Employment discrimination on the basis of class? Can we do anything about it?

a post by Tristram Hooley for the Adventure in Career Development blog



I’ve worked in quite a few different workplaces and researched and consulted in a lot more. In pretty much all of them, when you first come in from the outside you tend to notice a type. One workplace might be made up pretty much entirely of blond women called Emma. Another is stuffed to the rafters with check-shirted blokes called Steve.

Some of this is a fairly inevitable tendency for birds of a feather to flock together and for similar types of people to be drawn to similar types of jobs. One of the problems with this situation is that once we’ve been in an environment for a while we tend not to notice the similarities so much and to focus on the differences. Of course all of the Emma’s aren’t the same – eventually we come to mainly notice the fact that Emma A rides a bike, while Emma B is a bell ringer and Emma C is always ten minutes late back after lunch.

The challenge is that people tend to forget that they are in homogeneous environments and feel that they mix with a very diverse group of people. One of the problems comes when we start talking about ‘organisational fit’ as a criteria for recruitment. A desire for organisational fit comes from a desire to ensure that people get along and that new hires will be able to work effectively with the rest of the team. But, if you take a step backwards organisational fit/culture fit takes on a fairly sinister twist. The organisation is vetting new recruits to ensure that they are similar to the majority culture within the organisation.

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