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I remember seeing this video (

about a woman who is having a hard time finding her ladies room in college because there were more men's rooms available but not a ladies room on every floor and then the area where the ladies room was was sort of out-of-the-way and not easy to find. I have found this has occasionally been the case as I remember in my college they had a men's room on every floor but only a woman's room on the first floor, which was kind of annoying because when I was in the library on the third floor with all of my guy friends they were able to use the bathroom right there and I would always have to go down to the first floor where there was sort of a ladies room hidden in an out-of-the-way area.


So I am wondering has anyone ever noticed this themselves, where the men's room is very clear and easy to find but the women's room is in an out-of-the-way area? Again in most cases the bathrooms are side-by-side and everything, but occasionally I do find it is the case where the ladies room seems to be hidden or not as convenient as the men's room.

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@segaface

"I've seen both this and the reverse where the men's room is further away down a corridor or something. Unsure which has been more common, but either way that's pretty bad design and should have been caught when the building was first being designed."

I don't understand places where they have the ladies room and the men's room in separate areas of the building like that. I mean to be fair it's uncommon, usually the men's room and the ladies room are right next door to each other, and you can tell which one the ladies is from far away cause of the line in front :P, but some places it seems like they go out of their way to make things difficult to find.


Like there was this one time that I almost completely forgot about until I thought of this topic again, I can't even remember where this place was, but I remember there was one time I went to this place, and it was like a really big place too, but as soon as you walked in there was a men's room like right in the lobby of the place but the ladies room was like on the entire other side of the building or something like that, and I got lost looking for it, and it was just like so inconvenient and ridiculous. And I had to go pretty badly too! So it was another one of those frustrating situations where all the guys went right to the bathroom and then we basically had to go searching for me to find a place to go!


Once again it's pretty uncommon, I think most people are sensible enough to keep the bathrooms right next to each other, but sometimes I look at the plans of certain places and I am wondering, what are they thinking?! But then again it has to be remembered that most architects are men so I am thinking that in most cases it's probably easier to find the men's room. Again though I could be biased from experience, if I have ever been in a place where I couldn't find the men's room it was never any real concern to me!

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I might be over thinking it but it seems to me it may be an old design choice from a long time ago. With the example of the college, women weren't always able to pursue education, let alone secondary education so there only would have been a need for male facilities. Instead of updating the bathrooms they retrofit a few of them here and there to be women's bathrooms without really taking into consideration the locations. 

 

Probably over thinking it at 4am but thats what makes sense to me.

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@TheEvilDog

I think that's actually a pretty accurate assessment really. I remember reading an article about how in 1956 one of the teachers at my college was actually dismissed for being pregnant because back then a teacher being pregnant was scandalous. Even 50 years after that though I feel like they haven't really updated the bathrooms. So I think that that probably was their reasoning, not going to rebuild the entire building so they just say, take one of the men's room and make it a ladies room and that's good enough.


I think that that's why there is a lack of ladies room in general, the world is still based on the design it had from decades ago when women were not yet out of the house all that much, society has yet to catch up in the terms of bathroom provisions.

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1 hour ago, DesperateJill said:

I think that that's why there is a lack of ladies room in general, the world is still based on the design it had from decades ago when women were not yet out of the house all that much, society has yet to catch up in the terms of bathroom provisions.

Yeah, old buildings especially are very hard to update. Considering the higher number of enrollees and the fact that you can only use half of the bathrooms available.

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@Bismiris

"Yeah, old buildings especially are very hard to update. Considering the higher number of enrollees and the fact that you can only use half of the bathrooms available."

This is true and it makes me think of potty parity and how many exceptions there are to it, such as it only applies to new buildings and buildings that undergo more than a renovation of more than half the building, which means that most old buildings will never be affected by it. So what you have is there a larger number of people using these colleges and buildings and whatnot but they aren't making any more ladies rooms. So essentially women have to make do with the bathrooms that were designed for a world where there were only men mostly. Again there is some improvement with time, but I can understand how you can't really add more bathrooms if there just isn't enough space in the building, but it still is rather frustrating when the solution is make do with less ladies! Adequate female bathrooms in a lot of these situations are seen as an after thought, not a necessity.

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16 hours ago, rachelkirwan said:

This was literally my university, which when they allowed women in decided to just halve the number of washrooms. My first few weeks at grad school I had a bad UTI and trying to find the washroom in medieval buildings was... not fun.

 

Any big accidents as a result? Or did you switch to diapers/pull-ups?

