Nomura, a Japanese financial company, wants to have more men’s washrooms than ladies’ - but are they setting themselves up for a discrimination charge?
Male employees of Nomura will be relieved to hear that their toilet toils have been addressed. The Japanese financial company is making the move for more male toilets in the office.
Nomura will be moving into its new New York headquarters in uptown Manhattan equipped with more lavatory facilities for males than females on four floors of the building. The main trading floor, located on the fourth story, will gain an additional men’s room and the restrooms on three higher floors will get additional urinals, the New York Times reported.
According to a document filed with the city, this is a reflection of the typically male-dominated financial-services operations, where the building owner, a group led by George Comfort & Sons, rationalized the increase in male restrooms with the fact that “certain financial-services operations” have a historic composition of 75% men and 25% women.
This differs with New York City’s plumbing code of having equal numbers of restrooms for both genders.
Robert Brubaker, programme manager for the American Restroom Association, said normally the arguments for restroom inequity involve obvious places such as dorms and prisons. “This is the first time we’ve heard it from a business,” he said. “They could get into a thing where they say they can’t hire more women because they don’t have enough toilets.”
