updates: the convention center music, the knee-to-the-groin rumor, and more

by Alison Green on May 1, 2024

Here are three updates from past letter-writers.

1. Convention center will not turn down the music (#3 at the link)

I’m the guy who wrote about how, ever since the convention center my organization meets at was purchased by a chain, they blast loud music throughout the venue 24/7.

First of all, I was tickled by how many people were amused when I mentioned in the comments that we were a group of librarians. Secondly, we had our yearly meeting this spring at the same location. The music was turned way down and limited to the bars/common areas. I didn’t even notice it most of the time. However, on the last day when we were wrapping up, I noticed that the volume had cranked up again. Perhaps enough people groused last year that they turned it down just for us. That, or the management was terrified of being shushed by nearly a thousand stern librarians.

Another interesting thing: Due to the gender balance in librarianship, the convention center temporarily turns the main floor men’s bathroom into a women’s room, and us ‘guybrarians’ have to use another floor. I was wondering if any other career has such a gender imbalance that the restrooms reflect that.

2. My coworker said his boss kneed him in the groin

I don’t know how to start this update, to be honest, but I’ll give it my best go, regarding the knee-in-groin situation between Fergus, Jane, and Marshall.

My partner did go to HR, though it took some time to actually get ahold of anyone. That ended up being a very surprising conversation, because here’s the twist: HR had already investigated the situation when it happened… Last year! The whole shebang took place before my partner was ever hired! So Fergus may or may not have been lying about the incident (that’s still up for debate, although Jane and Marshall’s continued employment is a pretty big tell in my opinion), but he sure was playing fast and loose with the timeline.

As of right now, Fergus is on leave again, for the next two weeks. The scuttlebutt is that Jane is planning to revoke his access to the property completely, deactivating his passcodes, taking him off the schedule, and telling other security to let her know immediately if he’s seen there. My partner and I aren’t exactly sure if he’s outright fired or not, but it does sound like he’ll be enjoying his leave for longer than he expected.

3. Applying to a company where I previously withdrew from a hiring process (#5 at the link)

First of all, the comments were lovably unhinged that day (Diet Coke-Gate and feet pics trump my mild question). I really appreciated your advice!

It was mostly a non-issue. I addressed it in a matter-of-fact manner and we moved on. Short update is that I got the job!

Long answer: it turns out that I wasn’t the best fit for this exact role but the hiring manager slotted me in to interview for a position that hadn’t even been posted. I did a couple of rounds with them and got hugely positive feedback. They fast-tracked me through!

Coming from a slow, very bureaucratic industry (you can probably guess), this felt special! Downside, of course, is that they were fast tracking for a reason and it meant my fantasy life of a full week off between jobs won’t happen.

The negotiation phase was stressful — they came in lower than I would’ve liked — but worth it. Phew! Looking forward to the future.

I read the site daily and am so tickled you featured me!

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{ 202 comments }

{ 202 comments… read them below }

  1. saskia*

    OP 1: I remember your letter, and I’m so glad they changed the music volume! That would drive me mad.
    About your gender question — speech language pathology does; about 88-96% female, depending on whose statistics you’re viewing. And I applaud the conference organizers for changing the bathrooms! I was at Moynihan Train Hall in NYC this past weekend, and the two public restrooms had women’s lines out the door and into the hall. Meanwhile, men were in and out with no line. You see the same in any venue with large numbers of people, like conventions and concerts. It’s super annoying.

    1. That's not a bug, it's a moth*

      I’m in computer science, very male-dominated, but for at least the first couple of years of the Grace Hopper Conference for Women in Computing, the organizers did something similar (re-labeled numerous men’s restrooms for women), and the few men in attendance were…bemused. And stood in restroom lines possibly for the first time in their lives.

      1. Oxford Common Sense*

        I’ve been at fundraisers’ conferences where they have done something similar. This hotel has two main bathrooms, with a kind of “swing” section in between that can be opened to the men’s side or the women’s side, depending on who is at the conference. It’s actually quite clever.

      2. Keyboard Cowboy*

        I’ve heard that about GHC! I have joked in the past at regular tech conferences, though, with the 3 other women in the restroom immediately after keynotes how nice it is to have the space :)

        1. A manager, but not your manager*

          When I was a dev, I once joked to my (all male) team that one of the perks of being a woman in tech is never having to wait for the bathroom…which prompted an hour and a half of questions about being a woman in tech because apparently me being a woman hadn’t occurred to them until that very moment.

          I wouldn’t have minded if the questions didn’t expect me to speak for all women and included “Why do women use their looks to get jobs when their skills aren’t up to par?”

          That guy got fired eventually but it took longer than you’d hope. Look, bro, I was just excited I got to pee without waiting.

          2. Ellie*

            Oh wow, your comment really took me back to a similar conversation I had to have early in my career. Now I just boldly start these conversations with, ‘Well of course women are all different people, with different experiences and opinions, just like men are…’ and I often get cut off at that point when they discover they don’t actually want to have that conversation anymore. Using terms like ‘internalized misogyny’ seems to have the same effect. But yes, having twenty toilets to choose from every time I go to the bathroom is somewhat nice.

      3. Daughter of Ada and Grace*

        When I went to GHC in 2019, some of the men’s restrooms were relabeled as women’s restrooms, and others were relabeled as all-gender restrooms.

        1. Craig R*

          Local SF convention over the last few years has worked with the convention hotel to designate some of the public restrooms as “gender neutral,” both to alleviate having to wait in lines and to bypass self-appointed gatekeepers who would try to block access to people who the gatekeepers didn’t approve of.

          Most attendees were unfazed.
          What I did not expect was the signage designating those restrooms to be ripped down

          1. Luva*

            The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco started relabeling most of the restrooms to all-gender in 2018 or 2019, which is great; no lines for anyone! Twice as many options for everyone! Though I’m always a bit startled to see a urinal when I walk in (and they don’t really get used when restrooms have been temporarily relabeled, probably for the best).

            1. Alison O*

              A bar I went to recently had a really clever approach to this. All the restrooms were for use by anyone but they had them labelled as “sit down” and “stand up” so you knew what to expect walking in

            2. BLT*

              Something I’ve seen recently that I think is great is labeling bathrooms by what they include – so one might be labeled “stalls only” and another might be labeled “stalls and urinals,” for example. It’s nice because (a) it doesn’t bring gender into it at all; (b) if you’d rather not see someone at a urinal, you can easily opt out of that; and (c) leaving urinals as an option probably makes for shorter lines than stalls or single-toilet bathrooms only.

          2. Jamoche*

            There’s a park in San Francisco near Moscone (conference center) that’s been used by tech companies for their big conference parties. It has only two public multi-user restrooms. When the line for the mens’ room got sufficiently long, they’d close the womens’, wait for it to empty out, then let men go in for a few minutes.

      4. pennyforum*

        Same in tech.

