Understanding School Administrators’ and Teachers’ Perceptions of Gender-Inclusive Washroom Design: A Canadian Case Study

Empirical associations between school design attributes and the quality of students’ learning, comfort, and community experience are well-researched. Increasingly, a desire—and a requirement—to provide gender-inclusive washrooms in Canadian schools exists. Yet gaps in knowledge about how to best implement these spaces remain. The firm involved with this case study is a Canadian architecture and design practice that advocates for inclusive, accessible design, and strives to understand the social contexts emerging from built environments. This firm has designed gender-inclusive washrooms for a number of secondary schools and is seeking to understand their social impact on school culture based on the perspectives of teachers, staff, and administrators. Led by a professional environmental psychologist, this study employs interview methodology to examine employees’ attitudes about the design of gender-inclusive washrooms at a particular school in British Columbia, Canada, as well as their perceptions of students’ acceptance of these spaces. The aim to understand these spaces from the perspective of employees will allow architects and school districts to better contribute to the UN’s SDGs related to the promotion of quality education, gender equality, and inequality reduction, and ensure that “no one is left behind”.