News fresh from the Department of the Obvious this week: the Australian Financial Review reports that “class can have a bigger effect on your chance of being promoted than gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation”.

What has long been suspected is now quantifiable. It demands to be measured and addressed, far beyond corporate employment. In how we think about infrastructure. How we make culture.

Data collected by KPMG “showed people from working class families took an average of 19% longer to shift up a grade” on the employment ladder, “compared to those from higher socio-economic backgrounds”.

The data confirmed that those disadvantages compound if you’re also a woman and/or a person from an ethnic minority background.

We already know that classism is a pervasive and effective modern bigotry, because no one who perpetuates it admits that it exists. It helps that the definition of class in the contemporary context can be slippery. Class is not just socio-economic but cultural, manifesting not merely in productive relations but in shared rituals and behaviours which are different across nations and communities.

In Australia, public school versus private school education can delineate class, but after the introduction of mass vocational education in the 1980s, tertiary qualification today is far less revealing. KPMG joins PwC, the Slaughter and May law........

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