        The only event I’ve ever been to with a queue out the door of the mens loos and no queue for the ladies was a work conference about 8+ years ago now at what would now be a mildly toxic job but back then was on the better end of the tech bro spectrum.

        Since we were on a timed break between sessions some of the lads knocked and asked could they use the ladies.

      5. Medusa*

        Not a job, but there was this bar I went to in undergrad in the US (almost 20 years ago) that a special on Thursdays where pitchers and beers were extremely cheap and there was always a line for the men’s room and none for the women’s. I had extreme schadenfreude.

      6. Anna*

        Yes, actually, same sort of thing here… I am a software dev, and in my office there are an even amount of male/female restrooms. We have enough women that you certainly encounter one another in the restroom from time to time, but there is never a wait even when they’ve closed a bathroom or two for cleaning. The men, though, actually encounter situations where they have to wait in a line.

        We do internal conferences throughout the year where this effect is much more pronounced due to most folks using breaks between talks to use the restroom.

        It is literally the one life situation where I am not the one waiting in a long bathroom line.

      7. Whomst*

        Woman in computer science here. At my current job, there are literally more toilets in the women’s restroom than there are women who work in the building. At last count there were 6 of us, which is the most women in this building that I’ve seen in the 5 years I’ve worked here.
        (Although, funnily enough, the women’s restroom is twice as big as the men’s restroom in terms of square footage. This building is leased and I guess whoever built it had the other sort of gender imbalance in their employees.)

    2. Grandma*

      A national quilt show I used to go to did the same thing because of the preponderance of women. They also increased the handicapped parking by about 3 since there was need for more.

      1. Bunch Harmon*

        The Philadelphia Flower Show did this (at least pre-Covid – I’m not sure if they still do). I did exhibits for several years with high school students. The organizers changed the signs right before the show opened to the public, which was very confusing to several of my male students when the restroom they used during set up was switched to a women’s room overnight.

      2. Anne of Green Gables*

        Was coming here to say the same thing about quit shows! I have seen this at large quilt shows, where roughly half the men’s rooms were turned into women’s restrooms and there were signs indicating the locations with men’s rooms.

        I am also a librarian and have never seen the restroom change at library conferences.

      3. La Triviata*

        The industry I work in has been mostly male, although that’s changing. At one of our conferences, the woman hired to take photos commented she loved working our conferences because there was never a wait for the rest room.

    3. Woman Engineer*

      Not exactly a the same, but I went to University for Engineering, right before the turn of the century. It was not uncommon for an old classroom building to have a restroom each floor for students. Faculty had their own. One of the bathrooms would be converted to a Woman’s restroom by blocking off the urinal. The Woman’ restroom was NEVER on the first floor.

      (I am unsure if this has been updated.)

      1. e_electricus*

        Yep, that’s how my engineering school AND the chemistry building was set up as an undergrad. They solved the problem by converting all the “secretary” bathrooms to public bathrooms, and alternating genders on each floor for who got the big bathroom and who got the little one. So every even numbered floor had a full sized women’s bathroom, and a one or two stall men’s room, and the other way around on the odd numbered floors. It worked, but it did always make you pause – the buildings really weren’t all that old…

      2. WeirdChemist*

        Yeah, that’s how it was in the chemistry building I worked in for grad school. They converted every other floor to a women’s bathroom. The weirdest part was when they converted the men’s rooms to women’s, they tore out the urinals AND all but one of the stalls in each bathroom! So just a cavernous open space with one stall in it…

      3. The Prettiest Curse*

        I just remembered that the very first time my dad took me and my sister to a football (soccer) game to see his favourite team, we couldn’t use the toilets in the stadium because they had no women’s toilets. At all.

        This was in the UK in the early 1980s – women going to football matches was unusual in those days and equalities law hadn’t yet mandated access to women’s toilets in public facilities. My sister and I were pretty young
        (5 and 8) at the time, so when we needed to use the toilets, my dad took us into the men’s toilets and guarded the door.

        Both my sister and I subsequently became life-long fans of the team, but still – Wolverhampton Wanderers, what were you thinking??

        1. londonedit*

          It’s great as a woman at the football, because even now there are queues for the men’s loos but not for the women’s – completely the opposite of just about every other situation! When you go to Wembley for a women’s football match they turn some of the men’s loos into women’s and that’s great because it really helps to cut down the queues.

      4. Scientist12*

        Yes the physics building on my college campus was the same. And women’s rooms were not on the ground floor!

        At my current workplace, the oldest building has this discrepancy. The women’s room is a single use bathroom and the men’s room has four (!!) stalls! A coworker told me only recently. From the hallway, the two rooms look identical so I assumed they were both single use. I was always surprised seeing multiple men walk into their restroom at once! (When we women see another person walking into that restroom, we know it’s occupied and find another bathroom to use.)

        1. Nina*

          In my last workplace, we had exactly the same setup (men’s bathroom with four stalls, women’s/accessible bathroom on its own, doors look the same from outside).
          It was built in 2021, and at the time I was the only woman working in that building or likely to be working in that building for the foreseeable future. There are now zero women in that office, so I assume the women’s bathroom has gone back to being the Pooping Room (…it took three calls to HR to get the guys to stop doing that in the first place)

      5. Nina*

        My university’s science and engineering building (which is actually six buildings strung together and connected by corridors at every floor) has elevators and bathrooms in alternating buildings (so, elevator in buildings A, C, and E, and bathrooms in B, D, and F) and the bathroom block on each floor is the full-door single-occupancy stalls with the handbasin inside. One is labeled ‘men’, one ‘women’, and one is ‘accessible/all gender’, and in practice if you have a choice you go to ‘your’ one, but if there’s a line you go to the next one that’s free.

      6. AcademiaNut*

        Yeah, my grad school building only had women’s washrooms on alternating floors (including the floor with all the admin offices), and I’ve worked at sites that had a unisex washroom because when it was built women weren’t allowed on site.

      7. Fellow Canadian*

        Ha, I also came here to talk about the engineering building with men’s washrooms on each floor and women’s washrooms on alternating floors. This was in 2012, although the building has been renovated since then, so maybe it’s changed

    4. Arglebargle*

      Nursing too! Although the ratio has definitely improved in the 20 years I’ve been a nurse.

      1. Quill*

        Go to a small enough elementary school and you might find that staff and teachers have one guy per building. Of course, there’s approximate gender parity in the students so there’s no bathroom distribution gap unless there’s a staff only bathroom.