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On 3/5/2021 at 8:42 AM, DesperateJill said:

I remember seeing this video (

about a woman who is having a hard time finding her ladies room in college because there were more men's rooms available but not a ladies room on every floor and then the area where the ladies room was was sort of out-of-the-way and not easy to find. I have found this has occasionally been the case as I remember in my college they had a men's room on every floor but only a woman's room on the first floor, which was kind of annoying because when I was in the library on the third floor with all of my guy friends they were able to use the bathroom right there and I would always have to go down to the first floor where there was sort of a ladies room hidden in an out-of-the-way area.


So I am wondering has anyone ever noticed this themselves, where the men's room is very clear and easy to find but the women's room is in an out-of-the-way area? Again in most cases the bathrooms are side-by-side and everything, but occasionally I do find it is the case where the ladies room seems to be hidden or not as convenient as the men's room.

The Ladies room is DLC 

 

 

Thanks, EA. 

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@rachelkirwan

Wow so you actually went to the college itself in the video, small world huh?! It must have brought up a lot of memories then when he saw that video. The video apparently was made like five or six years ago and I guess things haven't improved since then. Were there often big lines at the ladies room too?


Simply halving the restroom seems like the stupidest solution in the world. That's why sometimes fear if they when unisex instead of giving more equal bathrooms they would simply just take the opportunity to provide half as many restrooms for everyone which would only make the problem of lines longer and more of a problem rather than less.


I guess this is probably a problem at a lot of universities which were built as all-male institutions until the last couple of decades and have not been majorly renovated since, so they still have bathrooms that reflect the fact that they didn't have a female population, whereas now more women go to college than men, which compounds the problem further when it comes to bathrooms.

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13 hours ago, DesperateJill said:

@rachelkirwan

Wow so you actually went to the college itself in the video, small world huh?! It must have brought up a lot of memories then when he saw that video. The video apparently was made like five or six years ago and I guess things haven't improved since then. Were there often big lines at the ladies room too?


Simply halving the restroom seems like the stupidest solution in the world. That's why sometimes fear if they when unisex instead of giving more equal bathrooms they would simply just take the opportunity to provide half as many restrooms for everyone which would only make the problem of lines longer and more of a problem rather than less.


I guess this is probably a problem at a lot of universities which were built as all-male institutions until the last couple of decades and have not been majorly renovated since, so they still have bathrooms that reflect the fact that they didn't have a female population, whereas now more women go to college than men, which compounds the problem further when it comes to bathrooms.

Not this college, but unfortunately this isn't the only college/university that has strange women's washroom locations/availability. 

Basically, imagine you have a castle built in the 1500s. It is a school for men (rich men at that). Then the college gets dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century and they let women in. Now they need washrooms. So what they tend to do is just convert half the washrooms into women's washrooms, but... which ones do you convert? The most easily accessible? Of course not, there are so few women scholars, why do that... so they tend to be the ones that are out of the way. 

Making the washrooms unisex was definitely not at thing in the 1970s, but a way better option. I know a bunch of universities out here in BC have done this. 

21 hours ago, Ms. Tito said:

The Ladies room is DLC 

 

 

Thanks, EA. 

Hehehe that is classic!

 

 

On 3/7/2021 at 6:36 AM, nappypants said:

Any big accidents as a result? Or did you switch to diapers/pull-ups?

I think I've shared some of the stories here, it was a while ago, but yeah, there were some rather serious accidents, and I was mostly wearing pads at the time but did use Goodnites a bunch when I was going to a building for the first few times. It was a strange fresher's week.

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@rachelkirwan

I think if it took them that long just to include women's restrooms and admit women it makes me wonder how long it took them to get indoor plumbing in the first place! But yes I think that that is a lot of the solution from society in general, if we have to give women something give them the bare minimum and put it in an out-of-the-way area, we're still technically giving it to them, we're just not making it convenient, but too bad on us right? Just blatant sexism really.

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At one time I worked in a five-building complex that had been constructed for an 18-month international trade fair.  The arrangement had only two public restroom areas.  They were accessed from outdoors.  But ushers herded visitors through the building in a planned sequence and could direct visitors to the restrooms.

Years before I worked there, the buildings had been repurposed as a museum with a random visitor flow.  The ushers had been reduced to working summers and weekends.  School tours went through on off-season weekdays.  Outdoor access is not the norm.  The restrooms might as well have been hidden.  Afternoon visitors lunched at a fast food court half a block away.  They consumed who knows how many milkshakes, root-beer floats and ice creams.

The architecture would have allowed easy restroom retrofit.  But. . . 1.  Only a fraction of upper management went into the exhibit areas during visitor hours.  When they did, they were totally focused on how well the museum served its "primary purpose."   2.  While the retrofit would have cost little by most standards, the museum seldom had money looking for a purpose.  By fixture count the building had good facilities.  I doubt management had a clue about the place's reputation of five building with no restrooms.  The place might have been losing as much gate income as US$100,000 per year.

