The arts have long been seen as a sector stuffed full of the upper classes, but research from the University of Edinburgh finds that this is increasingly so today. While the traditional narrative is one of discrimination, however, the study suggests that the biggest factor is that there are simply fewer people from working-class backgrounds in society to begin with.

That’s not to say that the prospects for working-class actors, artists, musicians, and writers are good, as they’re not, but they’re no better or worse than they were in the past.

“The chances of getting into creative work are profoundly unequal in class terms, but they are neither more nor less unequal than they ever have been,” the researchers explain.

Artistic mobility

The researchers trawled through data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, which covered around 250,000 people born between 1953 and 1992. Of this sample, 5,300 or so were defined as musicians, artists, or working in advertising, the media, museums, or publishing.

The analysis showed that 16% of creative workers in the oldest cohort were from a working-class background, with this falling to 8% among the youngest cohort. The reverse was the case for those from a higher professional background, whose numbers doubled from 12% to 24%.

When the data was adjusted so that comparisons could be made between people of similar location, gender, and ethnicity, it emerged that those who grew up in professional families were around four times as likely to become creative professionals as those growing up in working-class families.

Changing society

These changes coincide with general changes in British society, however, with an expansion of the middle-class occurring alongside a fall in the proportion of working-class people in the country. Indeed, the study period oversaw a decline in the proportion of young people from working-class households from 37% to 21%.

“Social mobility in the cultural sector is currently an important issue in government policy and public discussion, associated with perceptions of a collapse in numbers of working-class origin individuals becoming artists, actors, musicians and authors,” the authors explain.

“These shifts also correspond to changes in the class origins of the overall working population, suggesting both that there is nothing particularly special about the relationship between social mobility and creative work, and that while cultural jobs appear more exclusive in terms of their class recruitment profiles than before, this may not mean that they have become more closed to working-class people. In other words, rising exclusivity may simply be a function of the changing shape of the U.K. class structure since the 1960s.”