        1. Grandma*

          My spouse was an elementary principal at a school that had received funding for some small scale building. The staff was roughly 92 women and 8 men. Staff voted on a new lunchroom and a women’s 4 stall restroom. A 2 stall women’s restroom elsewhere was changed to men and a one stall women’s restroom near the office was converted to anybody. All good…until the state inspector showed up and wanted to know why they weren’t building equal numbers of restroom spaces for men. 8 vs 92? Husband held firm, they needed more women’s restrooms, not men’s. In the end the state inspector made an official notation into the file that Husband was responsible for this and if anybody ever sued, it was he who would have to pay. Funny, nobody ever felt the need to sue. That school is being torn down at the end of this school year. I guess we don’t have to worry about that anymore! (eye roll emoji)

        2. Cheri Littlebottom*

          At the Infant School where I was governor some time ago, there was a sign in the kitchen that read, ‘Ladies, remember to load the dishwasher and turn on at the end of the day.’ It was then I realised that NO men worked there at all…

      2. Mystery*

        But it doesn’t really matter what the bathroom ratio is in nursing. we don’t get enough break time to use them anyway….

        1. Dog momma*

          Many 12 hr shifts in the CT ICU where I never sat down, let alone went to pee. it got pretty wild at times and not for lack of staffing, we were already 1:1, 1:2 at most.
          Note, this was usually during the full moon…lol

    5. The Prettiest Curse*

      My very first time coordinating a big conference was a bin fire for many reasons, none of which (fortunately) were my fault since I was bought in at the last minute. Anyway, this was a conference predominately attended by nurses, it was oversold and an irate nurse nearly made me cry when she yelled at me about the bathroom lines, which were really long due to the gender balance of attendees and too many people.

      We didn’t convert the bathrooms for future events, we just used other venues with more bathrooms and made sure we didn’t oversell tickets. That first conference was such a useful start to my events career, because it showed me how not to do things.

      And OP 1, I’m glad that the hotel (mostly) stopped blasting music and allowed you to escape from Margaritaville. I bet you weren’t the only people to complain!

    6. CommanderBanana*

      Head Start program meetings skew really heavily female. So do conference planner / events planner meetings.

    7. Cookie Lady*

      I worked for the Girl Scouts and was able to attend our triennial national convention one year. Many of the men’s rooms were temporarily re-labeled but, like the women’s rooms, they were labeled as GIRL rooms, in a nod to both our branding at the time, where GIRL stood for Go-getter, Risk-taker, Innovator, Leader, and to acknowledge that the bulk of convention attendees were our girl members.

    8. LCH*

      ladybrarian here! so curious which org this is for and which convention center! congrats on the small victory.

      also from your first letter, “I’ve had to shout at the receptionists in order to be understood,” i go the opposite way and talk really quietly. because turn down the f%$*ing music.

      1. Observer*

        i go the opposite way and talk really quietly. because turn down the f%$*ing music.

        Except that it really is not the fault of the receptionist. And putting an extra burden on the person with probably the least power in the situation is not really a useful tactic, nor is it really very nice.

    9. Samwise*

      This happens all the time at clubs and shows. I’m a cis woman, I just open the door to the men’s room, shout “any guys in here? I’m coming in”. Wait a moment for a reply, then walk right in.

      lol works best when a fair proportion of the audience is stoned.

      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        Agreed.

        Also, recently had reason to herd teenaged children through single use bathrooms. Sure, they were listed as men and women. Our group was the only one in the building. As our group had had a transportation breakdown in the middle of nowhere, those equipped with external plumbing handled the delay a little better as far as relieving themselves til we got to this location. Needless to say, the grown ups stood guard at both doors and it was a single queue, not a short men’s room line and a doubled around women’s room line.

        1. Nobby Nobbs*

          As far as I’m concerned, all single-occupancy restrooms are gender-neutral.

          1. ScruffyInternHerder*

            No disagreement – but we felt the adult supervision needed as we were in “nowheresville” (in a state with unknown laws regarding bathroom use, didn’t both with googling it) with a group of young teenagers.

          2. Glenn*

            Fun fact: in California that’s now the law, as of 2016. (And apparently as of 2024, the law may be getting slightly more teeth; although in my experience compliance was good immediately, I guess that didn’t extend everywhere.)

            1. Grizabella the Glamour Cat*

              That’s the law in Illinois now, too, but only for a couple of years, so nor every place has caught up, especially outside the major metropolitan areas.

              I need to find out where and how to report infractions, or if there even is anyone keeping track of such things. I haven’t had any luck so far.

      2. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Gotta be careful with that though. Ages ago a woman got arrested for using the men’s room at Fenway Park, but she is my absolute hero for doing so. IIRC it got them to finally realize they needed more women’s rooms. I tried to find an article about it but only found an article about a woman in TX getting arrested for using the men’s room at a concert. She is also my hero.

        Recently I was at a work mtg at a hotel and when I went to use the ladies room there were four guys in there trying to fix a sink. They asked if I could come back in a few min and I was like, I don’t care that you’re here (I use a stall, who cares?) but they then started to leave….I guess *they* minded. So I waited a few min and used the bathroom after they left. It was pretty amusing and luckily I didn’t have to go that badly, was just taking advantage of our mtg break.

    11. many bells down*

      I was in a SLPA program and I never saw a single male in any of the classes. And it was a *heavily* impacted major; I had to wait 3 years just to get into the program.

      1. saskia*

        My bf is a male SLP in training : ) He’s at a big school, and there are only two other men in the (large) program. Crazy! And he really stands out because he’s a nontraditional, older student returning to school after doing skilled labor and retail management. Sometimes I think the professors are confused by him and don’t know what to do with him.

    12. Catherine Tilney*

      About 10 years ago, I was at a medical coding conference where they turned most of the men’s rooms to women’s. I am no longer in the field, but given the increasing number of men getting certified, I wonder if that has changed.

    13. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      Normalize women commandeering men’s bathrooms in these situations. If there’s a long ladies’ line and you don’t see any men coming out of their bathroom, get a group of women together to go in, one stands guard outside to warn any men that women are using the room, and rotate out as women leave. It’s a simple solution and cuts down on the line significantly.

      Or, you can just do what I do when they’re always cleaning the Walmart women’s bathroom when I have to go- very loudly yell into the men’s, “HI I AM A WOMAN AND I HAVE TO USE THE BATHROOM. I WILL NOT LOOK AT YOUR JUNK- I JUST CAN’T MAKE IT TO THE FRONT OF THE STORE.” I don’t look at their junk and I have headphones on, listening to podcasts, so if anyone has complaints, I don’t hear them. And I get in and out quickly.

    14. TooTiredToThink*

      When I went to a P!nk concert at a sports arena – they made the mass majority of the men’s bathrooms into women’s bathrooms. I was amused, and thankful.

      1. Anne of Green Gables*

        I have been at a concert venue that did this for a Tegan & Sara concert.

    15. Rara Avis*

      I took my child to see “Annie” at a venerable San Francisco theater that did not have adequate bathrooms to begin with. The audience of this particular show was probably 95% mothers and daughters. We just took over the men’s bathroom. Otherwise intermission would have needed to be 45 minutes long.

