You must speak proper to work in the City

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Clever, white, working-class men and women are being overlooked for top jobs in City law firms because they don’t quite ‘fit in’, according to research released yesterday.

‘Focusing on ethnicity enables law firms to boast excellent or, at the very least, improved diversity outcomes, despite the fact that they have continued to recruit using precisely the same types of class privilege that have always been in operation,’ says the author of the report, Dr Louise Ashley, in her most compelling soundbite.

It seems to be a uniquely British conundrum that, while ethnicity (and age, sex, religion, disability, and sexual orientation) should have no bearing on a law graduate’s ability to get a job, class should. Law firms, meanwhile, say that they recruit as they do to preserve their brands.

But this is class discrimination, and it begs the question: how many working-class law graduates have lost out on jobs to less talented middle- and upper-class law graduates?

I’m not a great watcher of TV show The Apprentice, but I did watch the last three episodes of the latest series. The winner? Stella English, a white working-class woman who left school with no qualifications. She was hired over second-placed Chris Bates, whose first-class undergraduate degree from Nottingham University and received pronunciation were not enough to land him the top job with Lord Sugar.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show’s format: 16 contestants take part in a series of business challenges over 14 episodes, amid an orgy of bitching, moaning, backstabbing, and sucking up to their prospective employer. One or two are eliminated every week, until the final episode, when Sugar (also white, also from a working-class background) picks his apprentice and hands them a fat six-figure salary.

If the firms surveyed by Dr Ashley had Apprentice-style recruitment processes, then, had she chosen to do a law degree in another life, English might have fared very well. But they don’t, and the research suggests that, sat opposite two senior partners in a dimly lit meeting room at a first interview, she’d be shown the door – despite her talent.