Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

play areas. The complex was not specifically aimed at women, but given women are less likely to drive and more likely to care for children than men, the outcome is nevertheless one that caters to women’s housing and care needs.

Care work is also built into the interior of the open-floor plan FWS I flats. The kitchen is at the heart of each flat, its visible lines of sight to the rest of the home mirroring the outer courtyard design. This not only enables women to keep an eye on children while working in the kitchen, it also places housework at the heart of the house: a subtle challenge to the idea that housework is solely a woman’s responsibility. Compare this to the tendency a local official in Philadelphia revealed she had to repeatedly check in developers of putting kitchens up on a third floor with no elevator: ‘Do you want to carry your groceries and strollers up to the third floor?’ she points out.⁶¹

CHAPTER 2

Gender Neutral With Urinals

In April 2017 veteran BBC journalist Samira Ahmed wanted to use a toilet. She was at a screening of I Am Not Your Negro at London’s famous Barbican arts centre, and it was the interval. Any woman who has ever been to the theatre knows what this means: a rush as soon as the lights go up to try to beat the inevitable queue that will soon be snaking it way across the foyer floor.

Women are used to queueing when they go out. It’s frustrating and puts a dampener on their evening. No nice interval chit-chat about the show with friends over a drink, just dull, tedious lining up, occasionally leavened by the knowing eye rolls they share with their fellow waiting women.

But this evening was different. This evening, the queue was worse than usual. Far worse. Because in an almost comically blatant display of not having thought about women at all, the Barbican had turned both the male and female toilets gender neutral simply by replacing the ‘men’ and ‘women’ signage with ‘gender neutral with urinals’ and ‘gender neutral with cubicles’. The obvious happened. Only men were using the supposedly ‘gender neutral with urinals’ and everyone was using the ‘gender neutral with cubicles’.

Rather than rendering the toilets actually gender neutral by this move, they had simply increased the provision for men: women are generally not able to use urinals, while men are of course able to use both urinals and cubicles. There were also no sanitary bins in the ‘gender neutral with urinals’ toilets. ‘Ah the irony of having to explain discrimination having just been to see I Am Not Your Negro IN YOUR CINEMA’, Ahmed tweeted, suggesting that the solution would be to ‘turn the gents into gender-neutral loos. There’s NEVER such a queue there & you know it.’¹

Although this truism seems to have passed the Barbican’s heavily male-dominated management team by, it is true that the perennial queueing problem is one that men do tend to know about – given it so often spills out of the main bathroom door, it’s hard for even the most oblivious man to miss.² But fewer people – men or women – know exactly why it happens. There is a tendency (as ever) to blame the women rather than male-biased design. But male-biased design is in fact exactly what the problem is here.

On the face of it, it may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female public toilets the same amount of floor space – and historically, this is the way it has been done. 50/50 division of floor space has even been formalised in plumbing codes. However, if a male toilet has both cubicles and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square foot of floor space in the male bathroom than in the female bathroom. Suddenly equal floor space isn’t so equal.

But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet.³ Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet. Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people.⁴ Then there’s the 20-25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore needing to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.

Women may also in any case require more trips to the bathroom than men: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections than men which again increases the frequency with which a toilet visit is needed.⁵ In the face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal (rather than substantive) equality dogmatist to continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair.

It gets a lot worse than supposedly equal provision being in fact male-biased. A third of the world’s population lack adequate toilet provision at all.⁶ According to the UN, one in three women lack access to safe toilets,⁷ and WaterAid reports that girls and women collectively spend 97 billion hours a year finding a safe place to relieve themselves.⁸ The lack of adequate toilet provision is a public health problem for both sexes (for example, in India, where 60% of the population does not have access to a toilet,⁹ 90% of surface water is contaminated¹⁰), but the problem is particularly acute for women, in no small part because of the attitude that men can ‘go anywhere’,¹¹ while for women to be seen urinating is shameful. Women get up before dawn and then wait for hours until dusk to go out again in search of a relatively private place to urinate or defecate.¹² And this isn’t just a problem in poor countries: Human Rights Watch spoke to young girls working in tobacco