First published on LinkedIn, 15th June 2019
I recently read a book called Lowborn, by Kerry Hudson. Lowborn is a memoir about Hudson’s chaotic and nomadic childhood in impoverished towns across the UK. It is a searing portrait of what it is like to have known true poverty, and what that does to a person. Two of the towns that Hudson lived in are Airdrie and Coatbridge, in North Lanarkshire. I know these places well, as I also grew up in North Lanarkshire and have relatives who lived in these towns. In fact they still do, and after a number of years away at university and living and working in Edinburgh, Leeds and London, I moved back to North Lanarkshire myself and settled close to the village I grew up in to be near my parents, who support me and my husband in looking after our children. When I reached the end of Hudson’s book, I realised that I had read it practically holding my breath the entire time. I consider it a piece of outrageous good fortune that I come from a loving family and was provided with a stable home life during my childhood, because although I recognised a lot of what she described about the communities she lived in, her own terrible experiences were completely alien to me due to the shelter I had from strong family bonds.
The book got me thinking. I am a white, middle-class, university-educated woman who has a conventional family life and a good job. I am under no illusions about my privilege. I talk a lot about my experiences of being a woman in the real estate sector, but what I do not really talk about, and very few people do, is what it is like to have got here from a working class background. It was by no means a given that I would end up where I have. It involved a lot of hard work, good luck and taking risk. But it is the definition of risk that is the key thing, because what I considered to be risky, many people wouldn’t even think twice about. The first risk is being ambitious in the first place. Marking yourself out as different makes you a prime target for bullying. Many bright, young, working class people fall by the wayside because it just becomes too hard to be different to the crowd. Deciding whether to go to university, or move cities to take a job, looks very different when you can’t rely on your parents for money. Taking an unpaid internship to gain experience is completely out of the question. Even finding work experience is hard, because your mum and dad don’t know anyone they can ask to give you a break. Explaining why you didn’t join any clubs at university because you spent all your spare time working in shops and bars and studying. Saying nothing at networking events when everyone is talking about their experiences travelling on their gaps years. Having literally no idea what to say when someone asks you where you go for the ski season. Making great new friends during your Masters then one day seeing the look of shock on their faces when they see a photo of you standing outside your parents’ house. That sense of dislocation when you are surrounded by people who look just like you, but you know that you are not one of them and for many years you live with the fear that if they find that out, they will cast you out. That may sound very dramatic, but that is what imposter syndrome is.
If you’ve never heard these stories, then how can you be expected to understand how crucial your own support networks have been to your success, to appreciate them and cut some slack to people who haven’t had those same advantages? How can you make active choices to help people who don’t have the advantages you’ve had? Well, you can’t, and that is why I am going to tell you my story.
Like Hudson, I have worked since I was fourteen years old. My first job was waitressing for an outside caterer, what we call in the west of Scotland a “purvey”. I spent my weekends serving dinners in bowling clubs, at wedding receptions in town halls, at boxing matches, Orange lodges, masonic halls and working mens’ clubs. That stood me in very good stead for entering a male-dominated work environment later on. The shifts were twelve hours long, the work was physical and we were on our feet the whole time. We had to wear white blouses and black skirts for service. I invite you to imagine what it might have been like, and then to remember that I did this between the ages of fourteen and sixteen.
At sixteen, I got a job in a supermarket. It felt like winning the lottery. I worked there, for 20 hours a week, until I left school. So throughout the entire time I was doing my Highers, that was 20 hours a week behind a bakery counter when I could’ve been studying. I did well enough in my Highers to get an offer from Edinburgh University, where I went to study geology. It was 1993, the last year of maintenance grants. Had it not been for my grant, I definitely wouldn’t have gone to Edinburgh. I would still have gone to university, but it would have been Glasgow and I would have stayed at home, studying for my degree whilst living in a small 3-bedroom semi with my parents and three younger siblings. Throughout university, I had a succession of jobs in bars and shops and did office work during the summer holidays. In retrospect I would have been better off staying at home from a financial point of view, but I was desperate to get away. The nauseous feeling of not being sure whether I was going to make my rent was not an unfamiliar one and I developed many new culinary skills at this time, as I learnt to be ever more imaginative with a bag of pasta and some vegetables. In her book Hudson talks about “passing”, where you gain acceptance because of your outward appearance and because you’ve learned to look, talk and act a certain way. Because your “face fits”, as her mother says to her. Edinburgh was my first experience of real culture shock, and it was during this time that I deliberately did things like modulate my voice to sound less “weegie” (Glaswegian), and ergo, less working class.
