Research Councils UK Diversity Data

I recently came across a dataset published by Research Councils UK (RCUK) on the diversity of grant applicants. The report didn’t include a single plot, so I thought I’d fix that. Annoyingly, it was only available as a PDF, which isn’t ideal for getting data out.

Luckily, there’s Tabula, an open-source tool for pulling tables out of PDF files. I used it to extract the data and build some plots. The rest of the document needed too much wrangling to be worth it, so I only used the first table, which estimates the academic populations applying to the Research Councils.