When I was about 8 years old, my grandmother took me to a local fabric store to pick out a pattern for a dress we could sew together. Piecing together the brown pattern paper, cutting out fabric, and learning to pin and hem, I felt like I was solving the ultimate wearable puzzle.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was also preparing for my PhD in cell biophysics—the study of how cells, and the structures within them, move and grow. Cells form, and interact with, the squishy, stretchy template of our tissues, where they are always jostling and vying for space. When one cell contracts and gets smaller, its neighbors get pulled along, expanding to fill the space.

Life, it turns out, is another spatial puzzle to solve.

My thesis research rests on understanding how chromosomes, our coiled and packaged DNA, stretch and fold in the cell and what those shape changes tell us about the forces acting on them. On the surface, it is completely unrelated to the crafting I do to unwind—knitting scarves and hats, sewing crescent bags and pajama sets. But research shows expertise in fiber arts—like sewing, knitting, crocheting, and even fabric dyeing—may help build the spatial intuition I’ve needed for my research.

The study of how we perceive objects in the physical world and infer details about their relationship to other objects in space is called spatial cognition or spatial reasoning. The most well-studied of these skills are rigid mental rotations, which involve identifying a single object rotated in space. Mental rotations come in handy for architects, engineers, and plumbers, who need a good grasp on how parts fit together or how pieces will round a tight corner. They’re also valuable for chemists, who often have to visualize molecules too small to see from various angles to understand their structure.

Being good at rigid spatial reasoning doesn’t necessarily translate to success in other spatial tasks, many of which are less well-studied. The non-rigid spatial reasoning skills of mental bending and folding ask us to imagine how an object would look after being deformed. This is important for understanding fluid dynamics—how liquids and gases move in space—which atmospheric scientists and oceanographers use to study how wind or water flow. Cell biophysicists like the scientists I work with measure the effects of similar flows. They ask how fluid moves through cells to create currents, how proteins bend, fold, and fit together to create a functional cellular machine, or in my case, how chromosome stretching and folding signals to the cell whether it is correctly attached to the cell division machinery, which ensures future generations of cells will inherit all the right DNA.

I use some of the same science and engineering principles at my sewing table, to help visualize how swatches of fabric fit together to form a three-dimensional garment. Unlike simply slotting flat panels together to build a box, sewing a garment requires an understanding of how fabric drapes to fit around a body, how the shape of a pocket changes the way it bears weight, and how folding fabric before sewing can affect the final fit. Researchers have seen that students who performed better in apparel design courses also tended to score higher on some general spatial visualization tests.

Knitting, too, is a remarkable mechanical process. Taking a one-dimensional yarn that has little stretch or give on its own and winding it into a series of knots that can create a stretchy surface or even a three-dimensional tube is a feat of engineering. And the pliancy of the final product can change based on the pattern of stitches you use. Because of its flexibility and the versatility of patterns, knitting is perfect for crafting handheld versions of abstract math concepts, like Klein bottles and other manifolds, and it helps students reason through tough geometry and calculus problems.

Mathematician and crafter Dr. Daina Taimina turned to another yarn-based craft, crocheting, to create the first physical model of a hyperbolic plane. Inspired by this breakthrough, the Crochet Coral Reef is an ongoing community art project that reflects on climate change and honors female labor and applied mathematics. By developing patterns that riff on Taimina’s original hyperbolic plane, crocheters collectively create a rich marine ecosystem and explore non-Euclidean geometric space in the process. Multiple studies have shown how incorporating crocheting programs improved students’ STEM learning and math achievements.

Continued practice of fiber arts staves off age-related decline in spatial reasoning. In knitting hats, crocheting amigurumi, and sewing jackets, artists gain an understanding of the world around them—and manage to keep it. Perhaps this understanding of the physical world is woven into textiles of all kinds. Spiders, master weavers, are thought by some to have “extended cognition” because of the way their webs help them understand the world. They are known to reinforce areas that are particularly rich with prey, expand sections that haven’t been so fruitful, and adapt their web’s shape to its build site—essentially storing their life’s experience in the webs they weave.

