> it's unease around the gap between the door and the partition

Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it.

As to the article overall: This is an interesting topic that is rarely discussed. I often see embarrassed bathroom patrons utilise the disabled-accessible bathroom because it is it's own room (i.e. not stall-separate, wall-separate).

I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong.

But it would be interesting if companies starting doing a "private bathroom" as a perk again, something that was popular some time around the 1980s.

> Why is this a thing in the US?

Cheapness. A door with bigger gaps requires less maintenance. Same reason they use partial/floating walls. They're easy to remove for maintenance, easy to replace when damaged, easier to clean, etc. Public bathrooms are an unwanted expense to most building owners.

Just make them all unisex. What's wrong with unisex bathrooms, so long as they have partitions and not troughs or heads out in the open and have the urinals sectioned off at one end.

I answered this in my post...

> I have no issue with gender neutral bathrooms, but from what I hear around the watercooler, women's bathrooms are a LOT nastier than men's (or at least that's how women tell it). Too many women trying to hover and getting it wrong.

If the stalls are cleaned out nightly I don't see there being a cleanliness issue. People with gastric issues can cause nastier environs irrespective of sex or gender.

And if hovering is an issue then clean nightly so people don't feel they need to hover and second educate. Talk about it... Lastly think about squat toilets. Easy maintenance.

"But it would be interesting if companies starting doing a "private bathroom" as a perk again"

Given decent wifi coverage, that bathroom would then have better working conditions than the stylish but low productivity open office, raising lots of questions, so its not possible until after open offices are no longer trendy.

ArtLebedev in Moscow did have "designer" single bathrooms as a perk: http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/toilets/

In the US most women feel men's bathrooms are nastier, and refuse to use them in general. Hovering & "seatpissing" is highly regional; almost none in the midwest of the US, while much higher (70% of seats?) in some parts of Europe (I am afraid in my experience Portugal is worst). Can't remember but the coasts are worse than the Midwest in the US and regions in California also differ.

It's partly a result of how clean you expect things to be to start with: if you don't trust that seats will be clean, you won't sit, and then you'll guarantee they're not clean. If you expect them to be clean, they'll remain clean(ish).

Building/fire codes are a big factor. When you have enclosed spaces with doors that shut tightly then a variety of regulations come into play, whereas with a loosely-fitting partition with a gap underneath they do not. If push came to shove you could kick most partitions and they would have enough flex to pop the door open, or you could crawl out on the floor.

Apart from that - the ability to see if the stall is occupied without tugging on the door and perhaps causing an awkward encounter, making it more difficult to smoke or shoot up stealthily, and just simple cost/ease of installation.

>Why is this a thing in the US? I legitimately don't understand it.

People are less ashamed of such mundane things. US being a new country is not bound to the same social taboos that you see everywhere else.

Also practical reasons like, easier to see when its empty, ease of cleaning, ventilation ect.

> easier to see when its empty

Is a little dial connected to the lock saying "engaged/vacant" or green/red that difficult to see?

We don't have those on American bathroom stalls, but it would be useful.

Oh if only US restrooms were like those in Japan. Even run of the mill ones in Japan are great.

I'm just glad they're not like some French bathrooms. Essentially a drain hole in the floor. Try to hit it.

I remember having been immediately struck by differences in office bathrooms between California and UK/France/Germany (where I worked).

The offices were usually nicer overall in the US (roomier, more recent), except for the bathrooms. Small, low quality, like 2 stalls in a 600 persons building. Usually pretty far away from work stations.

Turns out labor code enforces much higher standard for bathrooms in most Europe countries. IIRC for France: 1 stall for 10 person minimum, with a top value somewhere (maybe 10 stalls max), with adequate AC, lighting, water-saving systems, etc. There's a maximum walking distance to workspace. I believe it also now requires full-size partitions (or maybe in mixed toilets only if there's not enough room for separate). It should also now be 100% accessible in new office constructions and redevelopments. An architect friend told me those costs do add up, so the money doesn't go in fancier paint or lighting. It can also limit growth in team size if there are not enough stalls in the building.