      1. Slow Gin Lizz*

        Ugh, why didn’t the venue get the memo that the rest of these places did about women/men ratios at events like this and change the restrooms themselves? One of the best ladies rooms I know of is the one at the Boston Opera House that not only has about 30 stalls but also has indicators facing the doorway that say which stalls have people in them and which don’t. It’s positively brilliant. They also have a couple of attendees that’ll direct ppl to which stalls are empty. I don’t know if the attendees are needed or not, given the fantastic setup of the bathroom, but it’s a nice added touch.

        1. Modesty Poncho*

          They really run that bathroom like a military operation! It’s fabulous.

          1. Kelly L.*

            St. Louis’s Fox Theatre does too. They get people in and out of there with jaw-dropping efficiency!

        2. Gumby*

          I love, love, love the set up at the Bing Concert Hall. They have the lights over the doors so you can tell if a stall is occupied; they have a folder holder thing (in addition to the normal coat/bag hook) on the stall doors so you have someplace to put your program; they have purse hooks by the sinks so you can wash your hands w/o juggling your bag. I also think the women’s rooms are larger than the men’s or have more stalls. The only suboptimal part is that the largest restroom is on the lower level while most of the people would be on the main level. I was a volunteer usher there from when it opened until the start of the pandemic and never saw crazy long lines (though the venue capacity maxes out around 1000 depending on set up). All of the ushers, at least, chalked up the excellent bathroom design to Helen’s influence. Not sure if that was the case or not.

      2. Seashell*

        I recently took my daughter to her first Broadway show and made it clear that the thing to do at intermission is to move as quickly as possible to the women’s restroom without a moment’s hesitation. There still was a line when I got there, but it wasn’t too long and they were moving it quickly. It had become super-long by the time I finished.

    16. ThatGirl*

      My husband is a mental health counselor, which skews about 70-80% female, depending on whether you’re talking about clinicians, psychologists or psychiatrists.

    17. Nonanon*

      Interesting; I went to an all-girls high school and our newer (built 2000 or later) buildings had equal number of men’s/women’s restroom, but the “original” building (built in the 50s, renovated regularly with the latest being recent enough they mentioned it during my class reunion last year) only had one “staff only” men’s room, but two women’s rooms; a “staff only” one and a second.

      (this was a religious school so the genders displayed on bathrooms is unlikely to be reflective of gender-identity in the student body, but if it is I applaud them!)

      1. PhyllisB*

        I used to be a long-distance operator, and when I started there were NO male operators so our large multi stall bathroom was labeled women.
        When men did start in our division, they all had to one of the lower floors to find a men’s room. (We were on the third floor. No elevator.)
        Most of them loudly complained. Couldn’t really blame them, but there was really nowhere to add another bathroom on that floor.

    18. LaurCha*

      K-12 teaching and museums are also mainly women (though naturally most principals, deans, and museum directors are male. Gotta love that glass escalator for dudes in predominantly-female professions).

    19. Biller*

      At least a third of the hospital billing offices i’ve worked in have permanently converted men’s bathrooms to women’s due to the gender balance of the floor. My last hospital they kept a plant in an old urinal for one of the bathrooms that had become a women’s room.

      1. Karstmama*

        I was a midwife once. There are gentleman midwives but not many. (Still called midwives – the word means ‘with women’.) So at our conferences we usually have most of the men’s rooms commandeered and ferns in the urinals.

    20. Kelly L.*

      My two restroom anecdotes:

      First, I used to work at a women’s college. It had more women’s restrooms on purpose! It might be the only place I’ve seen where that was built in structurally.

      The second anecdote is that some years back I was attending a concert by an artist whose fandom is primarily women. The venue reassigned at least one of the men’s rooms with a makeshift sign.

    21. Alton Brown's Evil Twin*

      I remember reading about some arena concert tours that skewed heavily female (Indigo Girls, the Chicks, etc), and the contract riders included instructions about turning restrooms.

    22. Cedrus Libani*

      I’m a Magic: the Gathering player. There are big tournaments, held in convention halls, where most of the attendees are men…and also there’s rounds of play, so everyone wants to use the toilet right before the round starts. The way it worked for years: before the first few rounds of the day, there would be a line around the block for the men’s room, meanwhile the women’s room would be a pristine temple of silence. Then, at some point, I would head off for a potty break, only to find that the closest women’s was now a men’s. I would then have to race around the convention hall to find a women’s that was still open for lady business, then race back to my seat, trying to avoid a game loss for being late to my round.

      Eventually, I got so annoyed – first world problems, but still! – that I sent an email to the organizers who run most of these events. I’m not mad about having most of the bathrooms reassigned, but can we please do it BEFORE the event starts so that I can figure out where to go? To my surprise, they listened, and now it usually happens before I get there.

    23. Baby Yoda*

      Regional romance writer conferences usually commandeer the first floor men’s room for us ladies.

    24. BikeWalkBarb*

      I work in transportation and recently went to the annual event of the Women in Transportation Seminar (Puget Sound chapter). Some of us joked about how wonderful it was to be at an event where we’d actually have a line for the restroom since at most transportation conferences that isn’t a problem. It’s shifting, but slowly.

    25. tamarack, etc.*

      At the very first university I attended (in Germany, in the last century) the brand new experimental physics building, where we had lab class, had washrooms at each end of the long hallway that stretched from one end of the building to the other. At each end there was either “men” plus “disabled” or “men” plus “women”. From our lab, women would have to go either one floor up, or walk to the other end to the hallway. (Also, people needing accessible facilities would have to be either lucky or take a long trip.)

      There were about 10% female physics students at the time, no female professors, and at best very few female lab staff, though of course the administrative staff was largely feminized.

    26. GammaGirl1908*

      When I used to attend group exercise instructor conventions, we had a similar gender imbalance that meant they flipped several bathrooms.

      (I also assume they do that at Beyoncé and Taylor Swift (et cetera) concerts.)

    27. Kaisa (The Librarian)*

      I’m also a librarian and most the conferences I’ve been to lately have made all the bathrooms gender neutral for the duration of the conference.

      1. Anon in Aotearoa*

        My current client has an office where every one of the bathrooms is gender neutral, filled with self-contained locking cubicles with their own sinks and rubbish bins. The only thing in the lobby/general use bit is a period supplies dispenser. I love this client, and their support for all genders is part of that.

    28. Amazonanddogs*

      While I was in the military there was a huge imbalance on the carriers between not only genders, but officer and enlisted, too. As a female officer, the two closest bathrooms was 6 floors down from my squadron spaces and the other, while on the same level, was at the other end of the boat. Of course, the female enlisted were nice enough about you using their bathrooms when you had an emergency, but for the most part, I had to set aside 10 – 20 minutes to use the bathroom and most of that was just walking back and forth.

    1. Marthooh*

      So now I want an all-gay production of The Music Man with Marion the Guybrarian.

  3. Elk*

    They do the same thing for the bathrooms at our early childhood education conference!

    1. Phony Genius*

      I’m curious how this is done. Do they just change the sign on the door, or do they make some effort to cover up the urinals?

      1. That's not a bug, it's a moth*

        At Grace Hopper, they just changed the signs. It was like getting a tour of a place you don’t normally see the inside of.