Humans, too, have long stored memory in our fiber creations. The Inca and other ancient Andean cultures used quipus, fiber strings tied in a detailed knotting system, to record dates, census information, and even oral texts. Women in the ancient world wove classic Greek and Roman tales into tapestries, their creation a collective, social form of storytelling. A few years ago, a friend and I were inspired by the story quilts of Faith Ringgold to collaborate on one of our own. These textiles act as a physical representation of abstract knowledge, both in terms of the skill required to craft them and the cultural stories they record.

Why do we persist in building walls or imagining chasms between art and science, instead of weaving them closer together? The ageism and sexism are hard to ignore. You won’t see fiber arts as a rich source for building spatial reasoning skills if you’re convinced crafting is mainly a light activity for elderly women. Especially given the common perception that men excel at both spatial reasoning and math, while women are not naturally skilled. Data suggest men do outperform women at some rigid spatial reasoning, but that idea doesn’t hold for many non-rigid tasks. Maybe a first step toward equity in STEM is to stop viewing spatial reasoning as an innate gift granted only to a select few and instead as a skill we can all learn like any other.

For me, craft has been a critical part of moving my research along. Even when I tired of the lab and retreated to my hobbies, my brain was hard at work building the intuition to confidently analyze and interpret the movies I took of living cells dividing themselves in two. The art of crafting connects the abstract, twisting ideas in my head to a concrete reality I can hold, and untangles some of the thornier ideas in the process.

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More than four decades later, a groundbreaking new study suggests just how much poorer science and technology has become because of this discrimination. The research, conducted by sociologists Erin Cech of the University of Michigan and Tom Waidzunas of Temple University, is the first comprehensive national look at the experience of LGBTQ scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in STEM workplaces. With a sample size of more than 25,000, the study offers new insight into the bias that LGBTQ professionals must contend with at work. Among its findings: LGBTQ professionals experience 30 percent more harassment and social exclusion than their non-LGBTQ peers, and 20 percent greater incidence of professional devaluation, including lack of proper credit for their expertise.

Cech and Waidzunas’s work joins a long tradition of research that reveals practices and inequities that punish marginalized groups—and make a case for change. An early, visually striking use of data for advocacy is the collection of graphs titled “The American Negro,” which W.E.B. DuBois and his students prepared for an exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1921. In bold colors and often unusual shapes, the graphs documented the cultural, economic, educational, and intellectual achievements of American Negroes, supporting DuBois’s assertion that they were “a small nation of people who were studying, examining and thinking of their own progress and prospects.”

Data needn’t be complex to make a point. More than half a century after DuBois, investigative reporter Randy Shilts published And the Band Played On, which presented data in its simplest form to expose how the national press’s failure to document AIDS helped the disease spread unchecked. In October 1982, when seven people died from Tylenol laced with cyanide, he reported, the New York Times published 34 stories about the murders and the federal investigation that followed. The same month, 634 people were diagnosed with AIDS, and 260 died. In all of 1981, the Times published three stories about AIDS, and in 1982, it published another three.

Shilts, one of the first openly gay journalists to write for a major newspaper, was part of the nascent modern gay rights movement that grew around the 1969 Stonewall uprising. The scholarly Journal of Homosexuality was founded soon after, in 1974, with the goal of publishing research that provided alternatives to the prevailing model of homosexuality as pathology. Through the ’70s and ’80s, sociological, historical, and literary studies of gay culture burgeoned in its pages, and to a lesser extent in other journals. Yet the experience of LGBTQ people in the workplace was little studied—in part because the same social climate that kept LGBTQ professionals closeted created barriers to conventional scholarly work and powerful disincentives for research.

Rochelle Diamond, a founding member of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Science and Technical Professionals (NOGLSTP), has been a practicing scientist and fully out since the early ’80s. She recalled scholars receiving no encouragement to ask questions about LGBTQ people’s work experience, few individuals willing to identify openly as LGBTQ, no funds to support research, and few journals that would consider such work.

Donna Riley, head of the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, has long advocated for an equitable playing field for all minorities in STEM education and employment. She recalls searching the literature for workplace studies in the early 2000s, and finding very little quantitative work. “[The research] was thin. I would say formal research on the LGBTQ STEM community is absolutely a recent phenomenon,” she explained.

