Racial inequality report highlights ‘alarming’ loss of ethnic minority chemists

In the past 10 years there’s been no real improvement in the representation of Black people in academic chemistry, with Black chemists being lost at ‘an alarming rate’ after a first degree. Black and Asian students are less likely to go to a Russell Group university than their white peers and are more likely to be unemployed than to study afterwards, according to an analysis by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

Launching a plan to tackle racism and discrimination in the chemical sciences, RSC chief executive Helen Pain said ‘we have acknowledged some of these issues in the past, but we have not confronted them head on. We have not explicitly called out racism in science for what it is. And we have not challenged our community and ourselves to properly address our own biases.’ But that, she added, is about to change.