Working-class professionals earn £6,718 less on average, while women and most ethnic minorities face a double disadvantage, according to the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF), which carried out the survey. Working class professionals earn £9,450 less than men, while Bangladeshi working class professionals earn £10,432 less than their white counterparts in the same jobs. Alan Milburn, the former health secretary and current chairman of the SMF, called on ministers to legally require companies to measure and report on their classroom pay gaps. Only three firms do, according to the foundation: accountants PwC and KPMG and law firm Clifford Chance. “Those on the receiving end of this pay gap are hit with a double whammy as the cost of living crisis also eats into their incomes,” Milburn told the Observer. “Employers and the Government must take urgent action to stop hundreds of thousands of workers being underpaid and underpaid. Creating a legally based registry for reporting the pay gap in the classroom is ethically sound and economical. At a time when incomes are being squeezed, such a legal change can be part of the solution to combating the cost of living crisis.” The 13% pay gap affects hundreds of thousands of people and means tomorrow marks the day working class professionals will effectively start working for free, according to the SMF. The pay analysis used data from the Office for National Statistics’ Labor Force Survey from 2014 to 2021 for professional and managerial occupations, which account for more than a third of the UK workforce. As of 2014, the survey asked half a million people annually about their parents’ jobs, an indicator of socioeconomic class. Graph showing working class families earn almost £17,000 less than those from higher socio-economic backgrounds Working class managers earn £16,749 less than their peers. Finance directors are paid £11,427 less, and accountants and lawyers have a gap of more than £8,000. Class wage differences are smaller in lower-paid occupations, but remain significant. Police, firefighters and army officers earn £5,229 less than their middle or upper class peers. Academics face a penalty of £5,807, with £5,123 for IT workers. Teachers and social workers also earn around £2,000 less. The class wage gap was identified by Professor Sam Friedman and Dr Daniel Laurison in their book The Class Ceiling in 2019. “People tend to expect differences, but they think that maybe a privileged background can buy an expensive education, or maybe it has to do with how hard people work,” Friedman said. “But when you adjust for all of that, you can see that there is a persistent gap that is fundamentally unfair. It’s a strong response to any celebratory notions of meritocracy that people might have.” “The brute force of parental wealth” is the main factor, enabling children to get on the housing ladder or insulating them from danger, he said. “People often have to walk this incredibly precarious tightrope of short-term roles that lead to really lucrative roles at the end of their careers.” He added that the class was “completely absent from the equality and diversity agendas. It is now something that is key to discussions.” Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. PwC began publishing data on its gender and disability pay gap last year, showing a pay gap of 12.1% across its UK workforce, alongside its existing gender pay gap reports and ethnicity. Kevin Ellis, UK chairman of PwC, said tackling the pay gap in the classroom was vital to the firm’s performance. “We have 46,000 customers from all kinds of backgrounds, geographies, and unless we’re representing our customers, we’re irrelevant,” he said. “So it’s very important to have a diverse workforce. Other than that, if you’re trying to become a talent magnet, you need to make sure you’re not excluding the talent you’re trying to attract. Unemployment is virtually zero, especially for young talent and diverse backgrounds.” The company also no longer asks applicants for their Ucas points and has dropped the requirement for a minimum 2:1 degree. Ellis said there was resistance to the rank measure, both from partners who felt it would unnecessarily make PwC the target of criticism and from employees who were suspicious of why they were being asked to disclose their background. Initially less than 30% of employees were happy to share the data, but that increased to 88% as Ellis and other executives explained why, he said. Steven Barrett is a commercial solicitor who grew up in Birkenhead, the son of an electrician. “It sounds ridiculous to my upper-middle-class friends, but I always have Kellogg’s cereal and Fairy Liquid in this house, because growing up, those were two things we couldn’t afford,” she said. Barrett, who mentors young people for SMF and chairs social mobility legal charity BVL, said he believed he would have won more if he came from a different background and felt success was based on changing his accent and appearance. “I tell my mentors that I’m very well washed,” he said. “I became performatively elegant. There are these endless rules of scrutiny that seem to be there to expose the person who is performatively stylish but not genuine – there’s a cat and mouse game where you’re constantly worried that you’re going to be exposed.’
