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!
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.
But who buys a door which doesn't close the gap properly? That costs $1 less? In their multi-million $ buildings?
Only Americans.
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.
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
It took nearly three years of my complaining to finally get an End User License Agreement for our product, for example.
That is most likely a ventilation fan. The white noise is a side-effect.
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)
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 :)
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...
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.