters in our time of mutual need and at the risk of missing the start of the second half, or just hold it in till we get home? From where I stand right now, far back in line, I may choose the latter.

Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is a writer and business/academic editor.