Like many people, I have been thinking about racism this week. I have focused on statistics relating to UK academic Chemistry populations, and I wanted to share them.

UK POPULATION

The UK population is overwhelmingly white. This was true in the 2001 census and slightly less true in the 2011 census.

UK SCHOOLS

A DfE report showed that the 2019 population of primary and secondary school pupils is more diverse than the general population at the 2011 census date. 2017 data shows that A Level population is more white than the 2019 secondary school population, which might be relevant to Chemistry, as the progression from school to degree is predominantly through A Levels.

School teaching staff are predominantly white, and do not reflect the diversity in pupil ethnicity. I could find no data on subject-level demographics, so cannot speak specifcally to Chemistry teachers/pupils.

GCSE attainment data should be interpreted recognising that the large White population is the major factor in the average score, but it is striking how Chinese pupils attain high grades.

A Level attainment data by ethnicity is hard to find, but I have found the proportion of students getting the highest grades (AAA or higher) at A Level (the dominant route into Chemistry degrees).  This data does not include non-A Level qualifications, nor does it capture students who take more than 2y to complete A Levels.

Again, the proportion of Chinese pupils attaining high grades is large. Also striking is the low proportion of Black pupils gaining AAA grades. I do not have the insight to understand why Black pupils are not as likely to get AAA at A Level, but note that this poses really profound problems for Chemistry degrees if these general stats apply to the specific case of the Chemistry A Level. The elitist model of STEM (where grades are used to arbitrarily gate access to study) seems likely to discriminate against Black applicants, who are already underrepresented in the A Level population.

UK UNIVERSITIES 

The population of undergraduates in Chemistry degrees is predominantly white, but has been slowly changing over the last few years according to the HESA data.

This diversification has been driven mostly by an increase in the proportion of Asian students, though there is also a small increase in the proportion of Black students. Note that the internationalisation of HE may interact with these trends.

The PGR Chemistry cohort is much more white than the UG population. The much-slower drift towards diversity has been associated with a large increase in ambiguous data, which I think relates to people ticking the ‘prefer not to say’ box on forms. There is also a small increase in the proportion of Asian and Mixed students.

Academic Chemistry staff also seem to refuse data. The Asian population is much larger than any of the populations above, but the Black population is much smaller. Again, it is not obvious how the heavily-internationalised HE environment relates to these numbers.

Taking the 2019 HESA data, it is possible to compare the UG, PGR, and Staff populations. It seems that PGR has a much higher proportion of White people than the other groups. I wonder if this merits serious consideration in the context of lab demonstration recruitment.

HESA data also describes the profile of salaries among academic Chemistry staff. It is noteworthy that those refusing their ethnicity data are skewed towards occupying well-paid positions; I wonder if this might possibly reflect scepticism about the diversity agenda. The more pressing issue is the skew of Black staff salaries the other way: the (few) Black academics our discipline has are being paid too little. There is an obvious rebuttal to this in terms of career stage: perhaps Black staff are just starting their careers in a discipline which has been historically racist. I hope that this is true, but suspect that it is not.

The (All Subjects) graduate earnings data also reflects racial disparities. Given that employment outcomes data is a core part of how degree quality is assessed, this gives clear and perverse incentives for UK Universities to avoid recruiting Pakistani students.

CONCLUSION

I wanted to look at the data, and have tried to share it transparently. If you think I’ve got anything wrong, please let me know. A few things have really struck me.

1. The school system seems to have a much lower population of Black A Level pupils than I would expect from the secondary population. These pupils are much less likely to be awarded AAA at A Level.

2. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but it seems likely to me that the UG-PGR transition merits review on the grounds of diversity. The plight of Black academic staff also seems urgent.

3. It is hard to see how the BAME classification is a good faith engagement with social justice in the context of HE Chemistry: the over-performance of Chinese students must surely mask the lower attainment of, say, Black students when data is aggregated like this.

There has been a lot of talk this week about making academic chemistry more inclusive, in the wake of a terrible piece in Angewandte. I am not convinced that the community recognises how deeply the structures of education are implicit in the peer-reviewed expression of exclusionary academic practice.