In the ’80s and ’90s NOGLSTP stepped into this vacuum by publishing a series of pamphlets about the realities of doing science while gay, including “Who are the Gay and Lesbian Scientists?” about queer scientists of historical note, “Measuring the Gay and Lesbian Population,” and “Sexual Orientation and Computer Privacy.” The pamphlets were influential and widely (albeit quietly) circulated within the queer scientific community.

The literature on LGBTQ people in STEM work was still thin in 2008, when Erin Cech, then a second-year graduate student in sociology, ran a literature search for studies of LGBTQ students’ experience of bias in undergraduate engineering programs. Her search didn’t turn up a single paper. Cech, who is lesbian, studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate. She knew about bias. “I didn’t know how I’d do it,” Cech told me. “I didn’t know what I’d find. I just knew I needed to research this.”

Even the notion that LGBTQ people’s experience warranted study challenged the prevailing culture in many STEM settings. Cech remembers that to recruit students for their first research effort, she and fellow student Tom Waidzunas would visit the empty lecture halls in UC San Diego’s engineering building at night. They’d walk down the rows of seats to the front of the room, and write on the chalk board, Are you a lesbian, gay, bisexual engineering student? Please email us. “Just walking down those steep stairs and doing that felt so subversive, but also so important,” said Cech. “We felt how countercultural it was to be in this engineering building and writing that on a chalkboard in 2008.”

Cech and Waidzunas’s resulting paper, published in 2011, stated that “the experiences of people who identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) are all but absent in literature about math and science-based professions in general and have never been documented in research related to the engineering profession.” Other researchers have told Cech that this paper encouraged them: It confirmed that workplace research could be done and that it could get published. Over the next decade, as gay people became more visible in American popular culture, Cech, Waidzunas, and others found it incrementally easier to study larger populations. Every succeeding publication confirmed that LGBTQ people constituted a significant minority within the STEM workforce, and that they faced a variety of biases and discriminatory treatment. Yet there was no study of national scope, the kind that carries weight with policy makers.

This lack of national data persists even though there is a federal agency, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCES), specifically tasked by Congress to survey and report on the status of minorities in the STEM workforce. Part of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCSES publishes reports, including a biennial report on women and minorities, that do everything from help Congress draft legislation to undergird university and foundation programs. But NCES does not classify LGBTQ people as underrepresented, keeping them from many opportunities and funding avenues within NSF and other federal agencies.

NCSES’s spokesperson has said that the center is conducting internal research and waiting for federal recommendations for standardizing data collection across agencies. But Nancy Bates, formerly the Census Bureau’s senior methodologist, points out that other federal entities, including the Departments of Education and Justice, have moved more quickly on this issue. The Department of Education has successfully included questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in its surveys since 2016. She called NCSES’s leisurely pace “a head scratcher.”

This year NCSES will, for the first time, pilot a question related to gender identity in its 2021 survey of college graduates. Yet an NSF spokesperson could not say when its surveys will deploy fully tested questions that would enable it to determine the percentage of sexual minorities in the STEM workforce.

Cech and Waidzunas are among those waiting for NCSES to act. In 2015, NSF’s Division of Human Resources Development funded their proposal for a national survey of multiple underrepresented minorities—women, Latinx, Asians, African Americans, people with disabilities—in STEM workplaces. More than 25,000 scientists, engineers, and mathematicians—including more than 1,000 who self-identified as LGBTQ—replied. Their paper on bias against LGBTQ professionals is the first of many that will come from this survey.

Their findings, which make clear that biases against LGBTQ professionals undermine their ability to do their best work, may increase the pressure on NCSES to include sexual minorities in their surveys. Still, because their survey isn’t an NCSES-sponsored study, its influence with policy makers will not be as broad as it could be.

Bias against sexual minorities not only hurts individuals; it also undermines the American research enterprise. This year, Gallup reported that its 2020 survey showed that 15.9 percent—one in six—members of Generation Z identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This is the talent pool that will produce the next generation of American scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.

We know that no single group holds a monopoly on talent. Intelligence and imagination, creativity and tenacity, and other capacities required to do excellent science, engineering, and mathematics, are distributed randomly through the population. A growing body of research has shown that the most innovative ideas and solutions come from diverse groups. Diversity is necessary but not sufficient: For their creativity and innovation to flourish, all the members of a work group must feel that they and their contributions are valued.

