Learning to go with your gut s

New survey reveals great lengths women go to, to avoid having to go

BY SARAH BOESVELD hortly after crushing your morning coffee at the office, it starts: That rumble-in-the-Bronx, the growl of your intestines working their magic, moving things southbound. If you’re a woman, that gut roiling may spur panic – or at the very least a strategy session as to take care of business as discreetly as possible.

The ‘should I go or should I hold it’ debate was pried open this week by an article in the Daily Beast, which called women’s squeamishness with public washroom defecation “the last office taboo for women.”

While Sheryl Sandberg’s influential bestseller Lean In has motivated women to launch a more active pursuit of the corner office, the Beast identifies the ladies’ room as a place that’s still “wracked with anxiety and shame.”

The workplace bathroom is a unique social minefield for women — people can get to know one another quite well at work, but there is often still a social barrier raised. An office is a competitive environment, where image and reputation matters — that, of course, extends to the bathroom.

“I hate to say this but [women are] more self-conscious than men about the noise factor, the smell and all of that kind of thing,” Kimberly Law, a Vancouverbased etiquette consultant, told the Post Tuesday.

The lengths women go to to avoid detection are many: Jill, a 28-yearold NYC transplant from Vancouver who told Daily Beast that if she absolutely must go to the bathroom at work, she lifts her feet off the ground and steels them against the side of the stall to avoid the “chance that the person next to me would recognize my shoes and forever hold in their heads that I was the girl” in the stall next to them.

“How is that even possible? Wouldn’t the angle and leverage be all wrong? I’m picturing Jill pooping like a pingpong show,” wrote Maureen O’Connor of New York Magazine’s The Cut fashion blog. “Her effort is unnecessary: Nobody peeks under the edge of a stall to identify a pooping woman by her shoes. Nobody.”

An unnamed female host of a U.S. morning show told the Beast she walks 10 minutes (10 minutes!) to a bathroom in another part of her office building.

A new national survey of more than 1,000 Canadian women found that while the majority acknowledge the importance of bowel health, a whopping 71% admitted to going to great lengths to avoid defecating — especially in a public washroom.

Conducted Feb. 28-March 7 on behalf of Vision Critical and funded by Janssen Inc., the survey found almost half of women (46%) agree they have avoided going in a public washroom, and over 40% have waited until the bathroom was vacant. Forty-five percent of women reported feeling embarrassed to have a bowel movement in a public washroom and 23% have — like that anonymous morning show host — have found a ‘room of one’s own’ on another floor of their office building.

Dr. Louis Liu, a gastroenterologist at Toronto Western Hospital, says it can actually be medically dangerous to fight nature and hold it all in. ‘‘If an individual tries to hold back, there may be an increasing likelihood of constipation,” he said. After awhile, he said, the ‘gotta go’ sensation will fail to register.

‘‘It’s not an urge anymore,” he said.