A working class psychologist is something to be…

The story begins with Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg speaking. I couldn't understand why people listened to them… what they were saying was ridiculous. Are the British conditioned to trust and obey a posh voice spoken with authority?

I have a northern accent, yet I had never taken accents as being that important. Channelling John Lennon, I hoped that 'a working class hero is something to be'. But 'accent is arguably the primary signal of socio-economic status' (Levon et al., 2022, p.4). People will try, without conscious awareness, to place a speaker in their social class (Kraus et al., 2019); and studies in the US find that people are accurate in these judgements based on just a few words.

These perceptions based on speech affect recruitment and professional development (Diversity Q, 2019), and maintain social and economic inequality (Kraus et al., 2019). Speakers who use the 'standard language' are 'preferred for prestigious jobs, whereas the nonstandard accented speakers preferred for low-status jobs' (Ahmed et al., 2013, p.249), and the Accent Bias Britain studies found that British people rate the accents of working-class speakers, Northern industrial towns, and minority ethnicity groups lower for prestige.

Working class and minority ethnic accents were associated with lower professional expertise and competence even when interview responses were identical (Levon et al., 2022, p.37). A recent four-year study concluded that 'People do think that speakers in the north of England are less intelligent, less ambitious, less educated and so on, solely from the way they speak' (McKenzie, 2022).

Amongst the socially aspirational, there seems to be an awareness of this importance of accents. The Equality Group (2019) found that 22 per cent of professionals in Britain believe that to get on, they have had to change how they speak and their dialect. This is not new – Margaret Thatcher softened her Lincolnshire accent and moved towards Received Pronunciation, and in fiction, the central theme of George Bernhard Shaw's Pygmalion (1916) and the film My Fair Lady (1964) was phonetics professor Henry Higgins promoting the social advancement of cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle by teaching her to talk like a lady. But, elocution lessons are actually rising in the modern-day UK, with people trying to soften their accents (Lavelle, 2019).

I decided to seek out the evidence on accent, bias and opportunity. This led me to some surprising discoveries about accents and class, and their impact on my own journey in Psychology.

That journey starts with a diversion through my paternal history…

How far have I travelled?

In the mid-19th century Leicestershire, my great, great, great grandfather Edward Whomsley lived and worked as a framework knitter. He made clothing on hand-operated looms: a pleasant lifestyle, working from home, a cottage garden, flexible hours, and skilled trade.

Technology, industrialisation and a changing economy led to the worsening of framework knitters' conditions, leading to social unrest. The rebellion of the Luddites in 1811-1812 took 14,000 troops to suppress, together with executions and deportation to Australia. The Luddites have gained a bad reputation as backwards-looking people who could not accept progress. However, they were fighting not against technological change but against losing the terms and conditions in which they worked (Coren, 2017). Capitalists moved the process into the industrial mills of the north and turned their workers into commodities.

A generation later, life for those who remained as framework knitters had significantly changed. The 1845 Parliamentary enquiry into the working conditions of Frame Work Knitters took testimony from Edward Whomsley of Bagworth, Wrought-hose Branch, explaining that only 13 of the 34 looms were operational: 'The others are all standing-all lying down; some of the people who used to work them are gone a-colliering – some one way, some another; some are gone to America, and some are gone a –soldiering, and other things; the trade was so bad they could not stop any longer… I have been out, and could not get anything to do, and then sometimes we were in a clamming state, and sometimes I got a job at brick-dressing and stone breaking.'

Edward had to diversify and became a postmaster, and his son went to work on the railway, as did his grandson, great-grandson and great-great-grandson. Then there was me. When I was young, we did not have a house phone, a car, foreign holidays, trips to the cinemas or eating out. Nevertheless, we still knew people who were worse off; the children who got free school meals, for instance. Then I became a clinical psychologist.

How far have I travelled from those working-class roots? Bagworth is only 10 miles from Leicester University, where I received my doctorate in clinical psychology. On the stage at De Montfort Hall, when a dignitary shook my hand and gave me my certificate, was I entering the middle class? Or was my class determined by the family I grew up in, the school attended, and the friends before University?

