✒ “Sometimes, we make assumptions on people’s readiness to be promoted based on their ‘polish’, whether people fit and are the finished product.” Says Sarah Churchman, PwC’s UK head of diversity, inclusion and wellbeing.
Collecting data to assess how social class may lead to pay gap is a challenge. On the one hand employees fear that revealing their backgrounds could harm their prospects, thus not share their data honestly, which tend to dilute the effect of “class”.
On the other hand, people prefer to see their success as due to their innate talents rather than having been helped by education and family role models and connections, thus tend to misidentify their origins as working class and portray their humble origins to “tell an upward story” feeding a narrative of meritocracy.
PwC (and KPMG) used the question that asks about “parental occupation when an employee was aged 14” as the most straightforward question that can identify someone’s social class background, as it is easy to understand and answer, gets high response rates and can easily be recorded.