Working-Class Employees Are Vastly Underrepresented in Culture Jobs, a New UK Study Reports
People from working-class backgrounds are vastly underrepresented in arts jobs, according to a new report from a team of sociologists in the UK. Only 18.2 percent of people working in music, performing and visual arts, come from lower-class origins, found the study, which draws from interviews with 237 participants. The problem is reinforced at the top, which is occupied by those who tend to believe they got there on their own merits and that class and social obstacles are limited.
The report, titled “Panic! Social Class, Taste, and Inequalities in the Creative Industries,” illustrates a mistaken belief that success is based on ambition, talent, and hard work. The more highly paid respondents were, the more they believed in a merit-based system. In reality, one’s family wealth, parents’ educational background, social network, gender, and race have a huge impact, creating significant barriers to entry in the field for women, the working class, and racial minority workers.
The report also found that only a sliver of British society regularly attends arts and culture events. “Basically, you have a set of people who look very much like the audience that they are serving. We could consider the cultural sector a closed segment of society,” David O’Brien, who authored the paper with Orian Brook and Mark Taylor, told Frieze.
Small social networks keep workplaces insular, with predominantly white, well-off culture employees typically hiring from existing contacts who tend to share their background. The wealthy also have the advantage of being able to take unpaid internships, often a crucial stepping stone in establishing a career in the arts. (The report adds that “unpaid work is endemic across cultural occupations.”)
“We’re hopeful that ‘Panic!’ could contribute towards a shift in thinking and practice,” Hadrian Garrard, director of the art organization Create London, told Frieze. “For this to happen, it’s important that we acknowledge the privilege in our own organizations and recognize that the arts are not, as things stand, representative of the population as a whole.”