Many people can recall moments when they have been mocked, judged or subtly excluded because of where they are from, how they speak or because they seem out of place in certain settings. These moments rarely look like overt discrimination. Instead, they might take the form of jokes, assumptions or signals that someone doesn’t belong.

Class-based discrimination might be dismissed as harmless banter or attributed to personality clashes, but research on social interactions shows that what is labelled banter can quickly cross into harmful or exclusionary behaviour.

One reason for this is that class discrimination frequently operates through culture – in the everyday norms and expectations that shape how people are perceived and included – rather than through explicit rules, such as those that define unacceptable conduct. It is therefore rarely recognised as discrimination in the same way as sexism or racism. This makes it both harder to challenge and easier to overlook, even though it remains widespread.

Research on accent bias particularly illustrates this. A 2022 report by the Sutton Trust found that one in four professionals have been mocked or singled out in the workplace due to their accent. Among senior managers from working-class backgrounds, almost 30% had experienced this treatment in the workplace. Similarly, almost a third of university students reported the same in education settings. In social settings, these figures rise to almost half in both professional and student groups.

These findings matter because they show that class-based stigma doesn’t disappear with professional or educational success. Regardless of economic or social mobility, class-based cultural markers such as accent continue to shape how people are perceived and treated.

Research shows that class inequality is not just about material assets and occupation, it’s embedded in more subtle ways. It shapes our confidence our self-worth and our sense of our place in society. This is sometimes referred to as the hidden injuries of class. These injuries arise not from cultural differences themselves, but from the stigma and exclusions attached to them. This covert dimension of class helps explain why class discrimination is often felt, but less often addressed as such.

Discrimination that defies definition

Part of the challenge is that social class is hard to define. Unlike income and occupation, it is not a single measurable attribute. Class is fluid and contextual, shifting across spaces and relationships. Someone might feel working class in a professional space but middle class at home, and vice versa. A person might occupy spaces associated with a higher class, but hold cultural markers associated with groups historically excluded from them.

This fluidity means that class is noticed but not easily stated and measured. It’s signalled through accent, vocabulary, tastes, humour, norms and values and it shapes how people are judged, without those judgements being widely recognised as discriminatory.

Due to class being signalled through cultural markers, subtle judgements about people’s background are often tolerated. Class-based mockery also remains unusually acceptable. While explicit comments about race, disability or religion are widely recognised as harmful, remarks about someone sounding “common”, “too posh” or “out of place” often pass without challenge. This normalisation helps sustain class discrimination by framing exclusion as a personality difference.

Why it matters

The consequences of class discrimination are far from trivial. When people are made to feel out of place at work or in education, it shapes whose voices are taken seriously, who is encouraged to network, who is seen as promotion-ready and who is treated as if they belong. Over time, these patterns produce inequalities in progression, leadership and representation. Because these processes rarely break policy, they remain difficult to challenge through existing frameworks.

This is part of a broader challenge: legal and institutional systems tend to work best when disadvantage is visible, stable and clearly measurable. Class resists these criteria. It shifts across contexts, operates through culture as much as economics, and is often felt before it can be named. The hidden injuries of class, therefore, fall through the cracks between personal experience and institutional accountability.

One reason for this is that, unlike race, gender and disability, social class is not a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. This means there’s no formal duty to monitor class-based disadvantage or discrimination.

This gap has prompted growing calls from professional bodies and advocacy groups to take socioeconomic background more seriously in equality policy. But translating lived experiences of class into fixed legal categories remains difficult, given how fluid class identities are.

Whether or not class becomes formally recognised in law, the underlying issue remains. Many people continue to experience exclusion, stigma and disadvantage linked to background rather than ability or achievement, often in ways that remain invisible to institutions.

Understanding class discrimination therefore requires moving beyond income statistics or occupational categories alone. It means paying attention to how class is lived: how people are read, judged and positioned in everyday interactions. It also means recognising that some of the most enduring inequalities operate not through formal barriers, but through judgements about who belongs and who does not.

Naming these processes does not solve them, but it does make them harder to dismiss. Recognising how class shapes everyday experiences of belonging is a necessary step toward understanding inequalities that persist even when formal barriers have fallen.