The Guardian view on social mobility: no room at the top
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Version 0 of 1. Rare is the official report that produces a memorable line. But in today’s Social Mobility & Child Poverty Commission inquiry into the glass (or class) ceiling on entry into elite jobs, one law firm recruiter says more about discrimination in a few words than some whole books on the subject. “I can,” relays our recruiter of the ideal hire, “sort of write, you know, an obscure comment in the margin and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. You get my jokes. There’s not a risk that I’m going to offend you by saying something, because we get each other.” Here, beautifully encapsulated, is what we might call Plus, the People Like Us Syndrome, the mechanism by which the elite’s addition to its own ranks always involves topping up with more of the same. When class is discussed in Britain, or more especially in England, it is natural to hunt out the roots in old school ties, primogeniture or an aristocracy with 1,000 years of unbroken history. And these things can still be important, particularly the schools: the commission reports that where 70% of top job offers in 2014 went to the products of selective or fee-paying institutions, only 4% and 7% of the whole population attend them. The City recruiters deny they are any longer put off by estuary accents, but one who had made an accented hire grumbled of an ongoing need to discuss “the way that she, first, chooses words and, second, the way she pronounces them” in order to keep clients happy. As an Irishman put it a century ago, “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him”. Plus, however, is not just an English phenomenon. It is human nature to feel comfortable with one’s own, and established professionals who brim with self-confidence will find it easier to spot a glimmer of promise in candidates who are a little like them. Elites will always seek to reproduce themselves: the question is how far the rules and material conditions allow them to do so. And the answer, in unequal America as much as in the UK, is that they enjoy plenty of leeway. There are extraordinary parallels between today’s report, and a new book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, by the American sociologist Lauren Rivera. At one point, she embedded herself in a human resources department to try to make sense of recruitment decisions in the same sort of professional services firms in the US that the commission examined in the UK. The echoes across the Atlantic are eerie. Exactly the same word – “polish” – that’s used by elite British recruiters to describe what they seek is now also deployed in the land of the American dream. There is the same emphasis on costly means of demonstrating breadth of character, from foreign travel to pricey sports. And in both cases, too, there is an emphasis on hiring from “elite universities”, so often distinguished not only by the quality of their teaching but by the pedigree of students’ families. Few recruiters see a business case for doing things differently, but then – until competition forces recourse to unpolished talent – they wouldn’t, would they? |