Black Brits are virtually absent from STEM fields (the data)
What’s good people? Thanks to all subscribers who get these updates into their inboxes, your support is much appreciated. My latest video covers the underrepresentation of Black British people from S.T.E.M. fields, both in employment and in academic research. You can find all the resources I used below. Enjoy and see you for the next one. Peace.
Getting ethnicity data on specific sectors of the workforce can be difficult, and this seems especially the case with STEM fields. For a start, there isn’t a single widely-used definition of STEM, with some sources including Health and Medicine and others excluding them. Additionally, information on ethnicity isn’t widely collected and when it is, different ethnic categories are used. For example, sometimes you see Chinese as a separate category, sometimes not. Sometimes the generic BAME category is used, which covers all kinds of important differences between groups. The best report I’ve found regarding STEM employment is this:
“The State of the Sector: Diversity and representation in STEM industries in the UK” by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) 2020:
Low progression from undergrade to research
Ethnicity data is much more plentiful in academia
Black students make up around 8% of the overall undergraduate population in STEM, but a much lower % of the STEM research staff and professors
Interestingly, White students are underrepresented among undergrads, postgrads and academic research staff. And are slightly overrepresented among STEM professors. This is a problem for the UK because white people make up the overwhelming majority of people. If they are struggling to enter STEM field in academia, this means the country as a whole is lagging, which we’ll come to in a future video.
Note the cliff edge between postgrad to academic research staff:
“Although it takes time for increased diversity at junior levels to filter through to senior ones, data suggest that the current pace of change is slow, particularly among Black researchers. People from Black ethnicities accounted for 1.7% of junior academic science staff in 2008–09, growing to 2.5% in 2020–21. But over those 12 years, the proportion of Black scientists in professor and senior management roles barely shifted, rising from 0.5% to 0.6%.”
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-04386-w/index.html
Barriers to progression in STEM academia:
“Missing Elements Racial and ethnic inequalities in the chemical sciences” by Royal Society of Chemistry 2022
Things are much worse if you look at only UK-domiciled Black people
The country’s single Black Chemistry professor is Robert Mokaya. He was born, raised and educated in Kenya before migrating to the UK. In both Academia and Industry, a significant proportion of Black folks are like Professor Mokaya. If you exclude these and just consider UK-domiciled scientists (the vast majority of whom will be UK citizens) they make up:
8% of undergraduates
2.2% of PhD students
1.4% of postdoctoral/research staff
1.4% of lecturers or research fellows
0.7% of Readers or research leaders
0.4% of Professors At the professorial leve
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/42521/pdf/
In the 2018-19 Academic year
4 out every 10 Postdoc researchers overall were UK domiciled
Among Black Postdoc researchers, this drops to just 1 in 4
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/106948/html/
Struggles of Black Brit STEM Undergraduates
But there was some spectacular progress in the 00s
Would love to see similar data for students domiciled in African and Asian countries but they don't appear to exist
Summary
Black folks are underrepresented in STEM fields of employment
This probably reflects the fact that Black folks are massively underrepreented in STEM academic research and higher academic roles
We saw that things get worse if you consider only UK-domiciled Black people who make up a small proportion of academic research staff according to the available data
And we began to look further upstream to find that Black undergraduates domiciled in the UK have far worse outcomes in STEM fields, compared to their peers of other ethnicities
What we now need is to look at the causes of this under-achievement, and this is something I’ll do in a future video. In the meantime, I recommend you watch another of my videos which points out that Black graduates, on average, earn much less than graduates of other ethnic groups