Beyond “Potty Parity”: Public Toilets, Gendered Time Costs, and Institutional Accountability in Everyday Mobility

While public sanitation is a fundamental component of urban infrastructure, it is often treated as a discretionary amenity rather than a core public service subject to legal standards of equality and dignity. This article challenges gender-blind approaches to urban planning by examining how inadequate public toilet provision constrains women’s everyday mobility and presence in public space, raising questions of indirect gender discrimination and regulatory responsibility. Drawing on an exploratory mixed-methods study (N = 97), the analysis combines quantitative assessment of access barriers, qualitative user narratives, and time-based measurement of total restroom use duration to examine patterns of use and waiting with particular attention to gender differences. The findings indicate that hygiene-related concerns are reported across both men and women, without clear evidence of a consistent gender-specific pattern, while women are disproportionately affected by throughput failures, long waiting times, and the absence of care-integrated facilities. At the same time, variation in support for gender-neutral toilet solutions suggests that user acceptance may not align with model-based proposals in the literature. These inequalities reflect an institutional accountability gap with legal implications in the governance of everyday public services. By shifting the focus from numerical potty parity to temporal inequality and responsibility, this article contributes to feminist legal scholarship by situating sanitation within questions of temporal inequality and institutional responsibility. While exploratory in nature, the findings offer empirically grounded insights into inequalities in everyday sanitation governance.