More males than females suffer and die from diarrhoea in every region except South-East Asia. Absence or inadequate provision of public toilets for women reflects - and reinforces - women's exclusion from public power and public spaces more generally. Yet many millions of people in the world lack even the most rudimentary means of obtaining safe water, while billions do not have sanitation facilities that are protected from outside contamination (UN 2015, UN 2014, UN-Women 2014, WHO and UNICEF 2014). Water and sanitation access, demand, provision, priority, health, organization and policy are gendered, even if this is manifested in different ways in different places. The gendered dimensions of the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector are increasingly reflected in public policy agendas, but concrete results have been partial and uneven. Water was generally thought of as a physical resource whose provision was determined, for the most part, by the hydrological cycle and physical infrastructure.