The employee ‘class gap’ leaving workers behind

Measuring a company’s ‘class gap’ can help organisations diversify their ranks – so why don’t companies do it?

Luke, who’s in his early 30s and lives in Northern Ireland, defines ‘working class’ as not being able to miss “two pay cheques without everything falling apart”. His mother pushed him to attend university since she hadn’t herself, and since graduating Luke has had a patchwork career. After a paid internship with a health trust, he completed a short training programme with a major accounting firm.

The year he spent there was uncomfortable. “From day one I did not fit in,” remembers Luke. One of his colleagues casually mentioned sending his shirts out to be ironed, which to Luke sounded like “an unimaginable luxury”. Other colleagues spent their lunch breaks browsing watches on online shopping sites. It was clear that neither their backgrounds nor their values aligned. “It’s a totally alien environment,” he says now.

Despite the seemingly meritocratic aim of the training programme to bring in people like him, Luke watched as well-connected workers got promoted over more experienced colleagues. For him, this shattered the idea that hard work alone would lead to success. “That’s just not how it is anymore. You need to have starting capital, you need to have connections or parents,” he says. It was clear to him that he wouldn’t be able to rise up the ranks as quickly as more advantaged people. He left.

It’s well understood that social class is often correlated with earnings and career progression; the more money you come from, the better positioned you’re likely to be. But even getting a foot on the ladder isn’t enough, because of persistent biases and the lack of support structures. 

Luke is just one of many feeling like a fish out of water in certain workplaces. In job sectors as diverse as law and theatre, the few working-class people who get their foot in the door are often isolated. One crucial way to address this ‘class gap’ is to understand how socioeconomically diverse a company’s workforce is, and figure out ways to boost representation. 

Yet, it remains very rare for organisations to collect, and then act meaningfully on, information about class. 

The challenge of talking about class

People from poorer backgrounds are significantly under-represented in some sectors. In the UK civil service, only 18% of senior staff come from a low socioeconomic background – and the gulf has widened since the 1960s. Class-based exclusion is also pronounced in the country’s creative fields. Twenty-three percent of people working in music and the performing arts, for instance, are working class, compared to 39% of the overall workforce. And if the data don’t factor in job type – for instance, working as a security guard rather than a leader – decision-making roles may be even less representative than these figures suggest.  

Under-representation isn’t the only problem; workers from poorer backgrounds also face pay disparities. According to the UK’s Social Mobility Commission, on average there’s an annual class pay gap of £6,800 within professional occupations. Much of this has to do with factors like education and job type, but after controlling for all those factors, “those from working-class backgrounds are still paid £2,242 less than more privileged colleagues”. (Women and ethnic minorities, and those working in finance, medicine and IT, are especially hurt by the disparity.)

Of course, ideas of class vary greatly within and among countries. In the UK, one commonly used measure is the job of the individual’s highest-earning parent, at the time the child was aged 14. This reflects the way class identity, particularly in certain countries, can be rooted in family background and persist throughout a lifetime.

Two accounting firms, KPMG and PwC, are striving to diversify the class backgrounds of their UK employees. PwC uses the age-14 metric (and has a class pay gap greater than its gender pay gap or ethnicity pay gap, though the disability pay gap is greater still). KPMG considers an employee to be working class if their parent held a ‘routine or manual’ job. It’s not a perfect measure; jobs change, as Mindy Truong, a researcher at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in the US, points out. Truong prefers to assess class by asking people about their parents’ level of education, which is more stable and easier to remember.

In general, having some sort of concrete marker is helpful because, while ideas of class are changeable, people can also be very unreliable at gauging where they sit within the class spectrum. In the US, “everyone seems to identify as middle class”, says Truong. This may be because middle-class identity is the least stigmatised. In the UK, a quarter of civil servants who describe themselves as being from a low socioeconomic background are actually advantaged. And this misperception gets more skewed the higher up someone is professionally.

All this means that it can be tricky for employers to define class. Yet designating a measure is an important start to tackling the ‘class gap’, because there is an abundance of evidence to show that informal judgements about class – and reactions to it – happen all the time in workplaces, with negative impacts on working-class employees’ careers.   