Nancy Hopkins, who successfully challenged MIT to end discrimination against women, said, “If you don’t have women, you’ve lost half the best people.” In the new century, the message from American demographics to STEM employers is that if they don’t welcome and support LGBTQ professionals, they’ll lose a significant fraction of the best people.

Shirley Malcom’s words from 40 years ago are prescient: Science and technology is poorer for the loss of any talent because of personal attributes that are irrelevant to ability as scientists and engineers. The workplaces that welcome LGBTQ professionals as full citizens will draw from a richer pool of talent, and bring a wider range of problem-solving skills to their work. Those that do not will increasingly find themselves on the sidelines of innovation.

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Dad did enjoy his studies in Cleveland, and got a lot out of the experience, notwithstanding his nearly flunking music composition (not long ago I stumbled across a copy of his transcript). His was a classic liberal arts education, blending economics, history, and literature. Upon graduation, he returned to Mexico, got a job, and enrolled in an evening law school. He went on to have a successful business career, much of which involved connecting Mexico to the United States and (though not as a conscious matter) spreading American values to those who worked with him.

A fascinating new Brookings report on the foreign student population of the United States made me think of Dad’s experience, and what he and the United States got out of the deal. As Neil G. Ruiz, the author of the report, put it over the phone, migrant students build bridges between societies, and over time those bridges carry a lot of economic activity. This means that the United States is, in many cases, educating the future leaders of the world, particularly the future leaders of emerging nations. We currently take in about a fifth of all students worldwide who cross borders to study, though these students still make up less than 4 percent of the entire student population in the U.S.

Ruiz and his team looked not only at countries of origin for the 1,153,459 foreign students enrolled in higher education programs between 2008 and 2012, but their cities of origin and the metropolitan areas they cluster in within the U.S. So, for instance, the data compiled by Brookings shows there were 7,109 students (F-1 visa holders) from Seoul studying in the Los Angeles area during that four-year period. Looking into the future, it’s hard to imagine a more binding tie between the two cities than the presence of all those Korean students in Los Angeles, and their connection to the city long after they graduate.

It isn’t surprising that Asia dominates the census of foreign students in the United States, although I was stunned by just how much. China alone sent 284,173 students in that period. The top 20 hometowns of all foreign students in the United States are in Asia. Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Gulf states boast the fastest-growing contingent of students. Shockingly, the city of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, alone sent more students (17,361) than did the entire country of Mexico (17,171).

Mexico, ranked ninth among countries sending students here, is vastly underrepresented among foreign students when you consider that it is our neighbor, our second-largest trading partner, and home to almost 120 million people. The fact that the country lags behind cities like Riyadh and Taipei in the numbers of students it sends to American universities shows that Mexico and the United States remain “distant neighbors” in some ways, as Alan Riding termed the relationship in his book of that title three decades ago.

It also shows that money talks. In addition to having many families able to pay the high cost of tuition abroad, countries like China and Saudi Arabia offer lavish scholarships to promising kids. The U.S. has a strategic need to attract more students from Mexico and other countries who don’t have this kind of financial backing. But American universities prefer to see foreign students as a profit center. Texas has long been a welcome exception to the rule, offering Mexican nationals with financial need in-state tuition at public universities as a matter of policy. Meanwhile, the Obama administration and its Mexican counterpart have announced initiatives to increase the flow of students across the border to 100,000 in coming years, but the question of who pays for all those students remains an open one.

Our policy discussions about foreign students in this country also disproportionately focus on students studying science and technology. Lawmakers, analysts, and businesses are all advocating the creation of an easier path for those pursuing advanced STEM degrees to stay and work here once they obtain their degrees. There is widespread support, echoed by the Brookings report, for a law that would automatically grant these graduates a green card.

That makes a great deal of sense, but we shouldn’t take too utilitarian a view of foreign students in this country, writing off those incapable of writing code or finding their way around a lab. Yes, we want to be the world’s innovation hub, attracting the best and brightest to our great research universities. But we also benefit from having students come here from all over the world to learn our history, as well as our democratic and capitalist values.

And that’s true even—maybe especially so—if they go back home because it was too cold in Cleveland.

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