Shameem is not surprised by the drop. Relatively few students from lower socio-economic backgrounds know that PhDs exist and that they are often funded, she says.
But socio-economic factors only go so far in explaining the trend. A student’s undergraduate experience also has an impact, says Wayne Mitchell, a molecular biologist at Imperial College London and co-chair of Imperial As One. If they feel they’ve been “banging their head against a brick wall”, they are not likely to want to continue, he says.
UK universities often suggest that the drop-off is down largely to students’ choice, says Hussain. In fact, he says, there are structural barriers that affect selection. Universities tend to want PhD students with top grades, for instance. Yet students from marginalized ethnicities are less likely than their white peers to leave university with top grades, even when their school grades suggest they are equally able — which affects their ability to go on to further study. Known as the awarding or attainment gap, this is due to a range of factors, including biased curriculum design, a lack of role models and guidance, and students feeling like they don’t belong, according to a 2019 report from Universities UK, an advocacy group for British higher-education institutions.
PhD courses also privilege students from prestigious universities. But Black students are over-represented in less research-focused universities for their first degrees, says Richards, for myriad reasons not related to talent, including that they don’t see elite institutions as for them. The awarding gap between Black and white students is also exacerbated in these institutions.
PhD applications, meanwhile, often depend on reference letters that invoke superficial metrics and impressions of how engaged students are, which leave wide scope for bias, says Izzy Jayasinghe, a cell biologist at the University of Sheffield. The focus should instead be on the quality of students’ work, the challenges they have overcome and achievements that reflect on their character broadly. “The selection processes need to evolve from the traditional, white-centric procedures,” she says.
It’s unclear whether PhD funding contributes to the diversity drop: owing to data collection methods, the ethnicity of almost 30% of those awarded PhD studentships by UKRI (the UK’s national funder) is unknown. That makes it very difficult to analyse disparities.
Whether because of structural factors or just straight-up bias, marginalized students “aren’t deemed as competitive”, says Mitchell.
Seniority drop
Past PhD level, there’s a further drop. HESA data comparable with today’s statistics go back only to 2008–09, making it difficult to collate cohorts, but a snapshot of 2020–21 shows that 2.5% of junior UK research staff in science subjects were Black, compared with 0.6% among senior levels, including professors. There’s a drop for researchers of other minority ethnicities, too.
