Nailing Jellies to the Wall

I’ve been involved in quite a few conversations about D&I recently in various contexts. One issue that comes up time and time again is social mobility, and how to measure it in recruitment - especially at the graduate level.

One of the difficulties is the fact that it’s an imperfect science.

Parental occupation is generally a decent starting point. If your parents are in professional services or white collar jobs, then that correlates with a certain level of income and likelihood of benefitting from social capital (connections that might lead to an internship or other opportunities, learning “social polish”)* and intellectual capital (books, private tuition etc).?

But we soon run into difficulties.

There are hundreds of professions that exist, and you can’t categorise them all. Simply processing this data is long and arduous. So many surveys use a proxy for this. They ask if one’s parents have a university degree or not. Simple, no?

Alas, asking about profession or parental degree is a very broad brush approach. A solicitor or accountant working at a big city firm may well earn over six figures. But an auditor or criminal defence practitioner will earn a fraction of that, despite also being classed as professional services jobs that require degrees.

You also face challenges when you try to separate out class from income.

Someone’s parents might never have gone to university, but run one of the most successful building companies in the country. You’re talking about high income, and potentially also social capital. During my training contract, for instance, fellow trainees were often asked to supervise unofficial internships of children of senior client contacts to give them work experience for the CV. (The most extreme example was someone I know called Dom who had to effectively babysit a 14-year-old for a month, but we won’t go into that.) Mum and dad didn’t necessarily have a university degree, because it was not a prerequisite in many industries up until recently.?

The problem is that while you can ask about unofficial internships you can’t really ask about household income. For one thing, the candidate probably doesn’t even know. I have no idea what my parents used to earn when they were working. And when I asked about it my dad got strangely defensive. (He still does.)

So you have to find proxies for income. Things like whether or not candidates attended a private, fee-paying school or a state school.?

For private school students, you exclude people who were on scholarships. Or do you? These days, more and more private schools are providing limited or means-tested scholarships which they call “bursaries”. For school that charges ￡30,000 a year, someone whose parents have a gross yearly income of ￡100,000 - three times the national average - might still be on a scholarship.?

And then - there are state schools that are academically better than a lot of private schools, as evidenced by better grades overall, and a better record of sending kids to Russell Group universities or Oxbridge. Funnily enough, a lot of middle-class parents have a tendency to send their kids to these sorts of state schools. So unless you have an up-to-date list of the top 200 state schools in the country to cross refer against, there are limitations to this data.?

So you have to start again. Find other proxies for income. Ones that don't sound absurd.

But of course, if you start going into “markers” of income in granular detail, it comes across as less of a survey than an interrogation by HMRC.

Free school meals, perhaps??

What newspaper did your parents read? Broadsheet, tabloid, or Daily Mail?

Did your parents own their own property when you were growing up, or did they have to rent?

Did you have a Peloton bike or hot tub in your house??

(Or both - which probably definitely means you have one parent who was a partner at a City law firm who lives in a five-bed detached house in St Albans or Sevenoaks.)

Did you have to use prepayment meters at home growing up? Do you even know what a prepayment meter is?

Did you do any of the following sports growing up on a competitive basis - fencing, dressage, tennis, golf or swimming?

Which supermarket did your family shop at? On a scale of Waitrose to Poundland?

Actually, scrap all that, just enclose two certified copies of your parents’ last 10 HMRC tax returns and we’ll shred them once we’re done with assessing your application.

And ultimately, even then, you face the final problem that the goalposts are constantly moving.?

To take one example - inflation and distribution of income - which means you are having to adjust the base and ceiling of any income thresholds you use in your assessments.

Another example - the massive rise in people going to university in the 1990s means that pretty soon, the importance of having a university degree will become less relevant. (That’s if this trend hasn’t already started). The reality is that there will be lots of people who went to university and took on debt, but then afterwards went into careers which did not require a degree and/or had lower income potential.

Depending on the extent of this, it could have ramifications for income distributions - which would then impact on how surveys should be done and analysed.?

And...back to square one.

#diversity #inclusion #graduaterecruitment #law #socialmobility

*By this I mean knowing how to react when a hot cafetiere is passed to you in a job interview situation, rather than knowing how to order a coffee in Krakow.?