        1. Brian*

          I had more than one colleague say they freaked out when they saw the urinals, thinking they were in the wrong bathroom.

      2. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        Usually just the door signs. The only time I’ve seen urinals blocked was actually when they relabeled the restroom as gender-neutral, presumably to prevent gents from using them out of habit in a mixed-gender setting, and they just put big out-of-order blocking signs on them.

    2. OverEasy*

      At blogger conferences back in the day this was a very common practice. Convention Center/Hotel would cover up the signage for the men’s restroom and put a sign for women’s or all-gender over it. Once I saw a planter in the urinals, lol.

      2. How We Laughed*

        Unfortunately, we know that some people use planters for bathroom activities regardless of location. I fear for those unsuspecting plants!

      3. Business Pigeon*

        I’ve been to a conference where many of the men’s restrooms were relabeled as all gender, and it worked really went for that particular group.

      4. I Have RBF*

        I’ve been to several Queer in Tech conferences that just changed all the restrooms to all gender and covered the urinals.

        Makes things more comfortable for me, since I’m enby, so I don’t fit in either the men’s or women’s (I use the women’s mostly because I have big enough boobs to read as female.)

  4. Pastor Petty Labelle*

    #2 – Guess I am just cranky today but I’m not thrilled with Jane’s actions. Fergus may be a terrible employee but you fire him then. Cleanly, clearly. Not just refuse to put him on the schedule and revoke his access when on leave.

    1. orsen*

      You may very well just be cranky today. We’ve got thirdhand information that (rightfully so) doesn’t specify what actions Jane has taken re: Fergus, a timeline of when action was taken, or any other data relevant to Fergus’s situation that Jane took into consideration. If you think Jane wasn’t fast enough, well, the LW (as someone who doesn’t even work there) can’t even know that, so neither can you.

      1. ABC*

        Yeah, at this point, the LW and their partner should probably accept that they are both way too far away from this situation to have a clear read on the original event and how/if it was handled.

    2. Antilles*

      Per OP’s previous post, Fergus is a known problem employee, shows photos of graphic violence at the office, already has an HR file about his behavior, and is actively spreading malicious lies about physical assault. And that’s just the details that OP knows through their partner!

      Given that history, I don’t find ANY issue with pre-emptively cutting off his access and warning security. Jane should still call him and have that conversation directly, but Fergus’ behavior is almost certainly the reason for the rest of the measures.

      1. Colonel Gateway*

        >>And that’s just the details that OP knows through their partner

        Right. This isn’t OP’s workplace or OP’s employee, so who’s to verify the accuracy of any of this speculation?

    4. ChattyDelle*

      it’s all third hand (this is happening at the LE’s partner’s workplace) so I suspect there is more going on but what we’re getting is the workplace gossip

    5. goddessoftransitory*

      Right? My only goal in my next life is to get as many chances as Fergus no matter how badly I screw up.

    6. FrivYeti*

      Given that Fergus claimed he was on leave due to the immediate mental health aftereffects of an incident that (may or may not have) occurred over a year earlier, I think it’s equally probable that his ‘leave’ is a non-optional one directly related to the final stages of an investigation now ending in his firing.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        Yep. Mental health leave is what HE called it. I bet Jane is calling it something else.

  5. Porcupine Racetrack*

    Manufacturing lady here, and I can report that the opposite gender balance does indeed cause the equal and opposite reaction. (I have STORIES.)

    1. Rach*

      Yep, I’m an engineer and when they turned the only women’s bathroom on my floor into a (much needed) all gender bathroom (rather than adding another bathroom), it essentially became another men’s bathroom and I had to go to another floor (the few times I tried to use the all gender bathroom I got dirty looks so I refused to use it). Also, it was pretty messed up, a cis-gender man forced the all gender bathroom issue by insisting he was allowed to use the women’s bathroom if trans-women were allowed to use it, which resulted in my gender non-conforming friend being told she needed to only use the all gender bathroom or the men’s bathroom.

      1. Enai*

        Okay, WTF your cis man cow-irker. Also, good and depressing example how trying to defend the women’s bathrooms from men leads to cis women being barred from them, essentially for having the wrong taste in personal style.

    2. Spring*

      I was at a classical music concert last year, and all of the women were puzzled and commenting that the men’s room had a very long line at intermission, and the women’s room did not. We never figured out how that happened.

  6. High Score!*

    #1, I’m a female engineer. I’ve worked at many places where I’m the only female and walked into the women’s bathroom on the first and found it dusty and looking as if it had never been used.

    1. Keyboard Cowboy*

      My office is “mandatory” in-office only Tues-Thurs. You can tell when the cleaning staff has come through because they leave the seats up after cleaning underneath. On Mondays and Fridays, I like to use a “fresh” stall each time and see if I can get through the whole restroom in one day…

    2. Charlotte Lucas*

      Not quite the same, but I remember going to Comic Con about 2000. The women’s room was clean and had no lines. The guys I was with said the men’s room appeared to have been used by wild animals.

    3. Orange You Glad*

      One of the buildings at my university was originally built in the 50s to support the engineering school but was mainly used by gen ed courses by the time I was there. Even by the mid-00s they only had 1 women’s room on the 3rd floor (middle of the building) so you had to go up or downstairs if your class was on another floor.

    4. Ella Bee*

      I was always so annoyed at how the bathrooms were set up in the science building of my (tiny liberal arts) college: the bio, psych, and admin halls had the women’s restrooms, and the chem, physics, math, and comp sci halls had the men’s rooms. It was SUPER annoying that all 3 chemistry department halls had men’s restrooms only, especially because half the chemistry faculty and all 12 of the chem majors in my year were women.

    5. Doc McCracken*

      The engineering building in my undergrad days (early 2000’s) was like public bathroom heaven. Never a line, always super clean, always stocked with supplies.

  7. KTM*

    OP1 regarding bathrooms at conferences – I have a related anecdote. I’m a woman in a male-dominated niche high-tech industry (typically around 85%M / 15%F). This year at our major US conference, I went to the bathrooms in the main expo area and there was a short line for the women’s room. (Typically it’s a ghost-town in there). The entire line of women were all talking excitedly about it that there must be more women at the show this year. I’ve never seen a group of people (including me) be more excited to wait in a bathroom line!

    1. RatInAMaze*

      OP1, I am in health care. When our organization hosts employee events, the convention center has to turn one of the male bathrooms to a female. The first post COVID gathering ended with the female missing large portions due to bathroom wait times. Think 75% of a 700 person gathered are female.

    2. spcepickle*

      I am a women civil engineer who works in heavy construction – Excitement to see other ladies in the bathroom at conference is a THING! 100% relate.

    3. JR*

      That happened to me at a sports statistics conference! We were all so excited there were enough of us to have a line for the women’s restroom.