Other people ask themselves the same questions. According to Evans and Mellon (2016), 60 per cent of people in the UK state they are working class, and 40 per cent are middle class. This proportion has not changed since 1983. Just under half (47 per cent) of those in jobs classified as managerial and professional consider themselves working class. What is going on here? Evans and Mellon make two points. Firstly, the working class no longer means physical manual labour, an area of work that is declining: 'There is another working class: what we might call the working class of the mind.' Secondly, 'There is a big difference between being working class as defined by officials and social scientists in terms of occupation and being working class as defined by people themselves'.

So what a person feels they are may not be their socioeconomic status. Perhaps it is about where the person grew up as their character formed, rather than the job role and income in adulthood. As Manstead (2018, p.267) states: 'the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities, and this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and critical aspects of their social behaviour'.

Yet the chances of social mobility in Great Britain are limited. The Social Mobility Commission's State of the Nation 2018 to 2019 Report found that those from a non-working class background were 80 per cent more likely to get a professional job than those from a working-class background and earned 24 per cent more per year. In addition, when people from working-class backgrounds gained a professional career, they made 17 per cent less than people from more privileged backgrounds. And in 2022 KPMG, a global network of professional firms. conducted a progression analysis of 16,500 employees, looking at gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and socio-economic background. Social class proved to be the single most significant factor holding people back. If combined with another diversity feature, the person was held back even more.

If employment does cause a person to shift their position in the social structure as defined by social scientists, perhaps the person may experience a culture shock. Maybe that's what I experienced. Perhaps partly because it's not such a common thing, it was not so easy to adjust.

Class in clinical psychology

In psychology, how might perceived class from accent affect a client receiving a service? In an intriguing study in the USA, published in 2016, Heather Kugelmass left messages on psychologists'/therapists' phones requesting an appointment for therapy. She monitored responses based on class, race and gender demographics. Middle-class help seekers were three times more likely to be offered an appointment than working-class ones. Race differences occurred among middle-class help seekers, with white help seekers more likely to be offered therapy appointments than black. Women and men were offered therapy appointments equally, but women sooner.

Would a working-class psychologist be less likely to display such bias? Working-class people also score higher on empathy and show compassion more quickly than higher social groups, with Manstead (2018) concluding: 'The fact that lower-class people have been found to hold more egalitarian values and to be more likely to help regardless of compassion level suggests that it is the greater resources of higher-class participants that makes them more selfish and therefore less likely to help others.' Arguably, working-class psychologists seeing working-class clients may have a shared understanding based on experiences growing up, the education system's expectations and the need to prioritise an income ahead of the pursuit of talents and interests.

So much for the theory; what about reality? According to Ryan (2017), the experiences of being working class, including class injury, the ambiguities around social mobility and the defence of privilege, have been ignored by traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The psychological therapies that have followed have been predominantly individualistic in their outlook and have not paid enough attention to the material realities of people's lives and the impact of social inequalities on psychological well-being. A working-class person entering the world of psychological therapies enters a world where, in the main, their class experience is left out of the theory and is not part of the narrative. A working-class person working in psychology is part of one of the groups positioned as the 'other' by mainstream psychology (Rickett, 2020).

When a person enters Clinical psychology as working class, they are taking on more than a job role; they are entering a culture of middle-class professionalism where the values and way of being in the world of the middle class are the norms. Clinical psychology takes six years of training in the UK through undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, leading to a qualification at the doctorate level. It is associated with a good salary (generally in 2022, £40-60K a year) and where the entrance is highly competitive; in 2020, there were 4225 applications for 770 places for the doctorate, with an 18 per cent success rate (clinpsych.org: 2021). If Clinical psychology is an elite profession, it may be positioned beyond the reach of working-class people.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, through a qualitative evaluation of non-educational barriers to the elite professions (Ashley et al., 2015), found that elite firms are still heavily dominated at the entry-level by people from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. Talent was selected based on confidence and 'polish' – i.e., the socialisation of being middle class.

