Social Class Bias in the Digital Age: An Audit Study on Hiring Discrimination

Discrimination in hiring based on social class is a potentially important yet understudied mechanism for the reproduction of inequalities in the labour market.

The expansion of freely available information in the online sphere, perhaps most notably on social media platforms such as Twitter, provides employers with a new potential source of information for evaluating candidates in the face of imperfect information available in resumés and other materials. But with the use of such information also comes the risk of employers discriminating applicants based on the information they retrieve from individuals’ online presence, including regarding their social class.

To examine whether this occurs, I conduct a pre-registered audit study in the United Kingdom (N=1,379) in which I manipulate the social class of applicants expressed through their cultural consumption displayed on their social media profiles. Results show that while social class cues displayed on social media profiles do not have an effect on hiring in the aggregate, there are sector-specific effects.

While an upper-class-displaying social media profile increases the chances of being called for an interview for a job in the administrative sector by 5-percentage points, it has a negative and insignificant effect on the chance of being called for an interview in the IT sector. These findings illustrate that while social media profiles are not formally evaluated as part of recruitment, they might still be consequential in certain industries. By implication, while discrimination based on class might be reduced in the offline sphere, it can creep back in the online sphere in contemporary society.