Understanding Social Class Is Key to Belonging at Work

Class shows up in the food we eat

How we talk

The fabrics we wear

The places we live

Where we go for fun and the things we do for fun

Where we get educated

And of course, class shows up in where we work and what we do.

Journalist Jonathan Menjivar notes that class isn't just about how much money you have. “It's all of the things money gets you access to: the neighborhood that you live in, where you go to school, where you send your kids to school, what sort of activities or lessons you have access to.”

Menjivar was born into a different social class than the one he now inhabits. His parents worked in factories; he worked at National Public Radio, which is considered a media outlet for upper middle class and upper class people. The fact that a publicly funded news source is considered high class in America makes little sense, but that’s one of Jonathan’s questions. What gets coded according to class, and why? Jonathan created a wonderful podcast about social class called Classy. He has complex feelings about his jump in social class, and it’s created some anxiety for him at work, mostly around how to fit in, and even his worthiness. I wanted to ask him about this and invited him to join me on The Anxious Achiever. This stuff is difficult to discuss. I am the beneficiary of tons of class privilege and am trying to become less tone-deaf and incurious on this stuff… aka not a “classhole,” in the parlance of Classy. Leaders need to build skills to foster belonging for members of our teams from varying socioeconomic backgrounds.

Anxiety about social class can show up in unsuspected places, and people like me who have a lot of class privilege might not even be aware of all the information and cues we take for granted. We need to become aware. For example, Menjivar shared that for years,

““I felt anxiety about going to nice restaurants. I would look at a menu and see a bunch of things [I didn’t recognize] and feel like, oh, I’m supposed to know what all of this is. I didn’t grow up going to those kinds of places, and so my eyes would kind of glaze over and I’d go a little dizzy…the words would just sort of all start melding together, and I couldn’t concentrate and actually focus on, wait, what do I want to eat? Or if I [didn’t] know what something was, just ask. But there is just so much anxiety and shame built into that, and I would Google stuff under the table, even hiding from my wife that I didn’t know some of these things. And then for me, it also goes the other way. I’m somebody who [now] lives on the East Coast and lives in a slightly fancy suburb of New York City and works in the media. I’m part of a certain intellectual class now, and there are times when I go home and the food that I ate growing up, it’s not food I am used to eating anymore.””

In his early career, Menjivar notes, he spent a lot of time in meetings being very quiet, wondering “What is this language that everybody here has? There's just a certain way of talking about stories, about taking something in the news and having questions and trying to find a new way to talk about it and find a character in a situation. Sometimes people who were younger than me who had less experience than me came in and just knew how to do it right away, just [would] have a command of the room.”

This really struck me. When you have privilege, you're comfortable in certain spaces; you have an ease and a fluency of being in professional settings that might make people without that background feel uncertain. You might speak in a shorthand people outside your class wouldn’t know.

For Jonathan, people at work talking about elite colleges they attended can trigger strong feelings of being an outsider. “Talking about where you went to school and reminiscing about it, especially if there are other people who … had that same experience,” carries a lot of assumptions about class. I went to college, but I went to a commuter school and I never lived in a dorm or anything. I lived at home until I was a senior in college.” The same holds for discussing vacations, summer camps, and other markers of social status.

I asked Menjivar his advice for someone who feels that their class is making them feel different at work.  Maybe you have been invited to be a part of the team, but perhaps a difference in how you were raised makes you feel like you don’t really belong.

First, he suggests finding someone you can trust either at work or a mentor in your field of whom you can ask questions you might be embarrassed to admit not knowing.

Second: it's okay to ask the questions and to ask a lot of them. Menjivar stresses, “You shouldn't know how to do a lot of jobs when you walk in the door. When I worked at [the radio show] This American Life, there was an understanding that no matter where you came from, no matter what experience you had, it was going to take you at least a year to understand how to do that job.” But it can be hard sometimes to figure things out and asking questions can make you feel vulnerable or singled out. That’s ok. Ask questions anyway.

I asked Jonathan: what does someone like me who has a lot of class privilege need to know?

Awareness is the first step. You can’t fully understand someone else’s experience but you can have an awareness that people aren't going to be coming from the same place you have come from, have the same experience, and even know how to talk about certain things that can come up in a professional setting.

Jonathan says that when he starts a project, “I will sit down with the people who are going to work on that project with me, and I will also sit down separately with their manager and ask what are the skills that this person wants to work on? Also, what are the skills that we as a team think they should have that they don't even know they need to do this job?”

I’d love to hear your experiences of navigating social class and work.

Morra

PS: This "Class Privilege Walk" from Wendy R Williams American Psychological Association is helpful: https://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/privilege-walk-williams.pdf