One small squat for women, one giant leap for peequality. Peequal is the world’s first women’s urinal, and it has already done wonders for women’s festival experiences by reducing the dreaded queues for the toilets by a third. Not to mention, Peequal spaces – which support women, AFAB and trans people – are parties in themselves.
Bathrooms and who should have access to them has been a topic of great debate since the UK Supreme Court ruled on 16 April that the terms “women” and “sex” in the Equality Act 2010 legally refer to the biological sex assigned at birth. Confusion as to what this would mean for trans people and which bathroom they could, and should, use has been rife on social media, and just one example of the painful backlash of the ruling.
But bathroom inequality has been around for a long time. Women regularly wait up to 34 times longer than men just to use the toilet, owing to a number of factors such as menstruation and women being the primary caregivers. Research done by Ghent University showed that, using the same floor plan, men get 20-30% more from a combination of urinals and cubicles compared to cubicles only for women. If account is taken for the fact that women’s cubicles are not big enough to accommodate women with children or assist other adults with toileting needs, this works out to a ratio of 2:1 in favour of men, which is the opposite of the ratio needed to achieve potty parity.
Peequal began as a University Masters’ project in which co-founders Hazel McShane and Amber Probyn had to theoretically propose a solution to a real-world problem. Hazel says: “We kind of straightaway knew what we wanted to do. It was all about the problem; we were just so curious. Like, why are women waiting in line? It’s the most basic bodily function; we all need to pee, so why is there this disparity? We weren’t necessarily going to make a women’s urinal initially. It was fully explorative, and it was meant to just be a dissertation, but we got pretty carried away.”
Alongside their studies at Bristol University, where Amber studied Anthropology with Innovation and Hazel, Physics with Innovation, they spent their summers working at festivals. Even though women’s toilets face disproportionately large queues everywhere, they say they couldn’t get over the consistently thirty-minute-plus queues at festivals. Hazel says: “You would miss out on your favourite act and see men just waltzing in and out. So as soon as we saw that problem, we started talking about it. We saw the problem everywhere and got pretty riled up.” Peequal gets the 90% of women who just need to pee out of the cubicle queues, meaning everyone can get back to enjoying the events they love much quicker.
Amber says a real turning point came when they were doing loads of desk research at the start of the project and realised there were so many inventions that helped men pee, but there was nothing that helped women. Amber says, “There’s literally nothing. I honestly couldn’t believe it. I was like, surely not. Surely I’ve missed something here.”
A TED talk by architect and writer John Cary confirms this: he spoke about the reason the line for the men’s room is almost always shorter than the women’s is because of their design. Bathrooms, along with most of the modern world, have been predominantly designed by men, which has led to design issues not aligning with the needs of the people actually using the environments.
The co-founders talk about how we live in an existing environment that is skewed because it was designed by men without input from women, like cityscapes and places with loads of stairs not accounting for women with prams, or tiny corridors and alleys not accounting for women having to walk home at night. “Peequal is making sure that in the temporary environments, we have equity and equality. It really is like a stand for equality and equal provision.” Amber told me.
“Everyone’s always like, why hasn’t this happened before? Surely this is a standard facility? But it’s still very much something that events have to want to do instead of something they must do. So we’re trying to change that now. We’re trying to make it more of a standard and trying to change policy in the future and make sure that women’s urinals are an expectation.” Hazel adds: “To give women the choice, just as men have the choice.”
Peequal urinals are pioneering for pee-equality not just by providing women with the spaces to pee that have always been accessible to men, but by striving to remove the taboos surrounding them, and anything to do with women’s health and products. “It’s even in our language, it’s steeped in it. We say, ‘I’m just going to powder my nose’ to use the toilet; it’s so unsexy to talk about bodily functions in connection with women that it just means that everyone steers clear of it.
“That’s one of the reasons why it hasn’t been adopted. In the investment landscape, men don’t invest in women’s products because they can’t identify with them (and lots of other reasons too).” Amber says they knew something had to happen, that there was a gap, and they wanted to run with it. “And we’re still running with it,” she says. “Just opening up the conversation around women’s urinals in and of itself is addressing a taboo. Whether you are hating on it or loving it, what we found in our media is that both opinions just propel the discussion,” says Amber.