Besides buildings built before colleges accepted women students, other situations can hide restrooms. 

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On 3/5/2021 at 12:57 PM, DesperateJill said:

@segaface

"I've seen both this and the reverse where the men's room is further away down a corridor or something. Unsure which has been more common, but either way that's pretty bad design and should have been caught when the building was first being designed."

I don't understand places where they have the ladies room and the men's room in separate areas of the building like that. I mean to be fair it's uncommon, usually the men's room and the ladies room are right next door to each other, and you can tell which one the ladies is from far away cause of the line in front :P, but some places it seems like they go out of their way to make things difficult to find.


Like there was this one time that I almost completely forgot about until I thought of this topic again, I can't even remember where this place was, but I remember there was one time I went to this place, and it was like a really big place too, but as soon as you walked in there was a men's room like right in the lobby of the place but the ladies room was like on the entire other side of the building or something like that, and I got lost looking for it, and it was just like so inconvenient and ridiculous. And I had to go pretty badly too! So it was another one of those frustrating situations where all the guys went right to the bathroom and then we basically had to go searching for me to find a place to go!


Once again it's pretty uncommon, I think most people are sensible enough to keep the bathrooms right next to each other, but sometimes I look at the plans of certain places and I am wondering, what are they thinking?! But then again it has to be remembered that most architects are men so I am thinking that in most cases it's probably easier to find the men's room. Again though I could be biased from experience, if I have ever been in a place where I couldn't find the men's room it was never any real concern to me!

Ive seen it more as an alternating floors thing in old buildings.  i think because the plumbing lines were easier to have everything on top of each other.  Especially if buildings were expanded.  This is particularly true in old colleges.  

I think most of the buildings in both my highschool and college had it that way.  different floors.   but same location on each floors.  It actually makes a lot of sense if you have more than one floor (more than 2 or 3 like 7+).  its a more efficient way to run pipes.

 

Edited by mirtdesp (see edit history)
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On 3/10/2021 at 6:32 AM, DesperateJill said:

@rachelkirwan

I think if it took them that long just to include women's restrooms and admit women it makes me wonder how long it took them to get indoor plumbing in the first place! But yes I think that that is a lot of the solution from society in general, if we have to give women something give them the bare minimum and put it in an out-of-the-way area, we're still technically giving it to them, we're just not making it convenient, but too bad on us right? Just blatant sexism really.

You're not wrong about that.  I know someone who was heaviliy involved in getting a major university in the united states to be coed as recently as the late 1960s.  And because of it she was considered a radical and thus had a file on her.  When you consider the age of universities, 50 years ago is actually pretty recent.

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@mirtdesp

I think that it really says a lot that until recently the idea of coed facilities even at college was seen as a radical idea.


I can understand the alternating pipes thing from floor to floor but the point is that I still think that a lot of these places they consider men's restrooms to be a given whereas female restrooms are still something of an afterthought, like we have to provide some ladies room so what's the bare minimum we can give without changing anything or having to spend money. The reasoning being that if there aren't enough restrooms women will just deal with it somehow.

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My ex and I enjoyed exploring college libraries. Once in a great while we encountered an entirely different situation. An old college building with two restrooms per floor accessed from the main hall. The men’s had a set of pipes running horizontally along the wall to the women’s. External pipes scream “after thought.”

The room beyond the women’s contained some new equipment. Maybe it would be a network system administrator’s office plus the main network servers. Somewhere else the campus had a new classroom building.

Presumably, the college administration had chosen to split a classroom by adding a non-supporting wall. I’m imagining the administration ran an article in the alumni magazine. In short it would say, “due to changing laws, equipment needs and expanding enrollment, the college needs a new 80,000 square-foot building (or whatever the number would be).”

As monetary expenses go, partitioning a wall and plumbing a room amounts to pocket change. Floor space probably worries the administration more.

Suggestion: Document some bad and some good women’s facilities. When you encounter bad planning to meet laws or whatever, be prepared to show anyone with sympathy and clout your documentation. Show how bad, bad can be and that installing the women’s facilities can be done right.

 

 

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My college has several buildings where the mens room and womens room are on opposite ends of the building, but they're all small buildings. Regardless of where you are, it's a reasonable distance to either. However, there is one building where the layout isn't all that intuitive. I can't remember if it was built in the late 50s or early 60s. The womens room is really easy to spot. According to the floor plan, there's a mens room nearby, but I've never found the entrance to it. That being said, I've never had to look all that hard because I've never had to pee while I'm in that part of the building. I have peed in a more modern addition to that building, though, and in that part they were right next to each other.

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