I suppose it doesn't change in the US as a perfect "dark design": shitty bathrooms means people will use them less.

So bathrooms sum up the pros/cons of market regulation.

Also speaking of regulation, I like that the german labor code requires that all employees should have permanent access to daily light (with precise lumen values).

I work at a company whose office gets a fair amount of press for being cool and "stylish." What you don't see in the press is the half of the office whose only natural light is a 1 sq ft porthole in the corner. It's a dark, depressing work environment that shouldn't be legal. The other half of the building is "open" and "stylish." I seriously wish we had those German laws to prevent situations like this.

The University I used to work for had started the practice of building several small one-person bathrooms next to one another, so the would be a block of three or four bathrooms by each other. I found this to a nice setup but I'm sure this would cost far more than a men's bathroom with toilet stall, urinal and sink and a women's bathroom with two stalls and a sink.

I used to go to night classes after working all day and would often times want to change from my business casual attire to something more comfortable. Having those types of bathrooms certainly made changing easier and more private.

I'm sure the University had various reasons for doing this, but I think the spark had come to help alleviate anxiety regarding bathroom use by non-cis persons.

At a resort I've been to a few times, the nightclub area had a cool design. It was a largish round room with sink in the middle. The perimeter was individual tiny rooms with just a toilet. These were all gender-neutral, I guess that's OK because they were actual rooms, having walls and doors.

It seems like that gender neutrality would allow for extra efficiency, so that the dense-pack around the perimeter of a single restroom can handle more potential guests.

I never asked about how it affects cleaning effort, though.

In any case, the original article points out specific OSHA regulations. So it doesn't really matter if there are alternate designs that could work better; you're still stuck in the traditional paradigm, as regulation always acts as a drag on innovation.

I'm surprised to hear that people have found the bathroom going experience so suboptimal, but I can understand where they are coming from. The vertical gap between door and frame is sometimes more than a finger wide!

Personally, I mostly find the situation funny. I figure I've heard/smelled/been adjacent to my colleagues going to the bathroom more than any other member of my family. There's also something humanizing about seeing your VP walk out of a stall (eye contact optional) after you just smelled them commit acts most foul.

The vertical gap issue has always been weird to me, but I don't understand the issue with going to the bathroom in general.

It's something that we all do. I would better understand it if only half the population were afflicted with this strange curse called the poops, while the rest of us had digestive systems that could convert all waste into urine. That's not how it is though.

Everybody poops. Within the next 48 hours, it is pretty much guaranteed that all of your coworkers (from the sheepish new hire to the disgruntled 15 year veteran) will release something foul from their back end. Males, females and everything in between included. Most of them will probably stink something awful.

Everybody poops. Let's end this strange taboo.

Are so many adults that insecure and self-centered that they think everyone is focused on their bathroom activities? I'm certainly not paying that close attention. That said, I flush for noise and smell out of courtesy but not because I'm ashamed of something that I largely can't control.

Gender inequity in tech has one downside if you are a male -- lack of bathrooms. If there is one male and one female bathroom on the floor, and male-to-female gender ratio is 5:1, then you're gonna have a bad time. :)

Men cycle through a bathroom much faster than women when urinating (ever been to a sports event?).

I imagine someone must have urination vs defecation stats. I'd like it be like 30:1 or something.

> I imagine someone must have urination vs defecation stats.

Might make for a tricky office survey.

Luckily, the wired bathroom of the future will gather these stats for us!

It's more like 6:1, though I don't have a good citation handy.

However, some people seem to have a strong reluctance to defecate in public bathrooms, so the ratio in an office bathroom might be much higher.

Right, I was speculating about public restrooms specifically.

Plenty of downsides of gender inequality in tech for dudes beyond just that.

