The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 42, No. 2 - 81

Implementation of Gender-Neutral Housing

both of these factors. This ﬁts nicely with the
ACUHO-I Standards and Ethical Principles for
College and University Housing Professionals
(2014), which call for residence life programming that offers "opportunities to develop a
mature style of relating to others and live cooperatively with others" (p. 11).
To date, no comprehensive, systematic
study of the development and implementation of gender-neutral housing in colleges and
universities has been published. It is unknown
how many campuses offer this housing option,
what types of housing are being used, what
barriers campuses have encountered, or what
policies have been put in place.
In 1979 DeCoster published an important
article capturing the state of coeducational
housing during a time when it was emerging as
an option on college and university campuses.
Bleiberg (2004) and Willoughby et al. (2012)
stated that the trend of GNH may be similar to
that followed by coeducational housing; therefore, the present study created a comparable
look at GNH as it emerges as a practice.
The purpose of this study was to examine
the current state of consideration and implementation of GNH at ACUHO-I member institutions. The speciﬁc research questions for
this study were as follows:
(1) What is the current state of implementation
of gender-neutral housing at ACUHO-I member
institutions? How many have considered this
option? How many have implemented it?
(2) At those institutions where gender-neutral
housing has been considered, what obstacles
were encountered?
(3) At those institutions where gender-neutral
housing is offered, what type(s) of housing
facilities are used to offer this option?

(4) At those institutions where genderneutral housing is offered, what policies and
procedures have been implemented?

METHODS
Participants and Data Collection
The Research Committee of ACUHO-I endorsed this research study. ACUHO-I emailed
the invitation to participate in the study (with
an embedded link to the survey instrument) to
the chief housing ofﬁcers (CHOs) or designated contacts at member institutions (N = 943).
Two follow-up emails were sent by ACUHO-I
over a period of one month, and 343 institutions responded, for a response rate of 36.4%.
Only 17 of the responding institutions were international institutions; because this number
was too small to permit meaningful analysis,
those institutions were excluded from the analyses reported in this study. Therefore, all tables
and analyses reﬂect U.S. institutions only.
Table 1 shows the breakdown of the responses
by institutional size.

Table 1
Size of Responding Institutions
n
Less than 1,000
1,000-4,999

2.93

31.27

5,000-9,999

23.78

10,000-19,999

20.20

20,000 and above
Total

67
307

21.82
10

Note: Not all participants completed this question.

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 42, No. 2

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