Public toilets should be sex segregated not only for women's safety, but also to accommodate the different needs between the sexes such as women needing more floor space than men.
"On the face of it, it may seem fair and equitable to accord male and female public toilets the same amount of floor space – and historically, this is the way it has been done. 50/50 division of floor space has even been formalised in plumbing codes. However, if a male toilet has both cubicles and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square foot of floor space in the male bathroom than in the female bathroom. Suddenly equal floor space isn’t so equal.
But even if male and female toilets had an equal number of stalls, the issue wouldn’t be resolved, because women take up to 2.3 times as long as men to use the toilet. Women make up the majority of the elderly and disabled, two groups that will tend to need more time in the toilet. Women are also more likely to be accompanied by children, as well as disabled and older people. Then there’s the 20–25% of women of childbearing age who may be on their period at any one time, and therefore needing to change a tampon or a sanitary pad.
Women may also in any case require more trips to the bathroom than men: pregnancy significantly reduces bladder capacity, and women are eight times more likely to suffer from urinary-tract infections than men which again increases the frequency with which a toilet visit is needed. In the face of all these anatomical differences, it would surely take a formal (rather than substantive) equality dogmatist to continue to argue that equal floor space between men and women is fair."
— Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
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