According to The American Society for Microbiology, only 58 percent of men and 75 percent of women wash their hands after going to the bathroom. Think about that the next time you give someone a handshake or a high five.

Besides reinforcing the stereotype that women are cleaner than men, this statistic only confirms how unsanitary we are. What makes these numbers even scarier is that these percentages might have been lower if only college-aged kids were counted. Our age group tends to be one of the least hygienic.

With the recent hoopla over the H1N1 virus, these statistics are definitely a cause for worry, which is probably why we are constantly bombarded with reminders to wash our hands. The University has recently changed the desktop background of all the PODS on campus. The new background features a pair of hands holding a bar of soap with text stressing the importance of proper hygiene.

Although this is obviously a good first step, these reminders probably won’t change general behavior. In order to do that, you have to go to the heart of the problem and figure out why such unsanitary behavior is so rampant.

According to a survey, people wash their hands more often in public than private bathrooms. Perhaps they assume their homes are clean, therefore making it unnecessary to wash their hands as frequently. In public bathrooms, however, the opposite thought process can deter people from getting their hands wet. Public restrooms tend to be less clean, and many people, especially guys, probably find it self-defeating to wash their hands in a dirty public sink. These two reasons may sound ridiculous, but people actually think this.

Another possible reason that people do not wash their hands may be because of the soap. Public restrooms have the worst kind of liquid soap, which feels more like dish detergent than anything else. The smell is usually stale yet sterile (it’s hard to describe), and the colors range from deep yellow (the color of pee) to blue and green. If it were up to me, all hand soap would be like Softsoap: well-textured and fresh smelling.

If public bathrooms improved the quality of their soap, a lot more people would be less hesitant to wash their hands.

Now to digress a little bit. Has anyone ever noticed how differently people behave in a really nice restroom (for example, a restroom in an image-conscious restaurant)? Rarely do I ever see someone not wash their hands in such a place. People tend to saunter slowly along, take their time to check themselves in the mirror and wash their hands extremely thoroughly. In a regular public restroom, the opposite happens — most people come in and go out as quickly as possible and are more likely to not even acknowledge the presence of the sinks.

I’m not saying that the best way to encourage hand washing in this campus is to replace all the current sinks with expensive marble ones. However, it’s definitely interesting to notice the disparity of behavior.

Perception is everything. In a nice bathroom, washing your hands is therapeutic. In a regular bathroom, washing your hands is a nuisance. And this concept leads to my final point: public bathrooms should be less purely functional and more human. Going to the bathroom should be more private and intimate, an experience in itself. If people want us to invest more time and energy in the restroom to do such things as washing our hands, then they should make the bathrooms themselves more appealing.

And they can start by changing the soap.