An important aspect of the taboo-busting Peequal urinals is their branding and messaging. Hazel says: “We want it to be as inclusive a space as possible and allow as many people as possible to feel safe because so many people are affected by the current portable toilet provisions. All our signage is about inclusion: bright, colourful, playful, messaging online as well as in person. We really worked on our language to make sure as many people feel comfortable as possible.” Some of the most common words their users have used in feedback have been “game-changing” and “liberating”. “People say it’s such a small thing,” Hazel says, “but it’s so fundamental. You have spent your whole life experiencing this small thing, but it’s a small thing that’s normalised inequality played out day by day.”
“It’s one of the spaces that I always feel uplifted in. Everyone’s making friends and waving at each other, and it has this wonderful bathroom feel.” Amber says that during their research, they looked at clubs in Bristol where they realised how much community there is in women’s bathrooms. “It’s just pep talks going on in one corner, and someone’s crying and being hugged in the other corner. You know? There’s so much love and support. We wanted that in Peequal too.” Peequal spaces also include period positive spaces with cup washing facilities and free sanitary products.
Peequal were at the London Marathon this year, and one runner commented that using Peequal was the highlight of their day. Not running past the London Eye, or the pride of completing a full marathon, but having a women’s urinal experience. “It’s not just a toilet,” Amber says, “it is something that really has hit a need for women.”
When Hazel and Amber first started approaching festivals with Peequal, a key selling point was the money they lose out on when women are stuck in queues for the toilets. For a 20,000 capacity event, with women standing in a queue for an average of 30 minutes, the event loses around £127,000 in revenue. “Because if you think about it,” Hazel says, “when you’re choosing between going to a loo or getting food or having a pint in between sets, if you have to pee, you won’t have that drink. You have to really think about whether you want to ‘break the seal’ and queue again for the toilet. So you stop buying things.” The first festival Peequal appeared at was Glastonbury, who were really supportive and helped co-design parts of Peequal whilst Hazel and Amber were still students.
They say they thought it would take a while for users to adapt to using Peequal’s urinals, as there are a lot of changes to the way women – especially in Western countries – are used to going to the bathroom. Amber says: “But, actually, over one event, the women take to it like there’s no tomorrow.” There may not have been a market for women’s urinals before, but Peequal have created one. “It’s using our users to challenge our customers in a really positive way, to then produce an environment that’s more equal,” Amber says.
The creation of a demanding market has meant that Peequal have been able to scale up really quickly across festivals and mass-participation events. Hazel says: “There are so many plates spinning, and there are so many inbound requests and festivals globally.” She shares that they have begun manufacturing in Poland, and are ready to scale into Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and are also in talks with Australia and the US. The goal is to add permanent Peequal facilities to locations, but they have to scale globally with their temporary structure first.
They are currently on version five of their sustainable Peequal urinals, having evolved from cardboard prototypes to the first version after Amber learnt to weld. They took inspiration from everywhere. Hazel says, “From its infancy, it was talking to women. It was interviewing women about their needs. We would be the most annoying mates at house parties, in queues at Wetherspoons, or talking to as many different people on the street to get all different ages and stages and backgrounds that we could design for.” They constantly looked for feedback from users, as well as their stakeholders and anyone who is part of the services, to implement into their designs, which is why their confidence in their product and the pending scale-up is so high.
Amber says, “I think it’s fair to say that the feedback from the women is the fuel that keeps it going. From day one, it’s always been about what women have said in terms of: they want it so much that it just needs to happen. I think when we’ve had touch-and-go moments like any startup founders have, that’s what keeps us going.”
By bursting bubbles, not bladders, Peequal’s multi-coloured, taboo-busting women’s urinals are fighting for bathroom equality and beyond. Because the repercussions of inaccessibility to bathrooms go far beyond being a mere nuisance or discomfort, it can ruin experiences and endanger lives.
