UK low in social mobility league, says charity

I'm not totally surpriesed by this; as I've got older the more I have realised how privilege in Anglo societies works in various self-reinforcing ways. I have to say too that I think this is in actuality more important than the gender issue. It's all very well middle class women talking about glass ceilings but there is a great big wooden floor keeping loads of people in the cellar both men and women, before they can even aspire to the glass ceiling."The report focused on how education affected the life chances of British children compared with those in other countries. It put the UK and the US at the bottom of a social mobility league table of eight European and North American countries, with Norway at the top followed by Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Canada."
The interesting thing is that the Church of England works like this too; what the ordination of women has done is simply widen the number of upper middle class people to choose from when it comes to various church positions. And I expect that ordaining women and Bishops will be the same. There have been a few notable exceptions and so perhaps I am talking out of the back of my neck but 'one swallow does not a summer make'. I rather suspect feel-good tokenism is what drives the notable exceptions. Choose some people of exceptional ability or profile [not always the same thing] and give them high-profile responsibility partly so that you can keep them where you can assimilate them and partly to be able to say, in effect, 'look; we give opportunity to people from every background'. Truth is that less prominent, outgoing, tall, attractive or academic people from working class backgrounds lose out to those from upper middle class backgrounds, and it's often cultural -'they're not like us'.

It's a different proposition to take an individual who will naturally tend to adapt themself to the prevailing milieu around them to taking a group of people who bring their own cultural reinforcement by being something of a group and which culture might challenge the established order. That's why middle class women are a safer organisational bet than working class anybodies.
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