Reporting for Philadelphia-area website Billy Penn last week, Anna Orso told the fascinating story of that city’s gender-neutral restroom law. Since a law requiring single-occupancy restrooms to maintain all-gender signage went into effect in January 2016, the City of Philadelphia has issued no citations against any offending building owners. Perhaps even more impressively, the Department of Licenses and Inspections has fielded just three complaints against gendered signage. Taken together, these facts make Philadelphia a special case for how to build code compliance. Could the stipulated fines of up to $2,000 have something to do with the low number of violators? Whatever the reason, the city has acknowledged that awareness of and compliance with the law has been strong.

Like Philly, San Francisco passed a law requiring that single-occupancy restrooms be marked as all-gender in 2016, and as of March 2017, the same is true for all single-user restrooms in California, thanks to the Equal Restroom Access Act (AB1732). Unlike Philadelphia, however, the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection (SFDBI) has received 63 complaints regarding noncompliant signage for single-occupancy restrooms since May 2016. Of these, 27 remain active. Whatever the causes for this disparity, one thing is clear: While people might assume that progressive San Francisco would be fully onboard with all-gender restroom laws, the data suggests otherwise.

The reports are concentrated in the Mission, SoMa and Lakeshore areas, while other areas have been free of complaints. Of course, digging deeper could reveal that some San Franciscans are simply more apt to report gendered signage than their Philadelphian counterparts. Yet this explanation seems less than likely, since both cities are politically liberal-leaning with citizens who are aware of the issues surrounding transgender bathroom access. Furthermore, although Philadelphia boasts a population above 1.5 million compared to San Francisco’s 870,000, the number of complaints is nowhere near commensurate — in fact, San Francisco has received more than 20 times the number of complaints recorded in Philly.

*Data drawn from DataSF, the city’s open data platform, the week of Aug. 28, 2017.

At the same time, the list of complaints in San Francisco reveals that the problem is not limited to mom-and-pop storefronts. National franchises including McDonald’s, Chipotle and Burger King have been the subject of complaints against gendered restroom signage in San Francisco, suggesting that not even the largest corporations have good awareness of the requirements. Covering California’s all-gender restroom law for LA Weekly in March, Rick Paulas argued that for small restaurants, adding all-gender restrooms will be “simply out of the equation.” Yet with complaints against six different Chipotle locations in San Francisco alone, it seems that all-gender restroom rules are a challenge for businesses of any size. Even public buildings can be culprits: One complaint noted that Anza Library had yet to update its bathroom signage in September 2016. “Surprised city buildings aren’t up to code yet,” wrote the complainant.

The purpose of this essay is not to argue that San Francisco is less inclusive than Philadelphia but to highlight differences that deserve more attention. By building more awareness around the issue of all-gender restroom signage, perhaps better information can influence more widespread compliance (and vice versa). Large corporations should absolutely be held accountable for violating city ordinances, while small and family-owned businesses deserve some leniency by code inspectors seeking to bring their districts into compliance. These are goals to which large cities like San Francisco should strive, and perhaps Philadelphia has set the standard for how to do it properly.

Above all, the importance of all-gender restroom rules extends beyond the signs themselves. As design researcher Sara Hendren wrote regarding the Accessible Icon Project, the end goal is behavioral change: “[T]he graphic is not the destination of the work. The destination is a thousand invisible — and, I hope, eventually visible — acts of structural and cultural change: in global rights, in abuse prevention, in meaningfully inclusive schools and workplaces.”

Often, all-gender restroom signage only reinforces an existing reality. Over time, however, signage becomes a key element influencing human behavior in the built environment. San Francisco could be a shining example of these progressive changes, but this means forcing everyone — both large and small — to play by the rules.

— Daniel Towns B.A. ’13 M.A. ’17

Contact Daniel Towns at mrtowns ‘at’ stanford.edu.