Os limites à ascensão social (no Reino Unido)

Introducing the ‘class’ ceiling, por Sam Friedmane Sam Friedman:

There has long been a perception that Britain’s traditionally high-status occupations, such as law, medicine, and journalism, remain stubbornly elitist and research has continually shown that these occupations recruit disproportionately from the socially privileged and/or the privately educated.

Yet there is a danger of reducing social mobility to this one-dimensional issue of access. In particular it assumes that social mobility finishes at the point of occupational entry. But the reality is that while many working-class people may secure admission into elite occupations, they don’t necessarily go on to achieve the same levels of success as those from more privileged backgrounds. In a recent project, we have been investigating exactly this issue of social mobility within elite occupations.

In doing so, we have purposively borrowed the ‘glass ceiling’ concept developed by feminist scholars to explain the hidden barriers faced by women in the workplace. In a working paper recently published by LSE Sociology, we argue that it is also possible to identify a ‘class ceiling’ in Britain which is preventing the upwardly mobile from enjoying equivalent earnings to those from upper middle-class backgrounds. (...)

We are also able to look at individual elite occupations, where we find striking variations. At one end of the scale, engineering provides a notable exemplar of meritocracy, with negligible differences in pay regardless of social background. In contrast, our results reveal the arresting scale of disadvantage experienced by the children of the working classes in law, media, medicine and finance. The socially mobile (of any range) in finance have predicted earnings of £11,200 less per year than otherwise similar privileged colleagues, in media £9,440, law £8,830 and in medicine £5,050. This disadvantage also tends to increase the longer the range of mobility. In law, for example, the long-range upwardly mobile face a huge estimated annual pay gap of £19,700.