    4. Judge Judy and Executioner*

      After seeing this play out at numerous conferences, I decided the only good thing about the lack of women in tech is the short bathroom lines at conventions. The only place I’ve ever seen public restrooms where the men are lined up dozens deep and the women can usually waltz right in.

    5. 1-800-BrownCow*

      Woman Engineer here too. I will admit while actually seeing a line for the women’s restroom at a trade show or conference would make me happy that it’s because more women are in my field and attending these shows. At the same time, one of the main things I look forward to when I attend trade shows/conferences is that I’m attending a large event and I don’t actually have to wait in line to use the bathroom for once!!! It’s just a nice change and I get a good chuckle when I walk past a long line of men having to wait.

    6. TJ Morrison*

      I was at a similarly ratioed tech company when they built their own building. The mens bathrooms were twice as big as the womens.

  8. Cat Lady Esq.*

    I was at a social work conference that had one of the big mens’ restrooms turned into an all gender restroom. There were literally five to ten guys there out of maybe 100-150 attendees – if that.

    1. Nameless*

      my husband is an MSW student and has had maaaaybe two other guys in his classes. I know of one other for sure, there might be another one he’s met since???

    2. No Real Name Here*

      Sounds about right for social work! In MSW school, if there were 3 or more men in my classes of 25-35, that was a notably high number.

    3. kjinsea*

      As an MFT, yeah, that tracks with my profession. And art therapy is even more gender-imbalanced.

      1. music therapist*

        Music therapy is also very skewed, at least in the US. Not sure of the current ratios, but definitely at least 80% female, if not closer to 90%.

  9. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

    I was wondering if any other career has such a gender imbalance that the restrooms reflect that.

    Every medical coding conference I’ve been to, every other men’s restroom has been relabeled as a women’s restroom (or a gender-neutral restroom, in some cases, which has been nice when I’ve seen it).

  11. ChaoticNeutral*

    OP #1 not my job, but that’s how it was at the Taylor Swift concert I attended XD

    1. I'm great at doing stuff*

      #1, the idea of 1000 stern librarians is amazing. I would ask All the book questions.

      As another commenter said above, this happens with early childhood teachers! It’s usually 90% (very benign and friendly) women/female identifying.

  12. Alice in Hinterland*

    The military has the opposite problem to LW1! Most of the facilities were built long before gender integration, so usually a small percentage of the male restrooms are relabeled for females. Some of us had never seen a urinal before boot camp, so we were pretty puzzled by the weird toilets on the wall. We were often so desperate and in such a hurry that we figured out how to use them, though! So, in a military facility, you often might have to go two or three floors to find a women’s restroom.

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      There are urinals made for women, meant conserve water and keep one’s dainty bits from touching the fixture. But they’re not popular because having to finagle underpants/slacks/skirts without dropping anything on the floor or into the urinal is just way too complicated, especially when you have to go Right Now. Not to mention your cheeks would be on full display, even with dividers between urinals.

    2. Not A Raccoon Keeper*

      My very urban Faculty of Agricultural Sciences building was built in 1960s with only one women’s washroom, in the basement of a 4 floor building – the rest were all men’s bathrooms with urinals. At some point before I joined, they had swapped half of them to women’s, but they didn’t remove the urinals until *2009*. We used to host some pretty wild parties in there, which is how I know I can use a urinal quite proficiently, given my equipment.

    3. Anon for This*

      The Pentagon is actually one of the better office buildings for potty parity, but for a not-so-good reason. It was built in Virginia during segregation, so there were two restrooms built essentially side-by-side throughout the building – all intended for men. When the military de-segregated, all the restrooms built to segregate the men were turned into women’s restrooms!

    4. Coverage Associate*

      The story was that when my law school started admitting women, they just relabeled the restrooms and put flower pots in the urinals.

      Unlike the Pentagon, this meant that even in 2008, the restrooms weren’t paired in the older buildings, though the urinals and flowers were gone. When a visitor of the other gender asked where the restroom was, I couldn’t answer. (The buildings were kind of fancy with restrooms hidden down short hallways, so I didn’t walk by the signs to the restrooms I didn’t use.)

  13. Keyboard Cowboy*

    Piling onto the restroom reporting for OP1, one of the recent niche tech conferences I went to was both fairly small and fairly imbalanced (even though software is getting closer to balanced, open source software is still overwhelmingly male). The venue was small enough that it only had one (fairly large) restroom per binary gender, so instead of always having a line at the men’s, always having too much space in the women’s, and not having any gender-neutral solution, they put up gender-neutral signs over both restrooms (with an indicator of which equipment was inside). I thought that was pretty a-ok :)

    1. Texan in exile on her phone*

      Actually I don’t have a problem with making men wait. Maybe that experience might make them a little more sympathetic and understand why building codes need to change. Every time I am in line at a women’s room, I tell the other women to remember this the next time they go to the polls.

  15. Ann O'Nemity*

    I attended a tech conference that was male dominated. The convention center turned the one of the main women’s restrooms into a men’s room. Women were… not pleased. Considering that tech conferences and the tech field more broadly has a reputation for not being welcoming to women, repurposing the women’s restroom for men was panned as yet another example of misogyny.

  16. Jo*

    #1 Restroom question – yes, it’s very common for event centers to temporarily reassign restrooms when an attendee population is heavily skewed one direction.

    1. Coverage Associate*

      I understand that well designed convention centers have the restrooms side by side with a movable wall between. Rather than relabeling, they can move the walls between the restrooms so more stalls are assigned to one or the other.

  17. Observer*

    #2 – I think that this proves that your partner was correct in going to HR.

    It sounds like HR has been trying a bit too hard too be “fair” to Fergus, or there is a fairly high bar to dismissing people. That’s generally a good thing, but sometimes, like in this case, it can mean that someone who needs to be let go gets too many chances.

    What Fergus said is a clear sign that his testimony is totally not credible, in the best case. That’s something HR needs to know, and needs to be able to document.

  18. Juicebox Hero*

    I just love the mental image of the convention center’s mangers cowering away in fear from a thousand shushing librarians.

    Regarding gender imbalance in restrooms: not a job but a hobby, knitting (fibercraft in general). I’ve been on several knitting retreats and you can always tell when a class is taking a break because there’s a big line outside the women’s room as tumbleweeds roll past the men’s. Personally, I have no problem with ducking in and out of the gent’s if I really have to go.

    1. AnonForThis*

      At knitting conventions I’ve attended they’ve relabeled men’s bathrooms for women, which is very helpful!

  19. Manic Pixie HR Girl*

    OP 3, “Coming from a slow, very bureaucratic industry (you can probably guess)”

    … It’s Government, right? It’s definitely Government. :)

  20. Shutterdoula*

    #1 – yes, I’ve attended midwifery and doula conferences where this was done.

  21. Pam Adams*

    An academic conference I attended, dealing with the needs of transgender/nonbinary students marked the standard men’s and women’s restrooms as all-gender for the day.