Clinical psychology has been a socially aspirational profession, moving from researchers and diagnostic assistants of psychiatrists to fully autonomous professionals and transferring from an MSc to a Doctorate. Something of a sibling rivalry has developed between Clinical psychology and Psychiatry. In addition, the 2004 Agenda for Change (AfC) in the NHS led to Clinical psychology having its job evaluation and pay scales moved from a separate system to one shared with other health professionals, but not doctors and dentists. AfC meant that Clinical psychology jobs were rated and assessed on the same criteria as nurses, occupational therapists and many other healthcare jobs with standardised criteria; a recently updated handbook was produced by NHS Employers (2018). Psychiatry remained separate and retained a greater emphasis on clinical skills in higher posts.

In AfC jobs, including Clinical psychology, career progression in the higher banded posts became more about leadership and management than clinical skills. Could this have caused a workers' and bosses' class distinction in Clinical psychology? We do not know, as the impact of AfC on Clinical psychology has been poorly researched. If it did, this may have amplified the problems for working-class people working in clinical psychology. When I was attracted to Clinical psychology in the 1990s was a profession with a radical anti-establishment edge to it right to the top. Now, it feels it has been absorbed into the establishment through the effects of AfC.

A workers' and bosses' class distinction in Clinical psychology would pose a particular challenge for working-class clinical psychologists. Firstly, for the bosses' class, I suggest there is anxiety about whether having a psychologist in a senior position who is working class lowers the profession's status as a whole, making the job closer to nurses and further away from doctors. Secondly, for a working-class psychologist, joining the bosses' class can cause discomfort. They may have to play down their working-class origins.

However, a working-class psychologist still might not 'cut the mustard'… there is something about being from a middle-class background, particularly privately educated, that creates a way of being in the world, taking charge of things and considering yourself a leader even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Peter Belmi and colleagues published a set of four studies, with a combined sample of more than 150,000, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, concluding: 'In the middle class, people are socialised to differentiate themselves from others, to express what they think and feel and to confidently express their ideas and opinions, even when they lack accurate knowledge. By contrast, working-class people are socialised to embrace the values of humility, authenticity and knowing your place in the hierarchy… These findings challenge the widely held belief that everybody thinks they are better than the average. Our results suggest that this type of thinking might be more prevalent among the middle and upper class.'

She was right, you know

In the Republic of Ireland, a ban on accent discrimination passed the first Dáil Bill stage in 2021. The reasons for the legislation were put forward by Ms Wynne, TD for Clare: 'It is appalling that accent discrimination still occurs in our society and the workplace. It should go without saying that no one should be judged or treated as lesser because of their accent or stereotypes about their background… Our legislation is an important opportunity to change the current laws and protect people from class-based discrimination in the workplace. It is unacceptable that, in 2021, this can still occur with no protections in place for workers who are subjected to it' (Wynne, cited in Grennan, 2021).

Unfortunately, in my experience, it doesn't go without saying. A glass ceiling exists for working-class people to progress higher, as how they present themselves in the workplace is not seen as conducive to advancement. In Britain, posh people with posh accents get ahead. The Sutton Trust's Speaking up report states: 'Even today the voices of authority in the U.K. – newsreaders, M.P.s, judges, barristers, civil service employees, schoolteachers, professionals – are overwhelmingly associated with R.P.' (Levon et al., 2022, p.37). And despite calls from the British Psychological Society last year for change, class (and by extension accent) is not a protected characteristic in the UK under the Equalities Act 2010. 

How far have I travelled? A long way, but perhaps not as far as I had dreamt I would. I leave you with my poem on those dreams.

It is not what you know; it is who you know,
my mother used to say.
And the old lass was not wrong, you know,
I see it everywhere, everywhere, every day.
If you talk with a plummy old accent,
no matter what shit you say,
the daft ones around you will listen.
Subjugation is done in this way.
So send your children to a posh school,
and they are already on the pathway to glory.

Privilege buys privilege and replicates itself,
and perpetuates the same rotten story.
I dream of a Britain renewed,
where change has come to pass,
where what matters is you and your abilities
and not your accent and your bloody class.

References

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