At his first work dinner as a junior consultant at McKinsey’s, Ferry Grijpink felt ill-equipped to contribute to the conversation about “wine and poetry”. It was not just a lack of familiarity with Sancerre and Yeats. “I didn’t yet understand the informal rules of how to belong, how to build rapport, or how to signal I was ‘one of them’,” he recalls.
Grijpink’s parents met while working in a hairdressing salon and he was the first person in his family to go to university. He reflects that for those new to the white-collar world, like him, the most significant hurdles can be “the cultural codes — the unspoken norms around how to connect and build relationships”. This “made it harder to build a network, to be seen, and to navigate the early stages of my career with confidence”, he says.
Employer diversity programmes have traditionally focused on race and gender, neglecting the socio-economic dimension, which can be a significant barrier to professional success. A report last year from Progress Together, which promotes socio-economic diversity in the financial services sector, found that those from an advantaged background were promoted on average six months quicker from junior to mid-level roles than those from a lower socio-economic bracket.
As workers move up the career ladder, class diversity reduces. Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter, says he is increasingly asked by global employers to advise on socio-economic inclusion, partly driven by a desire to widen their pool of talented staff. “There is increasing recognition of the many invisible but powerful class barriers to selection and promotion — everything from accent . . . to the unspoken tacit middle-class rules, for example, how to advocate for yourself or navigate office politics — that so often dominate professional workplace cultures.”
This could be exacerbated by the impact of AI, says Sophie Hulm, chief executive at Progress Together, particularly as traditional routes into financial services through cashier roles and contact centres are being disrupted. Recruitment tools using AI to assess CVs or video interviews might discriminate against background and accent.
A recent report by McKinsey found that combating the barriers to employment that a third of Europeans face due to their socio-economic background would boost recruitment, retention, and productivity, with the potential to add 9 per cent to the continent’s GDP. The consultancy says it has expanded hiring strategies to engage candidates with non-business backgrounds, for example, using a game to encourage candidates to show their problem-solving skills without any prior business experience. It also has a community (Prism) supporting staff from lower socio-economic backgrounds, as well as mentorship.
But employment experts say companies, particularly in the US, appear to be hesitating in efforts to support “first-generation professionals” — those who are the first in their family to go to higher education or enter white-collar jobs.
Joan Williams, author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, says this is partly because many employees do not “want to identify as first gen [because] it’s not a great career move”. A report by EY, the professional services firm, found the aspects of their lives people feel least comfortable disclosing at work are the family’s socio-economic status, religion and political party.
Another reason is that companies are nervous about appearing to promote diversity following the Trump administration’s executive orders banning such initiatives. Many US businesses, including Target and Meta, have rolled back programmes to improve race and gender equality.
“Social class has been the missing dimension in employers’ diversity drives,” says Elliot Major. “In hindsight, a huge own goal opening them up to the backlash we are now seeing . . . Ignoring class risks building a superficially diverse workforce that’s still dominated by the middle classes.”
Last year, Andrea Lucas, acting chair of the US’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said employers should consider programmes aimed at first-generation professionals, including “offering additional training”, “an employee resource group . . . or even first-gen internships”. Such opportunities would have to be “race and sex neutral but can often lead towards your goal of social mobility”.
Massimo Giordano, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, says “enlarging the array of people you interview as well as monitoring and helping them advance” is key to building a “meritocracy”.
There is a stark class divide in professional roles, despite efforts by some companies to level the playing field among people from different socio-economic backgrounds. Among UK financial services workers, for example, 89 per cent of senior employees are from a higher socio-economic background by parental occupation compared with 33 per cent nationally, according to a report by the Bridge Group, a consultancy. A quarter were educated at a private school, more than three times higher than among the general population.
How class dynamics play out in the workplace is linked to culture, says Sam Friedman, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. In the UK, “even though we’re uncomfortable with it, we’re fascinated” by class and “we’ve got a language to talk about it”. It also shapes workers’ attitudes. “Taking risk is class based,” says Friedman. “If you face economic uncertainty, you simply can’t afford to take risks in the same way as those with a financial cushion from their family.”
Traditionally, one of the most common holes in corporate social mobility programmes, according to Louise Ashley, associate professor at Queen Mary University of London, “is their emphasis on access rather than progression”. While this is beginning to shift, “progression remains an area that would benefit from more attention”.
This year, Zurich published pay data for its UK staff, alongside eight steps to improve social mobility at the insurer. Chief HR Officer, Steve Collinson, says a number of people spent more time weighing up whether to disclose their parents’ occupation when they were aged 14 (a typical measure of socio-economic background) than other personal information. To reassure staff, Collinson says: “We’re very open at the firm, we make it clear that only two people can see this information.”
Rather than meritocracy, he prefers to “talk about our drive to make it a great [place] to work”. Zurich’s programme to improve social mobility includes skills-based hiring and senior leaders sponsoring new starters without corporate experience.
While Friedman welcomes corporate social mobility efforts, he is concerned class becomes deployed as “part of an inequality top trumps . . . If you make it an either-or, you ignore double disadvantages for women and ethnic minorities from working-class backgrounds.” Ashley suggests “it’s also quite hard for organisations to credibly claim commitment to mobility and equality when, for example, internal pay ratios between the highest and lowest earners remain fairly extreme”.
For Grijpink, who is now a senior partner at McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, a “life-changing” moment came a year into his first job, when a senior vice-president took him under his wing, becoming a “true sponsor”, inviting him to business dinners, connecting him to influential people and creating opportunities on high-level projects. “I’m not entirely sure what sparked it,” he says.
