Financial Firm Wants Fewer Women's Toilets in Its Manhattan Office

The group that owns the Manhattan high-rise home of male-dominated Japanese financial firm Nomura is requesting a new Certificate of Occupancy that will allow far fewer women’s toilets to be installed on those lower levels occupied by Nomura. That’s because Nomura boasts a long and storied history of not having many female employees, and all those extra women’s restrooms would just end up becoming the vacant, haunted abodes of ghost women who don’t appreciate institutionalized sexism.

The 59-story West Side building’s ownership group put in a request to divvy up “water closets and lavatories” on the Nomura floors at a ratio of 75/25, male to female. The group, led by George Comfort & Sons, has tried to justify this request by explaining that “certain financial operations” in the building (that would be Nomura) have historically been 75 percent male and a mere 25 percent female.

According to the Post, New York’s plumbing code mandates that the number of toilets in women’s restrooms be equal to the number of urinals and toilets in men’s restrooms. In this case, however, the building’s owners are trying to use historical data from Nomura to show that toilet parity would be superfluous, i.e. an unnecessary expenditure. Robert Brubaker from the American Restroom Association told the Post that the request is peculiar, and explained that, if granted, the 75/25 toilet ratio might give Nomura further justification for not hiring more women. “They could get into a thing,” he said, “where they say they can’t hire more women because they don’t have enough toilets.”

Brubaker added that an American company would most likely not try to pull any crap like this, but he couldn’t muster any toilet humor on par with the Post‘s many quips about “flushing” the “potty-parity” request.

Nomura headquarters owner seeking persmission to install fewer toilets for women on lower levels [NY Post]