    1. B*

      I’m in PDX so I’ve seen a lot of different spruces to bathrooms… One pizza place labels the bathrooms by icons for what is available inside (two urinals and a toilet on one door, three toilets on the other door) and provides tampons in both. I’ve seen them labeled as ‘sit’ and ‘stand’ bathrooms. Etc

    2. Nightengale*

      our local autistic advocacy group held an event in a local restaurant and converted both bathrooms to “all gender” due to the many non-binary autistic people expected to be in attendance. Then since we were covering up the gendered Braille signs, I made all-gender replacement Braille ones.

  22. ConventionAdjacent*

    OP1 – I’ve seen this happen before, though not for specific industries. I’ve worked alongside convention centers and meeting facilities for 20+ years, and there have been some specific events that flipped restrooms. One was a large women’s health event, and the attendees / exhibitors were probably 95% female. So any guys who were working a booth for that event or a male doctor presenting at a couple of sessions had to walk across the street to the attached hotel.

  23. B*

    Re the gendered bathrooms, I’ve been to a lot of women in tech conferences where there are obviously way more women than men (at work I NEVER have to wait for a bathroom because it’s the opposite)… some conferences don’t change the bathrooms but at every break between talks the women get tired of standing in line and storm the men’s room. At smaller conferences though I’ve seen them turn half the men’s rooms into gender neutral bathrooms—so men can choose to go in there knowing there will be women and women can choose to go in there knowing there will be men, or both have the choice to use segregated bathrooms (at the cost of a longer walk for men or a longer line for women). I really like it as a choice.

  24. BananaSam*

    OP #1, I asked around, and some people say that there’s a woman to blame. I know they’re wrong and it’s probably all my fault, so I asked them to turn the music down. Anyway, off to go find that missing salt shaker.

      1. BananaSam*

        Oh dear, she was supposed to be from Nantucket, or maybe the Vinyard. It was a season ago.

    2. Dover*

      Nibblin’ on free snacks, trying to send a fax
      Listening to yacht rock beat in my ears
      Cursing the music, along with this old tech
      Keeping me here away from my peers

      Wastin’ away in this Conference Resort
      Trying to send my Quarter Profit Report
      Some people claim that there’s a manager to blame
      But I know it’s nobody’s fault

      Don’t know the reason I came back this season
      Nothin’ to show but this sponsored lanyard
      But it’s a real beauty, colorfully fruity
      Holding my badge and my business card

      Wastin’ away in this Conference Resort
      It’s now overdue, my Quarter Profit Report
      Some people claim that there’s a manager to blame
      Now I think, could it be corporate’s fault?

      I picked up a free bag, for gathering some SWAG
      Filled it on up, had to cruise back to the room
      But there’s a poolside bartender, and soon I’ll surrender
      To “5 o’clock somewhere” invading my Zoom

      Wastin’ away in this Conference Resort
      Forget about sending this stupid report
      Some people claim that there’s a manager to blame
      But I know, it’s the organizer’s fault

      Yes, and some people claim that there’s a manager to blame
      And I know, it’s Jimmy’s darn fault

      1. Rekha3.14*

        omg dying I love this
        Nice work on the rewrite. Kudos!

        I wonder what the corporate world version of filk would be…

  25. FG*

    Potty Parity is a thing even in non-gendered spaces. There are public facilities that have been designed with more women’s restrooms than men’s. The reason is that even if you have equal attendence, women take longer. This isn’t about gender stereotyping, but even just a quick pee takes a woman longer because of stalls vs urinals and clothing.

  26. Just Thinkin' Here*

    OP #1 – I went to a STEM engineering school with a 85% male student population. There was an entire academic building that had no women’s restrooms so women had to run across to the next building just to go. It was a administrative battle my senior year just to convert the basement bathroom to a women’s room. They stuck a garbage bag over the urinal. And the professors in the building complained the converted bathroom was now “wasted space”. I’m sure the female professors were excited to hear the complaints from their male counter-parts.

    I’m hoping the conference center didn’t choose the main men’s bathroom – but I can see where an extra one would be helpful. That said – it means the architects didn’t design the place right in the first place if the users have to go to that extreme.

  27. RabbitRabbit*

    Not quite the same but craft brewing/microbreweries have had a shifting fan base that includes more women these days. More new breweries are popping up with having only single gender-neutral restrooms or with having those added in addition to separated ones. And a large-ish microbrewery on the East Coast (Allagash Brewing) remodeled its taproom to have a large restroom area with an open entryway – big sink area on one side and a row of enclosed single-user bathrooms with lockable doors on the other, plus (IIRC) some larger ones for family usage/accessible/etc needs.

  28. Nonanon*

    “Diet Coke-Gate and feet pics trump my mild question”
    God bless Ask A Manager *salute*

    1. Juicebox Hero*

      I always feel a bad for LWs whose more quotidian questions get posted alongside showstoppers like that. I feel like the commentators ignore them in favor of arguing whether artificial sweeteners are worse for you than alcohol or posting “eww, feet are gross!” for the billionth time.

      1. MsM*

        I don’t know, I imagine some LWs prefer fewer distractions from the main response.

    2. Seashell*

      I reread the comments on that one, and all the soda discussion makes me want to have a blind taste test of Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Diet Pepsi, etc.

      1. Nina*

        Diet Coke tastes adjacent to full-cream Coke (to me it has a milder, more vanilla taste), Coke Zero tastes exactly like full-cream Coke but with a thinner mouthfeel, American HFCS full-cream Coke is disgusting (we have the stuff with real sugar where I live), Diet Pepsi isn’t available here, and Pepsi Max is sharper than full-cream Pepsi but otherwise pretty similar.

    3. And thanks for the coffee*

      I got distracted by both those questions and forgot why I had gone to that page!

  30. VP of Monitoring Employees' LinkedIn Profiles*

    OP #1…

    Another interesting thing: Due to the gender balance in librarianship, the convention center temporarily turns the main floor men’s bathroom into a women’s room, and us ‘guybrarians’ have to use another floor.

    I attended a conference at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver in the late 1990s. On one particular level, the men’s and women’s bathrooms were continuous: men’s entrance, sinks, urinals, toilets, more toilets, lots of toilets, sinks, women’s entrance. The sections of toilets had movable walls so that both bathrooms could be resized depending on the event. A female-centric gathering would have most of the toilets assigned to the women’s room, with only the bare minimum needed for men. A male-centric event would have most of those same toilets assigned to the men, with only the bare minimum needed for women. If necessary, some sections of toilets could be completely blocked off and not used by anyone. (As I recall, that design won an architecture award.)

    1. Enai*

      Amd deservedly so! I always get angry at the standard men’s room: 7 Urinals, 3 stalls — women’s room: 3 stalls ratio. I am left to conclude that architects believe women don’t pee.

      1. ChiliHeeler*

        We had that problem when I took the bar exam at huge convention center. The test takers were about an even split between male and female. The number of bathrooms was technically equal. The number of facilities was not and this was exacerbated by the fact that the toilets were constantly breaking.

