Working class people paid thousands less despite doing same jobs

Maybe I misunderstood the study[1], but I don’t think the salary difference can be explained away by region.

“Class groups including “working-class” are based on parental occupation aged 14”

[1] https://departmentforopportunities.org/news/the-class-pay-ga...

Even after controlling for work region, and for other variables, a sizeable gap remains, at least according to this government report.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

4.3 Explaining the Class Pay Gap

In order to disentangle potential sources of the class pay gap we next use regression analysis to see how the gap is affected when we adjust for five sets of factors often identified as sources of income inequality. Figure 3, begins by showing (in the first bar) the raw average earnings gap reported in Figure 2, while the second bar shows the average earnings gap in pounds per week when we control for gender, ethnicity, age and hours worked. In the next bar, additional controls for educational attainment are included; then human capital, work context (work region, industry, firm size, public vs private sector) and finally the individual occupation the individual works in.

[..] even when we control for all of these variables, Figure 3 shows that the class pay gap remains substantial and statistically significant (see Appendix Table A10 for standard errors). Thus even when those from working-class backgrounds are similar to those from advantaged backgrounds in every way we can measure, they still face a 7% or £2242 a year pay gap in Britain’s professional and managerial occupations.

At first, I thought you had a good point. But apparently, the study is already exploring this effect.

So, now, the situation is that you have seen a study with results that you don't like, have come up with a reason why the conclusion is invalid without even checking if the conclusion is indeed invalidated by this reason, and used it to reassure yourself and attack the study.

In this case, you are clearly the unscientific irresponsible here.

I assume you're not arguing that people born into affluent families perform better than those who weren't.

In my view the ideal situation would still be a meritocracy but it would not be predicated on who you know or the old school tie.

In my view, it's a personal confidence thing. People raised in a (UK traditional) working class family are bought up with lower expectations about what success they can enjoy in later life[1], compared to people raised in (traditional) middle class families. They will generally have less educational advantages eg: less pressure to read books, finish homework, do extra-curricular activities, etc. Getting to university will require harder work in a less friendly social environment. So when it comes to work, working class people will (in general) tend to have less confidence to negotiate a wage equivalent to their middle class colleagues doing the same work. Of course there's numerous exceptions to this on an individual level[2], but we're not talking about individuals here.

[1] - anecdotal evidence: despite having an excellent academic record at school, the first question my Careers Advisor asked me was: "So which Regiment are you planning to join?" - which kinda sums up the sort of assumptions people made about me, based on my family's reputation and circumstances.

[2] - me, for instance (I'm ignoring, for the purposes of this comment, the 7 weeks I spent in the Army).

What if you have Steve who is a brilliant C programmer, better even than Jane, but autistic and so unable to negotiate a better salary than either Bob or Jane? Would you find it ethical to pay him less?

It is wrong because people are being underpaid for not participating in silly upper class rituals that are not relevant to productivity. Apart from the evident injustice of being poorer because your parents could afford polo lessons, it produces a system of perverse incentives, whereby wearing cufflinks is more important than knowing how to do your job.

There are a few industries in the UK were you’d be better off being a foreigner than a lower class local.

The ideal situation is one where people are judged by the value of their work and not by the socioeconomic background of their parents.

But the variable they used shows a statistically significant influence.

They could have come up with a variable that is "the first letter of the first name", but then, the result will not show such strong difference between the groups. In other words: if a variable shows strong difference, then this variable is a good choice, and there is a real mechanism below this variable, and classifying people according to this variable corresponds to separating people based on the fact that they, for real, are really different groups that go through really different mechanism. (it does not mean causality, but even in case of confounding variable, it is still a pragmatically good choice of classification)

Then, the question is what are these mechanisms. There are a bunch of hypotheses, for example:

1) society has rewarded people with "efficient gene" to be in high class, so people in high class are naturally better. This is the most naive hypothesis, and it corresponds to a common bias and a lot of studies or observations indicates it is probably at least a very small reality (adopted children, "imposters", ...).

2) higher class family have values and standards that educate their people to try to be better at their jobs. Again, it's a common bias to believe that, but there is no real proof of it (the fact that some people think it's "obvious" is in fact the proof that they are biased).

3) higher class family have access to better school education because of resources. It is unfair, and in a modern society, we should want to compensate for that: everyone should be born with the same opportunity.

4) higher class family have values and standards that educate their people to try to consider themselves as better as the others, to present their skills less honestly and to have less guilt of take the position instead of a more qualified person. Inversely, lower class family have values and standards that educate their people to be more modest than what they really are. If you think that this hypothesis is bullshit but did not think the same as hypothesis 2, then, you are clearly biased: this one is the same under-lying idea (different education), but you prefer the one positive for the higher class.

5) higher class family have better contact and better arguments to get better salary. It is unfair, and in a modern society, we should want to compensate for that: better skilled people should get the job.

6) higher class family have better reputation to get better salary. Similarly to a lot of studies that shows (using blind approaches and scientific methodology) that for two candidates with same skills, the recruiter is unconsciously biased to choose the one that correspond to the caricatural mental picture of who would be an ideal recruitee, recruiters tend to be unconsciously push to believe a candidate would be better if they know this candidate has characteristics that are in fact uncorrelated, such as "coming from this fancy school", "being of higher class", ... I personally think it's difficult to believe this does not has a big impact, because such impact has been observed in plenty of studies in a slightly different context (gender or race, for example). Also, it explains why the "imposters" works as it does ("imposters" = people from working class that have pretended to be higher class)

7) ...

The variable does not imply anything on those mechanisms, but it does not need it to still separate into groups that are, indeed, subject to different treatment.

was negative intention assumed here? It's not in the quote.

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Who said anything about intention? If somebody rear-ends my car by accident, they're still responsible for the damage. My insurance company's lawyers don't accept "Oh well I didn't mean to do it" in lieu of payment. Is there a bona-fide reason that the working-class Bangladeshi professionals should be systematically underpaid?