25 March 2021
The Royal Society recognises that people from minority ethnic backgrounds are currently under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education, training and employment. Identifying and addressing barriers to participation and success is a key priority for the Society and its Diversity Committee.
In order to identify areas of disparity and possible interventions, the Society commissioned Jisc to interrogate available data from the Higher Education Statistics Authority (‘HESA’) and provide a report. The report presents a detailed analysis of HESA data over an 11-year time period, in order to understand the proportion of black and ethnic minority students and staff in STEM in the UK and how this has changed over time.
The report’s key findings show that [summary of key findings].
The Society is convening a roundtable among senior stakeholders to discuss these findings, share experiences on what has – and hasn’t – worked to address the issues raised, and identify practical action that could be taken to make a tangible difference across the sector.
The Society’s Grants and Diversity Committees commissioned CRAC to establish the diversity profile of postdoctoral researchers in the UK eligible for the Royal Society’s early career fellowship programmes: University Research Fellowship (URF), Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (SHDF) and Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (DHF) schemes.
This profile (‘eligible pool’) has then been used as a benchmark for the Society to consider the diversity of its own early career research fellows, specifically individuals who applied between 2018-2020 for these schemes.
The data shows that the applicants for these three UK early career fellowship schemes is not fully representative of the ethnicity and gender profile of the potential pool of eligible postdoctoral researchers in the UK.
The Society is keen to address these concerning trends, in particular the very low participation of Black researchers. It acknowledges that more needs to be done to broaden the pool of talented individuals and this data highlights the potential to increase the gender and ethnic diversity of applications to the Society’s early career fellowship schemes.
Building on its ongoing efforts, the Society is committed to taking action to broaden participation of talented individuals from diverse backgrounds to its early career fellowship schemes. This will include: