Feds issue $150K grant to study LGBTQ engineering students, find ‘supportive spaces’

Researchers have been awarded a $150,000 grant by the U.S. government to study ways of making LGBT-friendly engineering classes.

The National Science Foundation announced earlier this month that Worcester Polytechnic Institute will explore the “notoriously inhospitable” classroom conditions faced by aspiring LGBT engineers.

“This project aims to understand the conditions that help lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) engineering students feel comfortable in their educational institutions,” NSF’s abstract of the project states. “Engineering schools are notoriously inhospitable to LGBTQ people, with costly results for LGBTQ students and society. 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. Their departure from engineering for reasons that have nothing to do with qualification only makes the field more homogeneous and therefore less creative, innovative, and risk-taking, at the same time diminishing a population that is already underrepresented in engineering.”

The study will take place between January 2017 and December 2018, the Washington Free Beacon reported Tuesday.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s researchers will employ interviews and other research methods to find the “most inclusive and supportive spaces” for LGBT students, which will then allow them to “extend these elements into engineering classrooms and other formal learning experiences.”

NSF says the medium-sized engineering college was chosen in part because it has “a relatively large number of openly LGBTQ students.”