NY considers women's restroom rights
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Women wait in line to use a restroom at Rockefeller Plaza in New York.
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NEW YORK (AP) -- Potty parity. Squatters rights.
Go ahead, make fun of the fact that several City Council members introduced a bill Wednesday to have more restrooms set aside for women than men in most buildings. To women -- and one male law professor -- it's a matter of gender equity.
"Women need more restroom facilities simply because women take longer," John F. Banzhaf III, a public interest law professor at George Washington University Law School, said Wednesday.
Banzhaf, who has filed several court complaints, wrote recently that these legal cases show that women are standing up for their rights "even if they can't stand up while exercising those rights."
"We would never tolerate a system where women would routinely have to wait five times longer than men to have their blood tested, even if men's and women's blood were tested for different things," Banzhaf argues. "And we shouldn't tolerate a system where women routinely are forced to wait five or more times longer than men to perform a basic and necessary personal function."
So why might women take longer in the bathroom? Because they often have small children to tend to, they wear more clothes, and, as Councilwoman Yvette Clarke put it, there's that anatomical difference.
"We don't have the same type of equipment that men have," Clarke said.
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