The connection between class and getting ahead

Research shows, for example, that being perceived as the ‘wrong’ class for a particular type of employment can hold back workers. Recruiters are less likely to hire working-class candidates in the first place, even if they have the right skills and experience, because of worries about ‘cultural fit’. For instance, recruiters at elite law firms may think of applicants from lower-class backgrounds, “No, they’re not going to be able to fit in with our clientele”. Or they may make snap judgements related to how someone speaks, in ways that favour more privileged applicants. In general, focusing on hazy notions of cultural fit can keep a workforce homogeneous. 

Even if an employer has established processes to bring in more diverse workers, that’s not the end of the story. New hires from more modest backgrounds may not feel welcome or progress with the same speed as more affluent colleagues.

For one thing, working-class people tend to have smaller, closer networks to draw on. Truong explains that this is “in part because they have fewer opportunities for geographic mobility”; they’re less likely to travel far for studies, work or leisure. Yet for networking, having lots of relatively shallow relationships is actually a strength. “It’s really your weak ties that are the advantage,” says Truong. “Weak ties are what will get you a job and will help you find career opportunities, because they tend to have new information that you don’t have access to yourself.”

There’s also a mental toll to feeling like there was something wrong with the way you were brought up.

As the first person in her family to be born in the US, as well as a first-generation college student, Truong says she’s struggled with feeling like she owed others, and had little to contribute herself. Yet she’s tired of the narrative that traditionally working-class characteristics are a weakness in academic and professional contexts. “People from working-class backgrounds are better at being resourceful, they do have loyalty, and they’re very resilient when it comes to changing or chaotic situations,” says Truong.

Towards more social mobility in the workforce

These days, some organisations are working harder to ensure their workforces come from socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. That’s partly because failing to include people from working-class backgrounds means that broad perspectives are less likely to be reflected in policies and stories, for example. It’s also bad for organisations, given that diversity fuels innovation. And there is also the risk that companies are missing out on excellent candidates because of processes that are biased against working-class applicants.

Diversifying workforces has to include change at the recruitment stage – for instance, hiring beyond elite universities. Truong recommends reconsidering whether a given role genuinely requires a university degree at all. Requirements like advanced degrees can help recruiters sift through piles of applications, but by “taking the shortcut, you are weeding out people who are from disadvantaged backgrounds”.

She also cautions against socioeconomic information being used to shut out working-class applicants – for instance, if a recruiter sees this on a form and allows this to influence their decision on a specific candidate. But for tracking progress, the Social Mobility Foundation, a UK charity, recommends that employers collect data on new and existing staff to understand if their organisations have a class pay gap.

Similarly, Adele Chynoweth, a researcher and curator in Canberra, Australia, argues that as organisations routinely collect anonymised data on ethnicity, gender and other protected characteristics, it’s time to extend that information-gathering to class. She understands people’s discomfort with the idea, but believes there is a way to do this sensitively. “I don’t think that’s an argument to not collect the data at all.”

To genuinely diversify an organisation, Truong believes that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives should include class diversity. And her research shows that it’s especially higher-status people who are uncomfortable in cross-group interactions. “When you have to diversify a workforce and create inclusion, everyone needs to have a part in that, especially the people who have the power or the status to do that,” says Truong. It shouldn’t be down to fresh hires like Luke to question nepotism in a company culture, for instance.

Chynoweth agrees, saying many organisational boards may be multicultural, but uniformly privileged. It helps to have a critical mass of people from disadvantaged backgrounds; Chynoweth says that it’s taken years and years of comradeship with working-class peers to combat isolation in her field and to articulate common issues.  

Reducing the ‘class gap’ is especially important now, as Covid-19 is worsening social mobility. In a number of industries, frontline staff have been working onsite while more senior staff have been able to work from home. People like Luke – who’s now precariously employed in TV production and cares for his father, a former electrician who had to stop working after losing a limb – have been burning through their savings during periods of unemployment. Meanwhile, affluent people have actually been adding to their wealth. 

To chip away at the class gap, it’s necessary to acknowledge just how large it is. “We like to think that social class is very malleable…what you were born into doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to stay that way,” says Truong. “However, a lot of research indicates that mobility isn’t as attainable as we think it is.” So rather than blaming individuals for where they are on the ladder, it’s necessary for all institutions to pitch in by – as a very first step – recognising that this class gap persists.