“Mark went to a state school but we won’t hold that against him.”
Former corporate high-flyer Mark Baxter heard variations of this phrase from senior leaders in the early years of his career.
Baxter’s corporate executive career has included working at large financial organisations in Australia and abroad. But after leaving university in the 1980s, he realised his working-class background was a barrier to progression and inclusion in the workplace.
He was raised by a single mother on a widow’s pension and attended a public school in regional Victoria. Baxter later chose not to discuss his educational background with colleagues.
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“It’s an awful admission,” he said.
“I ended up having to mask and just sort of avoid those sorts of discussions. I found it frustrating … that people still put a really big weight on where you went to school.”
For almost 30 years, Sydney-based Baxter didn’t talk about his upbringing and public school education. Now, Baxter mentors young people in the corporate world, particularly people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds and LGBTQ+ employees.
“I’m the first to admit, I’ve been sort of socially mobile, but there’s been lots of speed humps along the way,” he said.
The often invisible barrier of social class is what Diversity Council Australia (DCA) labels the “class ceiling”. Preliminary findings from the council’s latest Class Inclusion at Work report suggest this holds many Australians back.
Of those surveyed, 44% of “class marginalised workers” said they had been offered career development opportunities in the past year, including progression opportunities such as secondments or acting in a more senior role. This compared with 76% classified as privileged by their social class.
Only 4% of leaders surveyed reported being class marginalised, while 40% said they were class privileged.
Despite the disparity, just under a quarter (24%) of leaders surveyed recognised that social class made a difference in Australia, compared with 33% of other workers.
DCA uses the term “class marginalised” to refer to those in the lowest 20% of household incomes. “Middle class” is for those earning above that and up to the “class privileged” – people with the highest 20% of household incomes.
The council’s research found 22% of class marginalised workers felt valued and respected in their team compared with 41% of class privileged workers.
Baxter recalled being considered for a work promotion and being told “you’re not quite the right person for this”.
“I think it was coded for ‘you’re not really in the right networks’ or ‘you’re not one of us’,” he said.
“I was just told … Mark, you’re not the type of person that we want to promote at the moment.”
Baxter, a co-founder and chair of advocacy group Australian LGBTQ+ Board & Executive Inclusion and a former NSW Labor board member, said it has been difficult to pull apart the discrimination he has faced as a member of the LGBTQ+ community and being from a low-socioeconomic background.
“I can never decide which one has actually created the most barriers,” he said.
The complete findings from the DCA report, which will be published in October, draw on a nationally representative sample of 3,000 workers and a survey of workers and Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) practitioners.
Catherine Hunter, the chief executive of DCA, says the findings show social class remains “one of the most powerful yet least acknowledged” barriers to inclusion at work.
Dr Rose D’Almada-Remedios, DCA’s interim research director, says there is a persistent myth that Australia is a classless society.
“More and more people are starting to recognise that’s not the case because the divide is becoming more and more obvious. But I do think that the legacy of that myth is that people have this low understanding around class literacy in Australia,” D’Almada-Remedios said.
She said one theme in the research was the financial barrier of networking outside work hours that some class marginalised people face.
She pointed to one respondent who said they recognised networking was important but had to choose between those opportunities and paying household bills.
“We heard lots of stories like that, that really brought home how much of a real problem this is in Australian organisations, and how important it is that we work towards building class inclusion,” she said.
DCA published its first Class at Work report in 2020. It concluded that, more than any other diversity demographic, class was the most strongly linked to workers’ experience of inclusion and one of the most strongly related to exclusion.
It found that more than 40% of lower-class workers reported having experienced discrimination and/or harassment in the workplace in the past 12 months, compared with 26% of higher-class workers.
The same cohort was more likely to report missing out on opportunities and privileges compared with middle-class workers and higher-class workers.
