I first saw a man with a child in the ladies toilets way back in the 1970s, but that was a baby needing a nappy change, the only facilities were in the ladies & he was a young Canadian backpacker in Luxembourg, so a bit exotic anyway.
Over at least the last two decades it has been normal to see boys, even as old as ten, in the ladies toilets, since people started to get nervous about sending them in to the gents on their own. I always wonder how the boys feel about this, and at what age they start to rebel, as I assume they must.
We do not, generally, have single sex toilets in private houses & in many ways there is no reason why there should not be unisex toilets in semi-public places such as offices – at least so I used to argue when I worked in a tall building which had the ladies & gents on alternate floors. OK if your office was on the ‘right’ floor, but a pain if you had to go all the way down a flight of stairs & then back up again. It also got you disapproving looks, & sometimes audibly disapproving comments if you had to use the lift, from those who fail to appreciate that not all disabilities are visibly obvious.
And, as a colleague was fond of saying, women will always be at a disadvantage until there are unisex loos in the workplace because the men are wont to use the need for a loo break as a sneaky way of going off to agree their own conclusions to a meeting.
Separate loos may also be unfair to women if not enough of them are provided. But what is fair? Is it equality of provision in terms of equal numbers? This was the subject of a nicely judged conversation on More Or Less this week between Tim Harford & John Banzhaf. The isues which need to be considered & argued over - of how to define fairness, unfairness & discrimination between groups - apply equally to all other areas of service provision, even to equal pay, since they are in part biologically & in part socially determined.
Mind you Robert Crampton recently reported that at least in some of the trendier pubs in London young women are taking it upon themselves to correct any imbalance in provision by simply going in to the men’s room if the queue for the ladies is too long.
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