Eventually, I obtained a 2:1 in Geology from Edinburgh followed by a Masters in Geochemistry from Leeds University. In 1999, I saw an advert in a newspaper for a job with an environmental consultancy in Glasgow. I was still living in Edinburgh at the time. I applied, was interviewed, and they offered me the job. The salary was £12,000 per year. Now, I could not afford to live in Edinburgh and work in Glasgow on £12,000 per year. Once I factored in the travel costs, I would’ve been out of pocket. I went back and asked them for £14,000, and they withdrew their offer. So that was my first experience of negotiating my salary! Perhaps not surprisingly, I get very cross when I read articles about why the gender pay gap is women’s fault for just not asking for more money. After this unfortunate false start, I did get a good graduate job and over the course of the past 20 years I have worked my way up to my current position with Malcolm Hollis.
I moved back to North Lanarkshire in 2006 in order to start a family. My parents provide childcare and as a result of that, I was able to make decisions to help advance my career that otherwise would not have been available to me. I have always travelled a lot for work, and between having their support and a partner with whom I do genuinely share child-rearing responsibilities, I have not had to choose between work and family in the way that other women I know have. I also did not have to shell out thousands of pounds in childcare costs. For anyone who wants to know how I do it, I’ve managed to leverage that strong family unit so that we all use our strengths to everyone’s mutual advantage.
My parents live in the same house I grew up in and my children go to the same primary school I did. Their house, and the school, are in a former mining village that scores in the top 5% for all indicators on the Scottish Multiple Index of Deprivation. That is, it is in the top 5% in the country for people who are income deprived and in receipt of benefits, who are hospitalised due to drug misuse or alcoholism, who are prescribed drugs for anxiety, depression or psychosis, whose babies are of low birth weight, who are victims of crimes of violence, sexual offences, domestic housebreaking, vandalism, drug offences and common assault, who live in overcrowded houses with no central heating, who have the worst pupil attendance rates at school, the highest proportion of 16-19 year olds not in full-time education, employment or training and the lowest proportion of 17-21 year olds entering higher education and who have the poorest access to facilities such as GP surgeries, post offices, schools and shops. My own house is one mile away from the village, and on all indicators it is in one of the least deprived areas of Scotland. It is literally the polar opposite. Back in the early 1980s, it was the time of the miners’ strikes and the impact of that on families in my community was very visible. I was acutely aware of the haves and have-nots (luckily for me, my dad didn't work in the pits and I was a “have”). Thankfully the days of making children on free school dinners line up in front of the class for their dinner tickets and stand in separate queues at lunchtime are long gone; however what it does mean is that my own children live cheek by jowl with children from some of the poorest families in the country, and they aren’t even aware of it. How is anyone growing up in an affluent neighbourhood supposed to empathise with a life they can’t even begin to imagine because they don’t even know it exists?
I do not want to belittle anyone’s achievements. I know most people who have done well in a professional career have worked hard for it and indeed my whole point is that you never know what challenges someone has faced. But if you are poor, there are more of them, the chances of failure are higher and the consequences of that failure are petrifying. If you are poor, then it’s also likely that you are terrible at financial planning. You haven’t grown up with the concept of saving for the future. That is not an option for people who live hand-to-mouth. You are terrified of debt – what happens if you can’t make the repayments? I was in my fourth year at university before I took out a student loan, and even then that was only because I had no choice. Lots of my peers took out the maximum loan every year and stuck it in a high interest account. I would never have dared, even though arguably it was the financially astute thing to do. I know more than one person who later used that money towards a deposit for a flat. And ironically, you don’t understand how to budget once you have more money than just that required to meet your basic needs. No one teaches you these things – not your parents, because they don’t know either, and certainly not at school.
Then there’s the rules. Each social class has its own set of rules and they are largely unspoken and even subconscious. If you do not belong to the tribe, then you don’t know the rules. If you join a new tribe, then there is a constant risk that you are going to give the game away because you have broken a rule you didn’t even know existed. Maybe it’s your pronunciation, maybe it’s your politics. Maybe it’s having no idea how to network, or not owning any clothes you can wear to a black tie event. I went to my first ever ball at the end of my first year of university. I bought a dress from River Island, my mum came shopping with me. It was basically a summer dress, and it was above the knee. I bought it because I loved it. On the evening of the ball, it became apparent that every other girl I knew had a proper ballgown. I had never felt so out of place in my life, and actually I don’t think I have again since, even when I’ve been the only woman in a room full of men.
No one ever makes it on their own. We all have help in some shape or form. Do not judge people who haven’t had the hand up that you have. Be mindful of your privilege and pay it forward. Some practical things you can do – have some training in unconscious bias, engage with organisations who support schools and young people in disadvantaged communities (I have included some links below - I know there are others, please feel free to put links in a comment to this post), volunteer your time to go into those schools and talk about what you do – a lot of these kids don’t even know our industry exists, never mind our jobs. Get out of your bubble and meet people who are different to you. Read Lowborn.
And don’t judge me for eating all the good biscuits first, if I didn’t someone else would.