For sure, although given that 87% of Britain is White British, for a cohort of 95 students in my year, one would expect all things equal for there to be about 1

For sure, although given that 87% of Britain is White British, for a cohort of 95 students in my year, one would expect all things equal for there to be about 12 non-white students, when in fact there were two. This is not to get mired into a debate about inclusion in STEM, but it's also worth noting that both me and my other non-white friend (who's background I know because we grew up together, weirdly), were very fortunate to have had quite middle class upbringings too, and hailed from Northwest London. In fact, I doubt it comes as any surprise for me to say that from my time at undergrad all the way up to completing my PhD, I suspect that the much bigger discriminant for getting into Physics is class more than race (gender is a separate issue here I suppose). I remember this coming up in a talk from someone on the IOP commission to look at inclusion in Physics, although for their online reports I can only find the ones on gender, for anyone interested: http://www.iop.org/education/teacher/support/girls_physics/reports-and-research/page_63816.html http://www.iop.org/education/teacher/support/girls_physics/r...