Education

Feds Blow $548,459 To Study ‘MICROAGGRESSIONS’ Toward Female Engineering Students

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The National Science Foundation is currently shelling out $548,459 in taxpayer cash for a project at the University of Michigan that videotapes male engineering students working in campus laboratories to determine if the males are causing female engineering students to experience “microaggressions.”

The University of Michigan launched the big-ticket “microaggressions” project back in September 2014, reports The Washington Free Beacon. The study is slated to drag on until the end of the summer of 2017.

A “microaggression,” according to modern campus activists, is some minor everyday statement or action that entrenches discrimination or degrades a person based on group identity.

University of Michigan psychology professor Denise Sekaquaptewa is overseeing the $548,459 “microaggressions” research project.

“Because engineering is cast as a masculine field, women engineering students can experience subtle yet pervasive stereotypic messages in their learning environments that can negatively influence their experiences,” the grant for the current “microaggressions” study explains.

“Such ‘microaggressions’ may cause the climate of the team to become less welcoming to women,” the grant also suggests. “The proposed research unites two areas of strong research interest (social science research on gender stereotypes and engineering education on teamwork and climate) to advance understanding of women’s underrepresentation in engineering as compared to men.”

“The goal of the project is to identify and reliably measure ‘microaggressions’ in both lab-based and classroom-based engineering student project teams,” according to the grant.

To this end, the Michigan researchers are testing “exposure to ‘microaggressions'” by women engineering students to “develop a reliable ‘microaggressions’ assessment procedure” and to “analyze effects on engineering outcomes.”

In practice, lab sessions are being recorded. Then, focus groups of students will view videos of female students suffering from “microaggressions” and female students not enduring “microaggressions” to scrutinize “persistence in solving problems.”

Sekaquaptewa, the professor directing the $548,459 study, said the research has been plodding along.

“At this stage, we are still coding videos of engineering teams for behavioral indicators of microaggressions,” she told the Free Beacon.

Sekaquaptewa’s prior research has theorized “that people who rely on stereotypes in processing have more negative social interactions with members of stereotyped groups.”

The extensive, taxpayer-funded $548,459 National Science Foundation grant for discovering “microaggressions” perpetrated by male engineering students comes on the heels of a $6,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for an in-depth study of the “history of French lesbian activism.” The recipient of the $6,000 French lesbian activism grant, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign women’s studies professor Tamara Chaplin, will receive the tax funds in addition to her already-generous annual taxpayer-funded salary of $86,607.04. (RELATED: Federal Government Spends $6,000 To Study ‘French Lesbian Activism Since World War II’)

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