This idea of a “following wind”, a gust of privilege, gets to the heart of what we call the class ceiling. It neatly captures the propulsive power provided by an advantaged class background – how it acts as an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort – deftly shaping career trajectories, delineating what courses of action are possible, what kind of support is available, and how one’s “merits” are perceived by others. Equally, the metaphor also describes the experience of the upwardly mobile who, very often, have the wind against them. It is not that such individuals cannot move forward, or never reach the top; just that, generally, it takes longer, happens less frequently and often represents a markedly more labour-intensive, even exhausting experience. [...]
Still, it is important that we don’t fixate on this issue of access. Most academics, policymakers, charities and businesses have tended to make this mistake in the past, implicitly suggesting that the baggage of our class origins somehow disappears once we enter the workplace. We wanted to shift the debate – from getting in to getting on. And what we found was striking. In contemporary Britain, it quite literally pays to be privileged. Even when those from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering the country’s elite occupations, they go on to earn, on average, £6,400 less than colleagues whose parents did “middle-class” professional or managerial jobs – a nearly 16% class pay gap. This is exacerbated for women, people with disabilities, and most ethnic minorities. Each face a distinct double disadvantage. Women from working-class backgrounds, for example, earn on average £19,000 a year less in elite occupations than men from privileged backgrounds, and the figure is even higher for non-white women. [...]
Exploring elite workplaces showed us that the class pay gap is less about those from working-class backgrounds getting paid less for doing the same work and more about the kind of workplace segregation implied by Dave’s comment. And he was right. Only 7% of those in commissioning – the most prestigious and high-paying department – were from working-class backgrounds. The figure in HR was 22%. And even more significantly, this segregation was also vertical: only 2.5% of the executive team were from working-class backgrounds. Here, as in most of our case studies, there was a distinct class ceiling. [...]
Of course, the performance and recognition of merit is not just affected by a person’s class background. On the contrary, we find strong quantitative evidence – the first we know of – that upwardly mobile women and members of (certain) minority ethnic groups face a double earnings disadvantage in elite occupations. Our interview data sheds some light on these intersectional inequalities, particularly the way gender and ethnicity can magnify the visibility of class difference, and increase the scrutiny placed on these individuals in their execution of dominant behavioural codes. It is telling, for example, that no female equivalent exists of the heroic tale of the working-class boy made good. Instead, stereotypes of upwardly mobile women tend to be especially stigmatising, emphasising pretentiousness and pushiness.
No comments:
Post a Comment