Yelp will now show you which businesses have gender inclusive restrooms
Yelp will soon be able to tell you about a new aspect of restaurants and businesses that is often overlooked: whether its restrooms are gender inclusive.
The company is rolling out a new feature that will identify businesses that have "gender-neutral restrooms," similar to how it identifies establishments that are wheelchair accessible or accept credit cards.
With the update, Yelp will officially add "gender-neutral restroom" to its list of business attributes, which appear on a business' page, alongside their hours, reviews and other details. Yelp says it defines these restrooms as those that are "accessible to persons of any gender and are a locking, single-stall bathroom."
As with other updates that rely on user-generated information, it will take some time before the information can be added to the page of each business but the company is now collecting the data from users and business owners.
Beginning today, "gender-neutral restroom" will appear as one of the categories when you check in at an establishment or write a review. Business owners can also fill in the information for their own listings.
Yelp is hoping the update will help the LGBTQ community find establishments they feel comfortable with, as well as help educate business owners about the issue.
"Hopefully this will signal to businesses as something good that they will want to advertise about our business," Yelp's Head of Diversity Rachel Williams says.
The update comes on the heels of Yelp and 52 other companies joining an amicus brief in support of a transgender student in Arizona who was barred from the boy's restrooms at his school. Williams says it was the company's involvement in the court case that originally inspired the update.
"Conversations started to happen internally about how uncomfortable people are with what's going on in the world today in our country with people's civil liberties and rights. Our product team wanted to help out and get involved," Williams says.
And while the feature may be relatively small, she says it sets an important precedent for how a company's product can be impacted by its social policies around diversity and inclusion.
"This is one of the [first] times we've integrated any type of public policy or social stance into our products. This speaks volumes that we are marrying those two ideas that have been separate for a very long time."
Topics Social Good
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
