Last spring my Gender and Technological Change class did a project on bathrooms and gender, using our campus as a laboratory.

You can read all about the rationale for the experiment here, but the short version is that we tried to look at how the built environment influences, and even enforces gender divisions, and how resources in the real world impact how people feel and express themselves in public spaces. This tied into larger class discussions about how seemingly neutral technologies create and enforce categories in society, rather than merely reflecting them.

The outcome of the project was a variety of visualizations of the data the class collected–including graphs, charts, and spreadsheets. Perhaps the most impressive and useful one was the google map that drew on the class’s research. For those who might not be familiar with the abbreviated names for each campus building, an IIT campus map is available here.

View Bathrooms by Gender at IIT – Gender and Technological Change in a larger map

(Note: Data is incomplete for the Life Sciences Building (LS). The men’s bathrooms for that building were unfortunately not counted. So although it appears on the map as *only* having women’s bathrooms, this is not the case. We hope to update that soon.)

Two students in particular took the lead in creating this resource: Carla Kundert, who did all the meticulous work of setting up the map and transferring information it, and Cruz Tovar, who created a unified spreadsheet of all the information collected by the class that allowed the data to be easily utilized for the map.

By giving information about the relative sizes and locations of men’s and women’s bathrooms, the map tries to show the inadequacy of facilities on campus for women, as well as the paucity of bathrooms designated as gender-neutral. It tries to comment on which bathrooms are easily accessible for users with mobility concerns, and also indicates which bathrooms on campus might be good targets for future conversion to gender-neutral spaces, noting which facilities have a single stall configuration.

It was the class’s hope that this map could serve as a resource for current and future IIT students, and perhaps jump-start a public discussion about how IIT’s administration can meet the needs of students more effectively when it comes to this basic and essential resource.

As the chart to the left shows, there are significantly fewer facilities for women than there should be based on women’s numbers in the Illinois Tech population: Though IIT still struggles to attract and retain women students and faculty, overall we are 37% women, with our undergraduate student body currently 31% women, and roughly 21% of our full-time faculty. Critically, this chart also shows the woefully tiny resources devoted to safe, gender neutral restroom spaces on campus.

 

 

In my Gender and Technological Change course the students are currently looking at how gender and infrastructure shape each other, and in particular, how technological infrastructure disciplines our thinking, and our bodies, into specific patterns.

The class read a great historical article on the moral, political, and economic wranglings to try to get public bathrooms placed in major U.S. and European cities during the late 19th and early 20th century. The catch? Public bathrooms for women were seen as outside the pale by most men in charge at the time, leaving city women in an uncomfortable situation. Professor Maureen Flanagan, department head here at IIT in the Humanities, shows in “Private Needs, Public Spaces–Public Toilets in the Anglo-Atlantic Patriarchal City: London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago” that attempts to keep public bathrooms for women out of cities were also attempts to shape women’s behavior into “respectable” patterns–namely to keep women out of public places and to keep their time out and about to a minimum.

We also looked at more recent bathroom projects: particularly ones designed to highlight or make more available genderqueer and trans-friendly bathroom spaces. In this regard, college and university campuses have often led the way, making specific policies to create gender-neutral and genderqueer-friendly bathroom spaces.

On a personal note, I still remember how my undergraduate institution lacked enough women’s bathrooms in many buildings–including the undergraduate library–because women had only been allowed into the main parts of the campus as (almost) equals in the 1970s and 1980s. And even in the 1990s, when I was a college student, genderqueer-friendly bathrooms were barely even acknowledged as an issue by the administration, despite student groups’ protests.

Here at IIT, we have a multi-layered problem: not only is the discourse on queer issues on campus relatively quiet, the infrastructure of the campus has long been designed to reflect the fact that the majority of IIT’s students and faculty are men. (Currently, women make up roughly 30% of the student population here.)

So our class did an experiment to try to see how these things were reflected in, and also shaped by, the physical infrastructure of the campus. Each class member went to a series of buildings on campus and made notes about the bathrooms, including the gender of the bathroom and accessibility issues. Once their comments have been collected below, we’ll put them up on a campus map using Google maps to create an online resource for the campus.