When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Bathrooms

As we physically prepare ourselves for the big installation job we have coming up this week, we are also mentally preparing ourselves for the thing that every woman dreads about being on a construction site—the bathrooms. Women are famously a minority on most construction sites, and as a product women’s bathrooms are often overlooked.

We have had instances where our team have been the only women on a jobsite. A low number of women usually means only one women’s bathroom, often on the other end of the site from where we’re working, and often very poorly maintained.

We have had multiple instances where we’ve had to ask the super to unlock the bathroom, which was left neglected due to lack of use. We have also encountered women’s bathrooms that don’t lock at all, where you need to go to the bathroom in pairs so that you can guard the door for your colleague. These bathrooms are often dimly-lit, if they’re lit at all. Having to hold your phone as you pee because you need the flashlight to find the toilet paper shouldn’t be an everyday workplace occurrence. Speaking of toilet paper, we always bring our own to the job because the bathrooms are often not well stocked, if they have toilet paper at all.

Women who work on construction sites have reported that they try to drink less water on the job to avoid having to go to the bathroom as much, which along with the manual labor that they are performing, can cause many health risks. Though we are seeing rising numbers of women working in this field, I’m sure the number would be higher if we had better accommodations. A call for change is happening worldwide, and as we are starting to see a better work culture, hopefully better bathrooms will follow.