Potty Parity

We address the issues of unequal restroom access for women and LGBTQ+ individuals, known as the potty parity problem. We propose a utility model in which users consider gender identity, wait time, and safety concerns when choosing restrooms. We evaluate different layouts’ efficiency measured by the total utilities (as in the utilitarian principle) and assess their fairness using the measures of the minimum utility gain (as in the Rawlsian fairness) and the gap between maximum and minimum gains (as in the distributive fairness). When the population is sensitive to gender identity and safety concerns, although it may initially seem intuitive to assume that converting all restrooms to unisex facilities would be efficient and fair due to the pooling of servers and increased flexibility and perceived fairness due to all users standing in the same line, our findings demonstrate that this design can be neither efficient nor fair. In contrast, we show that converting some men’s restrooms to unisex can enhance both efficiency and fairness of access. This highlights that a moderate level of flexibility can outperform a fully flexible system. Moreover, conventional wisdom suggests that removing a restroom unit from the men’s room would negatively impact users from the men’s side. However, our analysis reveals a counterintuitive insight that such a change can lead to a Pareto improvement, benefiting all users involved. We also analytically explore additional benefits of unisex restrooms under different user behaviors and situations and present practically relevant numerical results to support our findings.

This paper was accepted by Elena Katok, operations management.

Funding: This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Grant RGPIN-2021-04295].

Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.04075.