<p>I have a quick question about the co-ed dorms: are the floors separated by gender in anyway or is everyone just mixed on each floor?</p>
<p>It depends on the dorm, and on the subunit within the dorm.</p>
<p>I lived in MacGregor, which is separated into suites of six or eight people. Suites could be mixed-gender, or they could be single-sex – it was up to the residents of the suite and the entry (a group of five suites) whether to designate the suite as mixed-gender or single-sex. Most of the suites were mixed-gender, because people didn’t care about living in a single-sex suite, but there were some that were all-female or all-male.</p>
<p>In general, I imagine there are not very many single-sex floors at MIT (because the dorms are not very tall, and therefore a single floor is a decent percentage of the building), but there are smaller units within a floor that might be single-sex, and which are the functional units of the dorm (for sharing a bathroom, e.g.).</p>
<p>Random Hall has two female-only floors and one and a half male-only floors (because the second one is tiny), out of eight total floors (four floors in two buildings). Note that this is single sex, not single gender. You will not otherwise find an all-female or all-male environment in the East Side dorms (East Campus, Senior Haus, and Random Hall).</p>
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@lidusha, what? Don’t they mean the same?</p>
<p>Not always.</p>
<p>@BetterThanBest - Here, “sex” is being used as a biological term, and “gender” is being used as a sociological term. A transgender person has a sex that does not match their gender.</p>
<p>The terms themselves are fuzzy (for example, what does “biological” really mean when not everyone fits a typical XX/XY scheme, or when someone has androgen insensitivity, infertility, etc), but that’s the gist of it.</p>
<p>Thanks @piperxp!</p>