Black representation in UK academic chemistry

As part of our ongoing work to support Black chemists and understand the barriers that may prevent Black people from following successful careers in chemistry, we analysed Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data focusing on ethnicity and particularly Black representation in chemistry.

This data analysis first appeared in the Chemistry World article UK chemistry pipeline loses almost all of its BAME students after undergraduate studies.

The data show that there is an under-representation of ethnic minority-identifying people in academic progression in chemistry, which is particularly pronounced for Black chemists. There is a clear retention problem and we are losing talent.

HESA data have been treated according to the HESA anonymisation methodology, and percentages have been calculated from numbers that were rounded to the nearest 5 unless otherwise stated.

On this page:

Figures and main findings

Data tables

Footnotes

Figures and main findings

At the undergraduate level, the percentage of Black students is higher than the census baseline, there is then a significant point of attrition from undergraduate to PhD, as indicated by the drop from 4.8 to 1.3% Black representation (Figure 1). This drops even further through the academic pipeline, to 0.9% non-professorial staff and 0% professors who are Black. Note that, according to HESA anonymisation methodology, numbers fewer than five are rounded down to zero and will result in a percentage calculation of zero.

Focusing on undergraduate students in chemistry, the ethnicity breakdown by gender (Figure 2) shows that there is a lower percentage of Black men (3.4%) than Black women (6.6%).

The ethnicity breakdown for undergraduate students in chemistry by institution type (Figure 3) shows a trend in Black representation, with the highest percentage of Black students at post-92 universities (8.9%), followed by those at non-Russell Group universities (4.7%), and lastly the lowest percentage of Black students is found at Russell Group universities (3.3%). This trend may provide further insights into the barriers behind the observed retention gap for Black chemists throughout the academic pipeline.

Figure 4 compares the ethnicity breakdown for biology, chemistry and physics, and the academic retention of Black scientists in these disciplines. Focusing on Black representation, there is a greater loss through the academic pipeline in chemistry and biology, as compared to physics. The observed trend for biology is similar to that in chemistry. Both biology and chemistry have a significant point of attrition for Black scientists between undergraduate and PhD studies and a continued loss of talent to the non-professorial staff and professor levels. In comparison, physics has a lower representation of Black undergraduate and PhD students compared to chemistry and biology (with statistical overlap between the three subjects at the non-professorial staff and professor stages), but the attrition from undergraduate to PhD studies is not as large in physics as is observed for the other two disciplines.

We will continue to work with the community to understand and break down the barriers experienced by Black chemists.

Data tables

References

[1] Higher education student and staff records for the academic year 2017/18, HESA, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis.

[2] 2011 Census, Office for National Statistics, 2011, https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/2011census.