We have two (2) cubicles and two (2) urinals for probably 200 males. One cubicle currently has a broken seat and the other is frequently (at least once a week) blocked with toilet paper and filth (properly splattered all over, of course).

It's the worst office bathroom situation I've ever encountered.

That is grossly out of code [0]. With only two urinals, there should be a minimum of six full toilets.

Management should be alerted to the violation ASAP so that they can take immediate corrective action, followed up by a complaint to OSHA.

[0] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...

Our office has the same issue. The problem is, the code only talks about number of employees but not proportional allocation between genders. It's possible that they have 200 men but less than 230 employees. This means they need 8 waterclosets, but naturally the builders made 4 for women and 4 for men. It's up to code, but don't expect to always be able to use the bathroom at work.

The table is per sex. So, if you have 100 females, you need at least 5 water closets available to females.

Sadly OSHA has no jurisdiction over the UK.

On the other hand, http://www.hse.gov.uk/contact/faqs/toilets.htm is the relevant document - which agrees that 2C+2U is too few.

If the bathroom environment is really the worst thing about your workplace, you're doing alright.

Everything about the stall door was irrelevant. They are made so cheap and with such gaps because, they are cheaper that way. They won't go down to the floor because, that would be 12" more material cost. They won't ever fit closely because, they sag and bend because they're cheaply installed. All the blather about how they could be different is ignoring the cost factor, which would be large.

ON a different note, I visited a dept store bathroom recently and was surprise to see, it was a hallway of individual bathrooms! Irrelevantly, they were marked Male and Female. If only one person is in it, why does it matter? The one at my house, upstairs first door on the right, is unisex.

Are you saying the cost of 12" of chipboard is expensive? Because it's not. Especially not at trade prices.

It's not blather, I'm not sure where you buy wood, but if you think the wood of bathroom door even makes up 1% of the cost of building a bathroom... And 0.01% of the cost of losing an employee to something so trivial as a horrid bathroom.

Honestly, this sounds like a US-specific problem, in the UK none of the offices I've worked in have had a 'gap' in the cubicals. Nor the schools or public buildings or public toilets.

Reading these comments are comical at how a whole country can collectively do something so simple so wrong. No judgement, every country has silly quirks like that!

It only matters, what is the marginal cost to the door vendor. Their profit margin is razor thin. They make those doors by the millions and sell them as a commodity. So yes even a few cents is too much.

We proposed putting a fuzzy-logic controller into a Maytag washer. Maytag said, any controls had to come in under 75 cents including sensors and actuators, for them to make it up in pricing. We couldn't manage that back then (the processor chip was several dollars) so no deal. Because washers are a commodity from the manufacturer viewpoint.

This isn't a counter point, all you're doing is proving my point. The consumer is the person who's being an idiot here, not the manufacturer. You can buy bathroom stall doors without a gap.

But who buys a door which doesn't close the gap properly? That costs $1 less? In their multi-million $ buildings?

Only Americans.

>Irrelevantly, they were marked Male and Female.

Anecdotally, my office has about 60 employees and 8 individual bathrooms. They're fully enclosed with sinks and their own heavy closing doors. They also are all equipped with a white noise machine that's connected to the ceiling light switch. I guess we're pretty lucky to have this setup.

About two years ago, however, someone complained that all of the bathrooms were becoming "too dirty" in between weekly cleanings and it was blamed on the men. Therefore, three of the restrooms are now women only, while the remainder are unisex. It seems a bit unfair, but nobody has cared enough to complain.

> Therefore, three of the restrooms are now women only, while the remainder are unisex. It seems a bit unfair, but nobody has cared enough to complain.

Even if today nobody complains, the company might have suffer a lawsuit in the future, by a disgruntled employee.

Better to fix that now, perhaps

I could say something, but my boss (the company owner) isn't the most receptive to suggestions like this.

It took nearly three years of my complaining to finally get an End User License Agreement for our product, for example.

60 employees, weekly cleanings?! Should be every night.

