Skipping the queue – female urinals successfully tested in KZN, Mpumalanga

Abstract

Any woman who has waited in a long queue to ‘spend a penny’ in a public toilet may have been slightly peeved at the quick turnaround in the men’s loos, due largely to the availability of urinals. This type of facility has long been reserved for men, from the Pissoirs that were installed on the pavements of Paris from the 1830s – but have more recently given way to self-cleaning, unisex Sanisettes – to the UriLifts that pop up at night to cater for Amsterdam’s revellers, only to retreat beneath a manhole cover by day. Over the years, a number of rather fancy women-specific designs for urinals have been developed in Europe and the United States, but they have not been widely implemented. These have typically been the wall-mounted variety, allowing women to adopt the same stance they would take to avoid sitting on a toilet seat. Elsewhere in Africa, however, trough-type urinals are known to have been installed at a number of schools for use by girls, with mixed success.

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