On the Horizon: the Diversity of Socio-economic Class

A report issued in January by the U.K.’s National Equality Panel highlighted the importance of an individual’s socio-economic class in determining outcomes such as educational achievement, job opportunities, and quality of healthcare. The report’s executive summary concludes “economic advantage reinforces itself across the life cycle, and on to the next generation…A fundamental aim of many political perspectives is to achieve ‘equality of opportunity’, but doing so is very hard when there are such wide differences in the resources which people and their families have to help them develop their talents and fulfill their diverse potentials.” Class impacts not only the opportunities available to individuals to achieve educational and professional goals, but how they are treated once they arrive in universities and the workplace.

These issues are attracting increasing attention in diversity circles, and have arisen in a number of ORC Network discussions in the U.S. and Europe, but class is still not a mainstream focus of attention in most companies. In Britain, the lead will likely be taken by the public sector, which, following new legislation passed this month, now has a positive duty to consider social equality in strategic decisions. In the United States, the lead on issues of opportunity and inclusion for working class and poor individuals has been taken not by industry but by the educational sector. We can expect, however, that questions of class and privilege—which often overlay more traditional diversity issues such as race and gender—will be making their way into the corporate world.

While employers grapple with exactly how their diversity and inclusion strategies could incorporate issues related to class, they might consider these questions:

• How can we create awareness of class and its impact, and open a dialogue about it?
• Do we make assumptions about the class background of our employees and how do these assumptions square with reality?
• How do employees from disadvantaged or non-privileged backgrounds experience our workplace?
• Are our employment practices skewed to favor certain classes?

Data—the mainstay on which diversity programs are often pegged—will be an especially vexing problem in regards to socio-economic class since there are few markers of class that can be easily tracked. Employers will most likely have to rely on self-identification if they wish to gather this information, or base their decision-making related to this particular issue less on statistical analysis and more on qualitative information from employee surveys, focus groups, input from employee networks, and the like. These and other questions are just beginning to surface as socio-economic class climbs higher on the diversity agenda, and it will be interesting to see how employers start to resolve them.

Watch for an upcoming mini-survey of ORC members on class in diversity strategies and for Deirdre Golden’s thoughts on social equality in the May issue of Profiles in Diversity.