Maybe it is? I really don't know, but I've only ever seen cleaning staff the few times I've come in on weekends, and only ever seen noticeable improvement on Mondays.

>They also are all equipped with a white noise machine that's connected to the ceiling light switch.

That is most likely a ventilation fan. The white noise is a side-effect.

Nope. Actual white noise. The company owns the property and built the building.

I never understood when a place has two single occupancy bathrooms with one marked Men and the other Women. Maybe there's a law that requires this in some places or are they just catering to social expectations?

Womens rooms have sanitary napkin dispensers etc. In the old sexist days only womens rooms had a baby changing table.

There are also social issues, is a one stall / one urinal a single occupancy or not? Technically there's two holes.

Also you'd be surprised architecturally how many are precisely arranged such that a strategically located adjacent closet could be sacrificed to double or triple the bathroom size at a later date, if it because necessary.

(edited to add, if you assume the massively dominant cis, the labeling is to prevent office romance trysts, along the lines of joining the mile high club on a plane but without the plane)

There's still no good reason for the labeling. Take Starbucks for example: two individual gendered bathrooms. When someone is taking a long time in one bathroom, invariably someone of the 'incorrect gender' will use the next available room, because there's a single line of people in a crowded space that all need to go and nobody cares who uses a single person water closet.

And before anyone mentions cleanliness, my anecdotal experience (from experiences like the Starbucks) is that both men and women's toilets are dirty at about the same rate. I would love a janitor to give their observations :)

Ok I volunteered at a parent-cooperative preschool. I cleaned the bathrooms. The girls' bathroom was shockingly worse than the boys'. A data point.

Those dispensers cost ~$10. Cheap to have them in every bathroom. The guys are not going to have a conniption fit if they see them. So there's no longer a good reason to mark individual bathrooms as far as I can see.

I came across a good summary of these requirements a while back. Unfortunately, I can can't find it now, but I can say there are definitely laws regarding this in the US, but they vary by jurisdiction. Some jurisdictions require 2 single-occupancy bathrooms to be labeled gendered, while some other jurisdictions require 2 single-occupancy bathrooms to be unisex.

P.S.: While not what I was looking for, I was able to find this Reason article that talks about the issue: http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/11/gender-neutral-bathroo...

> OSHA rules require that workplace bathrooms remain clean and dry and a mop can slide right under partitions.

Well, that explains why so many public bathroom stalls in Europe are nice, private, fully-enclosed spaces and none in America are. Thanks, OSHA /s

With the downside that cleaning them is a bit more difficult (and expensive), since you have to pay more attention to the (lower) end of the partitions, as a cleaner. More effort, or possibly even another OSHA violation because the cleaners would have to bend more (but I'm sure they can use a mop on the sides too, or something). There's also the matter of time spent cleaning.

Yeah - why on earth do you need the mop/partition regulation?

Surely you just clean the stall when its empty, and open the door?

I have always wondered why US toilet cubicles are so "gappy". In most of the UK offices I have ever worked in, in the cubicle the toilet door is floor to ceiling and closes completely - like being in your own mini-room with a toilet in.

I spent some time last year working out a We Work office in NY and I will say one of the best things they did was create nice private bathrooms. Each stall was a small private room in itself, similar to some airport lounges.

At my current work, we have a completely separate bathroom with a shower - in addition to "normal" bathrooms with a urinal and a stall toilet.

It's wonderful actually.

At Facebook there was one bathroom on the second floor of building 15 with a shower as well. That was the best bathroom I found there.

It's great to have a nice bathroom and full privacy, it just makes it more comfortable.

At sales force at fifty Fremont there is a guest bathroom adjacent to the main reception on 36 that is individual and private - best restroom in that building.

I'm reminded of a gym I frequent, with blasting music out on the weightroom floor. Of course it is pin-drop quiet in the toilet area. :/

Another tip: get rid of those stupid Dyson hand dryers. They're unsanitary and don't work.

hate those so much.