Built-in bathroom bias

The patriarchy is so deeply entrenched in our lives that it has followed us to our bathrooms.

When architects design and create separate bathrooms for men and women, they include features in each bathroom that account for sex. For example, the women’s restroom typically includes a tampon and pad dispenser, and the men’s restroom typically includes urinals. Interestingly, one design feature that does not account for sex but appears in women’s restrooms and is missing in men’s restrooms is a diaper changing table. Diaper changing tables are supposed to provide parents and guardians a safe and hygienic place to change their baby's diaper, yet these tables are – more often than not – accessible to only one sex.

This disparity came to the national forefront when Donte Palmer's picture of himself changing his son’s diaper went viral. Faced without a diaper changing station, Palmer squatted on the floor of the men's restroom to change his son's diaper. This phenomenon is not uncommon as a number of fathers reported to changing their child's diaper in a restroom sink or directly on the floor because a diaper changing table was not accessible to them. Not only does this design choice and/or oversight not serve single fathers and gay parents, but it denies fathers the ability to serve as fully engaged partners when it comes to performing a basic parental function in a public setting.

In response to the picture, Palmer stated that “[i]n society, we have this thing where men are supposed to be macho providers and protectors, while women are the nurturing and caring ones. I'm trying to shred that.” Palmer’s sentiment reflects how this seemingly innocent design choice and/or oversight feeds into gender inequality by reinforcing traditional gender roles.

As explained by the separate spheres doctrine, these traditional gender roles involve women primarily serving as their family’s caretaker and homemaker. Conversely, men are considered to serve as their family's breadwinner. In relation to the design choice and/or oversight to include diaper changing tables in women’s bathrooms, women have been relegated to diaper duty, while their “breadwinner” husbands have been relieved of such responsibility.

This antiquated separate spheres notion does not account for the fact that domestic responsibilities have shifted dramatically in the past few decades. According to a Pew Research Center study, men were found to spend more time with their child (almost three times more!) in 2016 compared to 1965. Further, women "constitute fully half of the American workforce and serve as breadwinners for [forty] percent of households."

Yet, while these statistics illustrate that domestic responsibilities have shifted, our patriarchal institutions still expect women to be relegated to the role of “caretaker” – especially when it comes to childcare. As a previous blogger on this forum has noted, this phenomenon is known as the “second shift” where “[e]ven though today’s women spend more time in the paid economy, they are still expected to complete most of the domestic responsibilities and chores.”

Many thought-pieces have noted that one solution to tackling the second shift phenomenon would involve co-parenting where responsibilities are divided and shared equally between domestic partners.

Shared parenting has been long-championed as a vital element of gender equality in two-parent families, and is now emerging as equally important for separated and divorced families. It is neither desirable nor viable that mothers work a “double shift” as full-time wage earners and parents; fathers’ assumption of responsibility to share the care of children in dual-earner households in particular is an important concern of women.

In light of this solution, I hope to engage in this form of co-parenting where domestic responsibilities are divided equally with my future partner. But how can I ensure that these responsibilities are truly divided equally when public spheres design roadblocks that reinforce into gender inequality?

Luckily, progress has been created towards achieving "potty parity". In 2016, President Barack Obama signed the Bathrooms Accessible in Every Situation ("BABIES") Act into law. This Act requires federal buildings to install baby changing tables in both men's and women's restrooms. California followed suit in 2017 with Assembly Bill 1127. This law requires "baby diaper changing stations to be installed in men's and women's restrooms in publicly owned state and local buildings and private businesses." Most recently, New York enacted a law that requires "all new and renovated buildings with public bathrooms to include changing tables in men's restrooms."

While these laws have been a step in the right direction towards tackling gender inequality and stereotypes, their impact has been stymied by slow compliance. This, coupled with the fact that few states have enacted similar laws, means we are still far from eliminating the disparity.

If national, statewide, and local change has been slow, we can still achieve "potty parity" on an individual level. To do so, we should recruit our male allies who come across public and private facilities that lack diaper changing tables to speak to managers to remedy this exclusion. Hopefully these private complaints can build into a movement where we begin dismantling the patriarchy one diaper changing station at a time.