Sophie Pender, 27, felt she stood out like a sore thumb when she started her career at a big city law firm. Photo: David Rose < p>Sophie Pender thought she would feel right at home working at a top City law firm.
An overachiever, she achieved the best A-level grades her school had ever seen, and graduated from the University of Bristol. , despite growing up on a council estate with an abusive father.
But when she arrived in the City of London, it didn't take her long to realize that meritocracy wasn't all that was cracked. be. Landing in the City, Pender soon began to feel uneasy, feeling that she stood out like a sore thumb among the posh and glittering crowd of lawyers.
She had good reason to feel out of place. A few months into her career, she received unsolicited advice from a colleague: “Don’t tell anyone your dad was in jail.”
“Lawyers can hold it against you,” Pender recalls. what they tell her.
Pender believes her colleague's clumsy advice was made with the best of intentions — oddly enough, they were probably trying to help her survive.
But it struck a nerve — it made her painfully aware that the network The old boys are still alive and well in the City, perpetuating the «same old, same old» approach to business, controlled by a small group of people with a similar background. It's better to blend in with the crowd and pretend to be one of them than to show your true self.
Pender is now campaigning for «old boys, old news» with the 93pc Club, a membership group for public school leavers. people who are committed to helping them succeed in the city.
“It’s very human to be a nepotist and want to support those close to you — working class communities do this all the time,” she tells The Telegraph, “but we can’t support each other to get into the City.” because we have no connections there.”
Pender created Club 93pc to help her find community and support others in her position. In addition to helping with professional connections, it can provide support when people find themselves on the brink of class prejudice.
Pender's initiative has already received support four corporate giants — BCG, EY, JLL and Slaughter and May. Credit: Jack Taylor/Getty
To date, Pender, 27, has had endless examples of sheer classism in her career.< /p>
While in law school, one of her peers noticed that she was wearing false eyelashes and asked, «What the hell is that?»
«I said it's completely normal where I am. I'm going to get This. This person said, «Well, maybe in some social circles it's okay, but not for those who go to top law firms.»
Pender felt so out of place in college and law school that she adjusted her accent to look more chic, and it was an «alienating» experience because she still didn't feel chic enough.
“All my life has been shaped by this problem that people won't talk about,” she says, referring to class.
Even her name was affected by the lack of money. Her parents named her Sophia, but by the time they noticed the mistake on her birth certificate, they didn't have enough money for the bus fare to go back and correct the typo.
Elitism had seeped into her working life (somewhere she thought her background would no longer matter) and it redoubled her determination to defeat classism in the City.
Until recently, social mobility was not part of the conversation about diversity in the city. Lady Cherie Blair QC argued earlier this year that the legal sector had barely diversified and had merely replaced «posh boys with posh girls».
A 2020 study found that more than half of the partners in the city's ten largest law firms attended private schools, compared with just 7% of the population.
Breaking into these elite circles is becoming increasingly difficult. Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), wrote in September that «parental choices are becoming increasingly important» after his think tank found a growing correlation between parents' and children's earnings.
The Social Mobility Commission found in 2020 that teenagers who grew up poor in the 1980s were four times more likely to become poor as adults, while the likelihood was only twice as high in the 1970s.< /p>
The boardrooms are finally waking up to the class issue and starting to pay attention to Pender's «reverse Bullingdon society».
The hijinks that took place at the Bullingdon Club, a private men's dining club for Oxford University students, were depicted in the 2014 film The Club rebels» Photo: TCD/VP/LMKMEDIA
Slaughter and May became the first major law firm to set social mobility targets earlier this year. KPMG wants 29% of its partners and directors to be from working class backgrounds by 2030. the reaction Pender received when she founded the 93% Club in 2016. She was insulted by other students at fresher fairs and called a communist and called a brat in the university newspaper.
«Social and cultural capital can make you listen — now because I'm a lawyer, people listen to me, whereas before I was a council estate nobody,» she says.
Pender hopes the tide is turning. Lawyers, in particular, are trying to redefine their elitist image.
Its professional network has attracted almost 7,000 members and is already supported by four corporate giants — BCG, EY, JLL and Slaughter and May. Club 93pc offers resume and interview workshops, professional portraits and networking opportunities.
Pender believes one way to bridge the class gap is to mimic the networking that comes from attending some of the most exclusive schools countries.< /p>
“I know people from private schools who, when they go to change jobs, go to Linkedin, search for the company and their school in the filters, and then write: “Hi, I’m also from this school, and I'm going to move.» There is nothing equivalent to public school students.”
By creating the community that Pender felt she was missing in the beginning, her participants will begin their careers on a slightly more equal footing. However, she understands that this is just the beginning.
“At the moment you have a two-tier system. Rich kids in private schools and 93% of kids in public schools move through life in parallel and never mix until they get to university or work, and then don't know what to do with each other.»
Perhaps Initiatives like the 93% Club could make a difference.
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