Most people tend to think of the workplace as a meritocracy: if people have the right skills and experience, work hard and perform well, they have the same opportunity to succeed.

But socioeconomic background can shape people’s working lives in ways that are not easily visible – influencing who gets hired, who progresses, who feels they belong and ultimately who reaches senior positions.

The figures are stark, says Lisa Fowkes, director of employment at social impact consultancy Social Ventures Australia:

• In Australia, one in three children born into the lowest 20 per cent of income-earning families will still be in that group by adulthood.
• By their 40s, private sector employees from higher-income backgrounds earn two-thirds (66%) more than their peers from low-income backgrounds.
• And, as the Diversity Council of Australia has found, class is more strongly associated with exclusion at work than any other diversity indicator.

So what role can NFP employers play in breaking down these barriers?

Fowkes is working to put socioeconomic mobility on the agenda through the Fair Chance Initiative, a national movement to make workplaces fairer and ensure everyone has the opportunity to succeed – regardless of their family background.

To explore how similar issues are being tackled by NFPs around the world, she spoke with Jenny Baskerville and Nik Miller of the Bridge Group, an NFP consultancy dedicated to advancing social equality in the UK.

Their insights reveal the often-invisible barriers that can shape career progression, why socioeconomic inclusion matters in the workplace, and what NFP employers can do to create more equitable opportunities.

The hidden barriers shaping who gets ahead at work

The Bridge Group’s research suggests that where someone comes from can significantly shape how their career unfolds.

Its analysis of around 16,500 employees over five years found that employees from lower socioeconomic backgrounds took, on average, 19 per cent longer to progress to their next employment grade than colleagues from higher socioeconomic backgrounds.

In financial services, the gap was even more pronounced: the Bridge Group’s 2025 Performance Not Privilege report found that employees from lower socioeconomic backgrounds took nearly two years longer to progress.

The issue isn’t a lack of talent or performance, says Miller. In the legal sector, the Bridge Group found that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds took an average of 1.5 years longer to make partner – yet they were more likely to be among the top 10 per cent of high performers. They were also more likely to leave.

So why does this gap persist?

The answer, Miller suggests, lies partly in the informal advantages that some people have when it comes to how they are seen and treated at work.

“We often find in the qualitative data – interviews with people in the workforce – that many of the attributes that help you get ahead in the workplace are typically more available to those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds,” he says. “These include familiarity with professional norms, your networks, your polish, presenteeism and self-confidence.”

“Also, senior sponsorship – so being endorsed by a senior colleague – really helps you get ahead. In our evidence, senior sponsorship is disproportionately given to those from higher socioeconomic backgrounds as well.”

These advantages may be invisible in formal processes, but they can still make a real difference to who gets internal opportunities and who progresses.

Why socioeconomic inclusion matters

Socioeconomic inclusion isn’t just about creating fairer career pathways. It’s also about building stronger organisations and making sure different experiences and perspectives have a place in the room when decisions are being made.

As Baskerville notes, it’s about creating workplaces that work for everyone.

“Socioeconomic inclusion can not only broaden an organisations’ access to talent, it can also reduce harmful groupthink and increase cognitive diversity and experience,” she says.

“We’ve seen it strengthen decision-making and help organisations better understand the communities they serve.”

Baskerville describes socioeconomic background as a “unifier” when it comes to thinking about diversity in the workplace – because it can intersect with other aspects of employees’ lives, including gender and ethnicity.

In this way, it doesn’t have to become another separate diversity initiative. Instead, it can be part of the inclusion work NFPs are already doing, helping see where different forms of disadvantage overlap and where some employees may be facing barriers that others don’t.

There’s also a practical reason to take a broader view, Miller adds. If organisations want to attract and retain people from a wider range of backgrounds, they need to create workplaces where those people can see themselves belonging and contributing – not simply recruit them and expect the rest to take care of itself.

The challenge for NFP employers is working out where those barriers are showing up in their workplaces, and how they can remove them.

So, what can NFPs do to make socioeconomic inclusion part of the way they recruit and support their people? Miller and Baskerville have these suggestions.

1. Remove unnecessary barriers at the recruitment stage

Miller recommends employers start by looking at whether the requirements in job ads are genuinely necessary or whether they are creating barriers for people who have had fewer opportunities. That includes “removing unnecessary academic requirements” and “ensuring internships are paid for”, as well as considering “non-traditional entry routes” such as apprenticeships.

That could mean an audit of existing position descriptions and job ads, looking critically at whether a degree, particular qualification or a certain number of years’ experience is really essential to doing that particular job well. As we’ve written previously:

While some jobs like ‘nurse’ or ‘social worker’ clearly need a specific qualification, many jobs really don’t. For example almost 10 per cent of US CEOs have not completed a university degree! So consider removing requirements for a tertiary qualification for jobs that don’t truly need it.

It could also mean thinking more creatively about how people enter your organisation and how they build a career once they are there.

2. Look at who gets opportunities

Once employees are inside your organisation, pay attention to what happens next.

The Bridge Group suggests analysing  whether socioeconomic background is linked to differences in promotion rates, pay and performance for existing employees, as well as access to the opportunities that can help people progress.

It’s not easy to easily gather data on employees’ socioeconomic background – people are often reluctant to disclose this in case it contributes to how they are perceived in the workplace.

A voluntary, anonymous demographic survey can reveal this data, focused on standardised early-life indicators like parental education (‘What level of education have your parents completed?’, or type of school attended (‘Which type of school did you attend for the most years between ages 11 and 18?’).

Miller recommends combining quantitative data with qualitative research and employee experiences to understand what might be driving the patterns that emerge from the data – and then using that evidence to assess how your organisation’s processes are working.

“The most progressive firms that we work with are also doing what seems to be fairly obvious,” Miller says. “They’re evaluating whether interventions are actually creating progress, not just assuming they might do so.”

Even without data on employees’ backgrounds, making internal opportunities – like stretch assignments, mentoring, sponsorship and exposure to senior leaders – more visible and accessible to all employees can help ensure progression isn’t dependent on already having the right connections.

3. Make the path to progression clearer

How organisations assess people for progression also matters.

If terms such as “maturity” or “fit” are being used to decide who is ready to progress, employers need to be clear about what they actually mean – and whether they are measuring performance or familiarity with professional norms that people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to have encountered.

For NFP leaders, that could involve making promotion criteria clearer, giving people more explicit feedback about what progression requires and ensuring employees don’t need to already understand the unwritten rules to navigate their way to the next step.

4. Make it a workplace issue, not just a diversity initiative

Finally, Miller suggests organisations can get greater traction by positioning socioeconomic inclusion as a broader organisational issue, rather than treating it as another standalone diversity initiative.

That’s because socioeconomic background affects issues that sit well beyond diversity targets – including who gets recruited, who progresses, who stays and whether organisations are making the most of the talent they have to achieve their goals and missions. Framing it this way can also help make responsibility for change broader than the people leading diversity and inclusion, bringing it into conversations about recruitment, leadership, performance and organisational culture.

The aim isn’t to create another layer of work, Miller says. It’s to look at the systems and everyday practices your organisation already has, and ask whether they are working equally well for people from different backgrounds.

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Talent can be found in every part of society, but opportunity isn’t always distributed as evenly. The challenge for employers is making sure that informal advantages don’t become invisible barriers to progression.

For NFPs, that means looking beyond who you recruit to longer-term questions of who gets opportunities, who progresses and who stays – and making sure that where someone comes from doesn’t determine how far they can go.

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