I've written before about Anna Stansbury and Kara Rodriguez's research on social class gaps in academia. In a series of papers. they've documented how first-generation students getting PhDs earn less in academic positions, are less likely to be employed in prestigious universities, and are less likely to be tenured. When PhD holders work in the private sector, class gaps in promotion and salary are also evident.
In a new blog post for the Stone Center on Socioeconomic Inequality, Stansbury and Rodriguez write of how few organizations even collect data on socio-economic background of employees:
Gender and race have rightly become central to how researchers and organizations think about career disparities in elite occupations. But there is a glaring omission: class. Among the roughly 600 large U.S. firms whose DEI goals and reporting we reviewed in September 2024, virtually all discussed gender and race, and most discussed LGBTQ status, disability, and veteran status as well — yet only 6 percent made any mention of socioeconomic background. Socioeconomic or class background is similarly absent from most academic research on career progression.
They argue, as they have elsewhere, that too many leaders in these organizations assume that while class matters in access to education, all vestiges of class are erased while in college, so there is no need to question how class still operates throughout careers.
The blog post is a concise summary of their far-reaching technical research, and I think that more of us could share it with our campus and workplace leaders with their concluding paragraph highlighted:
Our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should consider socioeconomic background alongside race and gender as an important axis of advantage in elite career progression. Studying it — and ultimately addressing it — requires, first, that we start paying attention to it and measuring it.