    2. JennyEm56*

      Librarian here. I remember when the American Library Association was at the Denver convention center at the same time as some sort of sportsman’s conference. The guys I knew had to go over to the sportsmans’ space to use the facilities.

  31. orange you glad*

    LW1 : if any other career has such a gender imbalance that the restrooms reflect that

    My daughter started research work today in a university physics department. The entire RESEARCH WING has no female bathrooms. Women have to go to the common areas/classroom area for female bathrooms.

    So, yeah, other professions have that. Some don’t care.

  32. Orange You Glad*

    #1 – Not a work-related conference, but when I have attended sorority conferences the venue usually converts the men’s rooms to unisex

    1. orange you glad, #1*

      Ha. I love how we picked two random user names and ended up beside each other!

  33. 1-800-BrownCow*

    Woman Engineer here too. I will admit while actually seeing a line for the women’s restroom at a trade show or conference would make me happy that it’s because more women are in my field and attending these shows. At the same time, one of the main things I look forward to when I attend trade shows/conferences is that I’m attending a large event and I don’t actually have to wait in line to use the bathroom for once!!! It’s just a nice change and I get a good chuckle when I walk past a long line of men having to wait.

  34. UnCivilServant*

    For a few years I worked in an office that had previously been occupied by either an entirely female staff, or so significantly so that both bathrooms had been converted to women’s rooms. One got relabelled to a men’s room when we moved in as the ratio was more even. There was no other change – they even left in the padded bench which occupied one wall. That bench still confuses me.

  35. Ruby*

    The Society of Women Engineers usually commandeers a men’s bathroom at their conferences.

  36. Nonbinary In Computing*

    I work in software and the last conference I went to was ~60% men, ~30% women, and 10% “genders not described by ‘man’ or ‘woman'”. They turned the nearest men’s room and the nearest women’s room into gender-neutral bathrooms for the conference. Most men still used the one with urinals, most women still used the one without, but as a nonbinary person I appreciated that the double-takes in the bathroom were limited to just double-takes – and a cis male coworker was glad he could use the other bathroom when the line was really long!

  37. Susan*

    I was wondering if any other career has such a gender imbalance that the restrooms reflect that.

    Lots of women are going to have a story about this. But here’s one that I always remember, even if it didn’t effect me: It wasn’t until 2011 that there was a women’s restroom near the US House of Representatives chamber.

  38. Sarah*

    To #1 – I’m a software developer and I worked at a large company in the past 5 years who took away the women’s restroom and had two men’s restrooms next to each other. In my division where the women’s restroom was taken away, the ratio was probably about 25% women to 75% men.

    I could see this for a conference I suppose. For a day to day workplace, I have to say it was quite annoying to have to travel to the other end of the building every time I needed to use the bathroom.

    I really hated it! It felt very non-welcoming. When I saw it on my first day, I had a bunch of intrusive thoughts about if I should just immediately quit. When I asked my manager about it, he explained to me why they did it as if I didn’t know the obvious reason “why,” and offered no resolution.

  39. roisin54*

    I’m pretty sure I was at the same conference as OP#1, and those of us who use women’s restrooms were tickled by the temporary conversion. Although I will say it didn’t really help much in this case because the presence of urinals cut down on how many stalls there were. I found myself leaving a lot of sessions early to beat the rush to the bathroom.

  40. spacecowgirl*

    For the bathroom question – I have encountered that on a construction site. I could have used the men’s port-a-potties, but they gave us ladies our own bathroom in the work trailer with a special key that the guys couldn’t use.

    1. Sarah Fowler Wolfe*

      I’ve photographed jobsites where I carefully walked the hydration line because I didn’t want to pass out *or* have to use the porta-potty.

  41. It's Marie - Not Maria*

    LW1: The only other profession I can think of off the top of my head with such a gender imbalance is Human Resources. We are heavily skewed to female presenting.

    1. First time caller*

      Yep! I attended the SHRM National Conference last summer and there were easily 90% women there. We were in a multi-level conference center with at least 100+ individuals rooms for sessions. At every other set of bathrooms, the Men’s room had been converted to a Women’s room. There were still lines at every Women’s restroom during the breaks.

  42. Sarah Fowler Wolfe*

    #1: I’m a woman in construction/transportation, and I’ve never seen a tradeshow or conference venue close women’s bathrooms but maaaaan are they delightfully free at all times

  43. Have you had enough water today?*

    LW 1 – Nursing. When I was managing nurses, any conference I attended had oodles of bathrooms for the women & only a few for the men. One conference, admittedly a small one with only a scooch over 100 attendees, had a grand total of 3 men in attendance.

  45. wiggly cat*

    To the guybrarian: I work in a medical laboratory and that skews heavily female. I believe we have one or two women-only locker rooms with toilets. Otherwise all the washrooms are gender-neutral private lockable rooms, not stall-style.

  46. Thanks Rosalind*

    Yes, LW #1, venues for genetic counseling meetings also need to reassign bathroom genders to reflect the female heavy demographic.

  47. Amy*

    #1- I’m in aviation. At a convention I used to attend every year, they made one set of restrooms into men only, while the other set was normal. There was still never a line for the women’s restroom…. one of my favorite things about being a female pilot!

  48. learnedthehardway*

    OP#2 – it’s good that your partner went to HR with this. He’s gotten some good information about Fergus’ reliability and truthfulness. Of course, HR couldn’t provide details about what actually happened, but it’s pretty clear that Fergus has an agenda of making people distrust your manager Jane, and that he’s not above (at the very least) bending the truth to do so. That should tell your partner all he needs to know about whether the original incident happened as per what Fergus told him or not.

    And it’s good that HR knows that Fergus is telling new employees this nonsense. Perhaps they will be able to do something about him.

  49. Steph*

    Registered Dietitian! Last major RD conference I went to was at a big expo-conference center with three? four? floors and they kept one men’s room.

    They might be up to two, now. Maybe.

  50. Kate*

    OP#1 – As a female working in the heavy civil construction industry, I have tons of experience with gender balance affecting the bathrooms. I’ve worked on enough jobsites where a bank of port-a-johns were the only bathroom nearby my office and I and the other ten or so women (out of probably 200 people) had our own, locked port-a-john and one of the women kept the key to it in her office. I can’t explain how luxurious it felt to use a semi-private, women-only port-a-john on a mostly-male construction site during 100 degree summer heat.

  51. Marshmallows*

    On the gender imbalance affecting restrooms. I’m in a very male dominated industry and as such the women’s restrooms/ locker rooms at the locations I’ve worked at have always been significantly smaller than the men’s. Like 2 stalls vs 4 urinals and 4 stalls. It’s improving, but in older buildings it’s still pretty common.

    1. Marshmallows*

      Oh and at one plant I worked at, one department only had a men’s bathroom. The women in the department had to go to the admin building… a solid 10-15 min walk from their department.

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