Researchers received a grant for almost $150,000 to investigate the best ways to make gay students “feel comfortable” in engineering classes.
The National Science Foundation gave the money to researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute because, “engineering schools are notoriously inhospitable to LGBTQ people,” reports The College Fix.
“The emotional toll of being an LGBTQ engineer (either open or closeted) is so great that it threatens to drive LGBTQ engineers out of the field,” the study’s abstract states.
The research team plans to use a “campus climate survey,” interviews and other research methods to find out how to create an inclusive and welcoming space for gay students in engineering schools.
“These interviews are helping the research team learn in some detail about the experiences of LGBTQ engineering students, probing whether and how a traditional or project-based engineering curriculum can contribute to LGBTQ students’ experiences and developing models for other schools to adopt in classes and projects,” the grant states.
The grant alleges that having only straight students in the engineering field leads to less creativity and innovation.
“Their departure from engineering for reasons that have nothing to do with qualification only makes the field more homogenous and therefore less creative, innovative, and risk-taking, at the same time diminishing a population that is already underrepresented in engineering,” the grant claims.
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