Yes this is an example of how male behaviour affects design.
It’s clear what’s happened. They put standard cubicles in that best work for single sex changing areas. What are the negatives of these alterations? Well you can’t chat to your child or friends so easily if they are in the next cubicle without the gap. People have lost the facility to sit down. I used to get handed all the wet stuff under the partition otherwise my children’s dry clothes would be soaking wet. It also means plasters and other peoples hairs built up at the sides. The cubicles with be more humid and smelly.
This next bit is blunt but I am saying it as it is. If someone vomits, wees, bleeds, ejaculates or poos on the floor or walls it is not as cleanable by drench soaking then draining. Remnants will be on the sides. Tragically you’ll occasionally get someone die in a leisure centre changing cubicle (like I have listed in school toilets) and all leisure centres and schools all have defibrillators, so it depends how they fall as to whether they are seen so that defibrillator is used effectively.
This is why design can be life-saving. I saw the young woman my uni friends and I saved as we were facing the row of ladies nightclub toilets head-on so we immediately saw her. Her blue hand was sticking out of the door gap but we still would have seen her body on the floor it not. It depends on angles of approach and how they fell and whether doors rest in the open position. If anything else had been happening to her we would have seen, had it been voyeurism or an assault. We got to her in seconds and got her breathing again, clearing her airway congested with vomit. In a gender neutral design I am certain she would have died.
The new DfE guidance has single sex toilets and sinks. It has sanitary provision machines in areas that boys are not allowed in (schools had a scheme for supplying free stuff but boys messed about with it). It still says gaps can be 5mm but this appears to be less rigid. What needs to happen is a sentence about the advantages and responsibilities for safeguarding children with collapsible conditions like epilepsy, diabetes, heart conditions, endometriosis, drug overdoses and mental health crises in their care. And safeguarding girls (and boys) from assaults from within the cubicle. Preventing all sex in toilets is a good thing and it is illegal.
In the Sarah Everard inquiry it said we need to design-out crime. It also said systems need to improve so we are looking at where crimes happen and collate centrally to build a picture.
The WRN have done a report on hospitals. They couldn’t find out exactly where sexual assaults were happening within wards because there’s no system in place on recording. Research in India is ahead of us, and research shows unisex school toilets are a rape risk (girls already knew this and were going in the open). India have introduced single sex toilets in schools.
British Transport Police come closest to collating meaningful data - on train carriages they can’t tell me where sexual assaults and rapes happen. In stations they can tell me what crime happened in a toilet (but not the design). They can tell me the sex of the victims because of crime codes but only the gender of the attacker. All the attackers are male gender except two that are female gender.
I know from years (!) of looking at this now, what’s going on in private designed toilets in public places. However, people did always know this. It was built into legislation and regulations that people ignored to be this new ‘inclusive’- which is exclusionary to more vulnerable people. Women know - you can see how we look at design is different from the men that build. It’s commonsense that you unfortunately learn at a young age.
You can see on this thread we mitigate and risk assess for ourselves and our children constantly, even though we do it subconsciously. But it is worth trying to work out how to design better because it saves lives and prevents assaults.