A woman is suing the Vienna City Council for discrimination over access to public toilets, complaining that women must pay to use cubicles while men can use urinals for free.“I was in a park with a friend and we both needed to use the bathroom. He could go for free, but I had to pay 50 cents [US$0.58]. I thought to myself: How is that possible?” Melanie Gradik, 27, told reporters in the Austrian capital’s Augarten.“I want everyone to be able to use the bathroom on an equal footing. Either we all pay 50 cents or no one pays 50 cents,” Gradik said, but added it is not about the money.
Melanie Gradik, stands near public toilets in the Augarten in Vienna on Wednesday. Gradik is suing the city’s council for discrimination over access to public toilets.
“It’s a small thing, but it’s also an example of how women are treated unequally in everyday life,” she said.Gradik has filed a legal complaint against the municipality, arguing that exclusively charging women for access to public toilets contravenes the city’s anti-discrimination laws.
According to her lawyer, Petra Laback, the fact that some public facilities offer free urinals for men creates inequality between the sexes.“Men have an additional free alternative, women do not,” she said.If Gradik wins her case, it could set a precedent across Austria, Laback said.“This will certainly have an impact on other municipalities,” he said.Vienna has 168 publicly managed toilet facilities, 139 of which are free to use.According to the city authorities, the 29 facilities that charge a fee do so because they employ toilet attendants.“In very busy locations with intensive use it is necessary for organizational reasons to ensure supervision in order to guarantee proper use and cleanliness,” said Sandra Holzinger, a spokeswoman for the municipality.“In these 29 facilities, a usage fee of 50 cents must be paid for the use of cubicles by people of all genders,” she said, adding that urinals were additionally provided “in order to prevent fouling caused by urinating in public spaces.”For law professor Anna Gamper of the University of Innsbruck, the system raises serious questions about equality.Under Austrian law, “a distinction between men and women may only be made if there is a special, objective justification for it,” Gamper said.In the case of public toilets, such a justification “does not appear to exist,” as the cost of building, maintaining and cleaning cubicles and urinals is basically the same, she said.Even if cubicles were slightly more expensive to maintain or consumed more water, that would not necessarily be enough to justify a price difference compared with urinals, she said.The argument that men also have to pay to use a cubicle does not hold up because they still have a free option that is not available to women, she added.In Gamper’s view, women should not be financially disadvantaged because of their anatomy or because they need cubicles for safety reasons, for example.
