July 2, 2010
Feminism and Equality; Or, Why Elections Can Be Like Urinals
That’s right dear readers, it’s another post about toilets!
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Wandering into St Pancras station yesterday to take advantage of the free toilet facilities, I was greeted by the not-unusual sight of women queuing outside of their section. As a man I was able to breeze straight in and out of my side, not having to wait at all.
This is an extremely common occurence. Paradoxically, however, it is often the outcome of equal treatment…at least, on a particular understanding of equality.
Allow me to explain.
Men and women’s public toilet facilities are normally allocated roughly the same amount of physical space. Nominally, therefore, equal priority is given to men and women when designing and building public toilet facilities. However this equal-space approach over-looks the fact that male facilities include urinals and cubicles, whilst women’s facilities are necessarily all-cubicle. Urinals, however, take up much less space than cubicles (so more of them can be provided in a given space), and they are much quicker to use. The result: men are able to use their facilities much more quickly than women, meaning men don’t wait in long queues but women do.
Equality of physical space therefore results in inequality of waiting-times. Insofar as the latter is considered more important than the former (and surely it should be), this is an undesirable outcome. It also illustrates that equality is a complex concept. Accordingly, alternative ways of thinking about equality may help us engineer different results. Ronald Dworkin famously encouraged people to think about equality in terms of exhibiting equal “concern and respect” to all individuals.* How might a Dworkinian approach toilet provision?
Straightforwardly. Those designing public toilets could ask themselves: “do these plans treat men and women with equal concern and respect by ensuring roughly equal waiting times?” The simplistic equal-space approach would fail this test. Instead, women’s facilities would be allocated greater physical space than men’s (to compensate for cubicle-urinal disadvantages), thus equalising waiting times.
Men may think this a trivial issue; I expect many women will disagree. Regardless, it illustrates two further points:
1. Inequality of outcome in public lavatory provision is consistent with a society characterised by patriarchy. Not because those who commission and design public facilities purposefully want to frustrate women’s lives. That’s (usually) not the case. But because alleviating obvious and well-known female inconvenience simply won’t be a priority in a society overwhelmingly geared to the interests and needs of men.
The discrimination is thus subconscious. Precisely what a thoroughly-entrenched patriarchy would exhibit.
2. Public lavatory inequality illustrates (by analogy) why all All Women Shortlists may be needed to secure gender equality in political elections. For although men and women are nominally equal – both are free to put themselves forward as candidates for selection by political parties – this initial starting equality interacts with other factors to generate (manifestly) unequal outcomes.
Such factors include:
- self-deselection by many women due to their believing that “politics isn’t for women”
- conscious and subconscious ignoring of women candidates by selection committees due to beliefs that “politics isn’t for women”
- gender-biased social attitudes that encourage women to be quiet, non-combative and passive whilst politics rewards loud combative aggression – traits socially inculcated, and found predominantly, in men.
These factors – combined with initial equality of selection between men and women – will likely result in inequality of outcome. And indeed only 21.4% of British MPs are women.
All Women Shortlists – by excluding men and being unequal in terms of starting selection – may therefore better promote equality of outcome. Which I’m assuming most decent people want. At least, insofar as a conception of equality that is geared towards interacting with the world as it actually is remains preferable to one which is implemented with wilful disregard to the likely subsequent consequences of other relevant social factors.**
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* Dworkin mainly focused on the state showing “equal concern and respect” to citizens, but we can apply the principle more widely.
** Neanderthals believing that women are “less good at politics” because they are women, or that the above social factors don’t exist or affect selections, need not reply. In fact, they can go jump in the sea.
Tim Worstall said,
July 2, 2010 at 8:26 am
Well, there’s actually been quite a lot of research into this. By both sanitation engineers and economists (‘coz of queuing theory, see?).
Women take twice as long as men (clothing and seating arrangements) and also use loos more often (bladder size, menstruation etc) meaning that, as you say, equal space provision won’t provide equal queuing. Nor will equal point provision (a point being “a urinal” or ” a toilet”). Nor, in fact, will a 2:1 provision in favour of teh laydeez.
If I’ve remembered correctly, it comes out to provision needing to be 3:1 or so for queueing time to be equal: assuming that the crowd using the facilities is equally split male/female. Much of the built environment of course does not reach that standard: for the quite obvious reasons that in times past (and still in certain places today) we would not expect a crowd split 50/50 on gender.
Fun fact: one of the few places which does manage to reach equal queueing time is the Pentagon. When built it included “coloured” and “white” facilities, the former being ripe for conversion once they’d got over both Jim Crow and not letting the women in.
Franlydie said,
July 2, 2010 at 10:17 am
We can’t wait that long. Women have to act now.
In Liverpool whenever the two queues are next to each other it is common for women to switch queues and use the men’s cubicle if it’s free (which it usually is). The disabled loos (which are spacious and usually very clean) are often placed within the female loo areas (assuming that disabled persons must be female?!) so they also can be used to alleviate the ladies’ queueing.
In the same way, top women will be resourceful enough to get selected and elected on merit; many have done so already. Or do we want to wait for “women only” lists and then elect ‘token’ women MPs?
Peter said,
July 2, 2010 at 10:23 am
There was a segment on this very issue during the last episode of radio 4′s More or Less. Well worth a Listen Again if you’ve gt the time.
Steve R said,
July 2, 2010 at 7:49 pm
I don’t know what I think about All-Women Shortlists, but I’m not convinced by your analogy with public toilets.
A ‘progressive toilet policy’* would make the Ladies bigger at the expense of the Gents in order to equally distribute the good of having somewhere to wee without excessive queuing, because female needs are more space- and time-consuming. The space devoted to toilets in a particular area is shared equally according to outcome not absolute space. But that’s just it: the Ladies would take up more space; they wouldn’t take up all the space in a certain locality.
That’s what AWS do. They abstract away from individual desires to the distribution of Prospective Parliamentary Candidacies nationwide. They prevent individual men in certain constituency parties from standing for nomination: they have lost their opportunity to have their desire to stand for election as an MP fulfilled.
Now perhaps you are in fact suggesting distribution of Prospective Parliamentary Candidacies across all the constituency parties nationwide is like the toilets in a single location rather than nationwide. But that doesn’t sound very liberal to me: the individual has become unimportant. Not even very egalitarian/Rawlsian liberal, because the AWS results in some people getting nothing at all.
* I really hope there is no policy document in existence with this title, but I’m too afraid to go on Google to find out.
Nakul said,
July 2, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Indeed, provision of toilets is in fact an important feminist cause in many parts of the world. Watch the extract from this documentary about Indian feminists and lavatory equality.
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/globalcities/density.shtm
Nakul said,
July 2, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Also: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/congress-considers-potty-parity-bill-women/story?id=10624844
Churm Rincewind said,
July 2, 2010 at 11:16 pm
What’s wrong with gender-neutral toilets – i.e. one facility divided into separate cubicles? A fully Dworkinian solution.
Feminism’s Complexities « Bad Conscience said,
December 12, 2010 at 12:28 am
[...] helpfully illustrates one way in which feminism properly appreciated incorporates an extremely broad set of considerations. It encompasses far more than some crude [...]
Cy Quick said,
December 13, 2010 at 5:31 pm
Churm Rincewind got in before me. That is just what I was going to say. Nothing wrong with gender-neutral-all-cubicle. I got a link to this Post on my sumpnado.wordpress.com by the way. Nothing will be done for ladies in this regard. They are too submissive to the status quo.