Lady Business: Women’s toilets, and Broadway’s $1.1 billion bad-bathroom problem

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fifty-sixth issue, published January 31, 2019.
 

Potty Problems

As you might have noticed in recent newsletters, I’ve seen a fair amount of live theater recently. Which is lovely! But which also leads to a very first-world, if genuinely infuriating, Lady Business problem: The atrocious women’s bathroom situation in Broadway theaters.

Women made up 66 percent of the Broadway audience last season. That was a record high year for Broadway, which sold $1.7 billion worth of tickets to 13.8 million customers. Which means, according to some back of the envelope math, that women spent roughly $1.1 billion on Broadway tickets in the 2017-18 season.

And yet! Even thought we’re responsible for two-thirds of Broadway’s business, we still can’t get a commensurate two-thirds of access to the theater industry’s toilets:

“Broadway has never been busier … and nowhere are the grand but geriatric buildings weaker than in their paucity of bathroom facilities, particularly for women.

… Most Broadway theaters were built nearly a century ago, when consumer expectations and habits were different, and many of the buildings are landmarks, making structural change difficult.”

That’s from a 2017 New York Times feature about the sad state of bathroom facilities on Broadway, especially for women who make up the bulk of the audience … and also don’t wear corsets any longer and drink too many liquids these days? (I might have some notes on these explanations.)

But anyway, the basic math is: More women than men go to the theater, and women take longer to use the bathroom due to that whole sitting-down thing. But most theaters are old and have, at best, a few more stalls for women than for men. It’s expensive and time-consuming for theaters to change the situation; and it’s easier to just make people put up with the inconvenience than figure out a solution, since most theaters are landmarked buildings and exempt from updated building codes and regulations.

You might hope that public shaming would work? Take, for example, the prime example in that 2017 article about Bad Broadway Bathrooms: The zig-zagging, fall-inducing, three-usher-requiring line for the women’s bathrooms at Waitress. And yet -- as I discovered during the 20-minute line I waited in earlier this month -- two years after that musical was line-shamed in the New York Times, the theater hasn’t done anything to fix it.
 
(That’s not even the most infuriating women’s bathroom line I’ve faced on Broadway. That distinction goes to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child -- an extremely profitable show where the producers spent $33 million renovating the theater, but one that has so few women’s toilets that I literally had to race back to my seat after intermission.)

It’s easy (and not wrong) to blame sexism for this. The people who designed and renovate the theaters tend to be men, and a lot of the Broadway critics and reporters are men, and so design choices that affect two-thirds of your paying audience just get ignored. (And then you get articles like the above story about the Harry Potter renovations, which discusses the theater’s new “phoenix sconces and dragon lanterns” but doesn’t get into whether the shiny new theater spent any money upgrading the restrooms.)

But it’s also about crowd control (everyone wanting to use the facilities at the same time, like intermission) and building codes and regulations; much of which, admittedly, comes back at least partially to sexism. Which is why I so enjoyed this in-depth Atlantic article about the cutesy-named quest for “potty parity” and why it’s so hard to achieve:

One would think that developers could neutralize this problem by simply building more toilets for women. And they could—there’s no rule or regulation that would stop them. They’re beholden to local or state plumbing codes, but those only stipulate the minimum number of toilets for men and women in a given building, based on occupancy numbers and use.

Anything that exceeds those prescribed minimums becomes a question of spending. “From an economic standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to increase the number of toilet fixtures if that’s going to decrease the amount of rentable area in a building,” says Christopher Chwedyk, a building-code consultant at the firm Burnham Nationwide. In other words, toilets don’t make money (and are quite expensive to install), so developers don’t have a financial reason to go beyond what the code requires.

Oh, so, right -- it’s not sexism. It’s money. Which, for most Broadway theaters, apparently is worth more than keeping $1.1 billion worth of customers happy.
 

Lady Bits

--“White, well-intentioned feminists of a certain vintage,” and the erasure of black suffragists through Central Park statues.
 
--This Gizmodo stunt journalism, about how impossible it is to block Amazon or the other big tech giants from your life, is also very good and scary journalism.
 
--“Turns out people respond when you tell them you’re dying of cancer.” R.I.P. Fatima Ali, one of my favorites in recent Top Chef seasons.

--“UAE's gender equality awards won entirely by men.” 
 
--Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has been making me giggle a lot of late, especially at its killer meta-episode about romantic comedy tropes:
 

 
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