The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is to provide £750,000 for university projects aimed at tackling the severe under-representation of black academics in the discipline.
At present, there is only one black chemistry professor in the UK – the University of Nottingham’s Robert Mokaya – and just 1 per cent of non-professorial academic staff in chemistry are black, according to the RSC’s Missing Elements report published last year.
As part of a wider £1.5 million three-year investment, the RSC will provide grants of up to £60,000 to support institutional projects that tackle racism and racial inequalities, including initiatives to improve representation, progression and retention of black and ethnic minority chemists. Projects to support allyship and a sense of belonging among ethnic minority staff and students will also be considered.
One major area of concern is the drop-off among black students between undergraduate and postgraduate level. Black representation at undergraduate level is strong, with almost 5 per cent of students identifying as black, higher than the 3 per cent of the UK population who do so, but this falls to 1.4 per cent at postgraduate level. This attrition is unlikely caused by an awarding gap, with the proportion of black students with a 2.1 or higher broadly similar to other ethnic groups, the Missing Elements report found.
