Are unisex loos a good idea at work?

Peeing at work has traditionally been a segregated business. In the old days, directors relieved themselves in different, swishier places from the rank and file.

Later, when hierarchies went out of fashion, the executive washroom was abolished in the name of equality and chief executives peed shoulder to shoulder with office juniors.

However, the lavatorial segregation of men and women at work has endured. In private houses, on planes and on trains the sexes happily use the same toilets but at work they still do not.

This segregation is threatened by the rise of the gender-neutral toilet. This time it has nothing to do with equality of men and women. It is because if you are transgender, it is not clear which loo you should go for.

In California a law was passed this month insisting that any single-stall toilet must be gender neutral. Starbucks is busily introducing them, while the Barnes & Noble bookstore is encouraging people to use whichever loo they prefer. Last week at Salesforce's annual festival of self-congratulation in San Francisco, there were gender-neutral loos.

Preferred pronouns

More than that, each of the 150,000 participants was given a cute badge on which to put a sticker with their preferred pronoun: he/him, she/her, they/them or ask me.

This, I suspect, is big news. Where Salesforce leads, the rest will follow.

But are unisex loos a good idea at work? Making everyone pee in the same place surely makes sense. On average we get out of our seats and go to the toilet three or four times a day, but instead of this being an opportunity for the broadest and most serendipitous sort of networking, we arbitrarily limit ourselves to only one slice of the workforce.

I have just canvassed views around my office and found the big divide is less by gender than by age. All the millennials shrugged and said making office loos gender-neutral was fine. They looked so unconcerned that I found myself feeling sheepish for having asked the question at all.

Yet older workers were less keen. The men mostly said they did not like the idea but could not say why. The women were more forthcoming. Variously they said the men’s loos smelt. They did not want to put on make-up in front of male colleagues. The ladies loo was the perfect place to cry. Or to gossip. Or was a much needed refuge.

Yet none of these five reasons is conclusive. All loos stink if they are not cleaned often enough, so the answer is more frequent dousing with Harpic. As for make-up, I put mine on so amateurishly that I dislike being observed by anyone. Given the choice, I would rather battle with cloggy mascara in front of an oblivious man than in front of a woman who could see what a hash I was making of it.

Crying

A similar argument applies to crying. It is true that women cry more than men, and as blubbing at one’s desk is not acceptable, we tend to do it in the loo. Yet the few times I have wept at work, my main aim was not to be observed. Men are possibly less likely to notice and to comment, and so having them washing their hands next to you as you dab your red eyes might not be too bad.

It is also true that more gossiping goes on in the women’s loos than in the men’s – where I gather silence usually prevails. Yet for either sex the loo is a dangerous place for chatting as you never know who is in the stalls. As a refuge, the office toilet is much better – there are times when the privacy afforded by a locked cubicle door is just what one needs. But in those instances, I cannot see it matters much whether the invisible people in neighbouring stalls are men or women.

Yet there is another, better reason for segregated loos. While half the tech world was gathered in San Francisco, I was at a rival tech conference in Europe. As almost everyone in that industry appears to be a man, at coffee time I had a weird experience. There was a long queue for the men’s loo — and none for the women’s. As I dried my hands I started up an interesting conversation with the three others in there about why there are so few of them in tech, and a thought occurred to me: when women are in such a minority, a loo of their own is a perk worth keeping.

– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016