Monday

Quantifying exactly how undergraduate participation in physics represents elements of the UK's population is a key step in ultimately making it representative. By combining data from the Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) we have quantified how representative the undergraduate population in physics and other STEM disciplines are in terms of ethnicity, gender, socio-economic background, and regional domicile. This analysis reveals that various groups are significantly under-represented in physics despite actually being over-represented in higher education overall and even across the STEM disciplines.