There were three ceiling lights in the women's room on my floor of the old Math building at the Ohio State University. When a light bulb burned out, it didn't get replaced. The room had no windows, so when all three light bulbs died, it was pitch black. How did the janitors clean the women's room in the dark? I imagined them wearing spelunkers' head lamps as they cleaned the toilets. I wondered why they never reported the burned out light bulbs to the maintenance department. I learned that was my job.
The hair dryers in the women's locker room at the gym had a worse problem. There weren't many of them, and at one point all were broken. The winters in Columbus, Ohio were cold enough to freeze my hair. I wondered whether frozen hair breaks like icicles. Fixing the hair dryers seemed like a worthwhile cause.
I reported the problem a few times, but nothing happened. I eventually phoned the maintenance department. The man at the other end told me that of course they couldn't send a man into the women's locker room to fix it. I asked why they couldn't send a woman. OSU didn't employ any women who could do maintenance. Couldn't they hire a woman? No, women weren't competent enough at fixing things. I pointed out that if this was a job that could only be done by a woman, then they should hire a woman to do it, and train her if necessary. He was unimpressed.
The eventual solution didn't involve hiring women in the maintenance department. My recollection is that it involved erecting plywood walls to form a long temporary corridor from the locker room entrance to the hair dryers, for the repairmen to walk down. I don't know how they built the corridor while maintaining privacy for the women in the locker room, but the rights of women might not have been their top priority.