Things can only get better? Trends in inequalities in access to professional careers over time

By Professor Lindsey Macmillan, Dr Claire Tyler and Dr Catherine Dilnot

For the last decade we’ve been collecting and analysing recruitment data from over 20 of the UK largest graduate recruiters to highlight barriers to professional careers for underrepresented groups of young people. We have shown that young people from ethnic minority and/or working class backgrounds are well represented in the applicant pools for entry level professional careers but are less likely to be hired even when they look the same on paper. We have used our innovative ‘early careers recruitment data hub’ containing data on over 2.5million job applicants to document new evidence about why these barriers exist, highlighting the role of online testing, applying early, educational background and intersectional disadvantages.

But is this picture getting better or worse over time?

In this latest blog post we summarise new findings from our updated report, showing trends in inequalities in access to professional entry level careers over time. For our updated analysis we look over the period from 2022 to 2024 using a sample of over 350,281 applicants to graduate programmes, 73,525 applicants to internships, and 298,057 applicants to school leaver and apprenticeship programmes across a range of sectors (predominantly accountancy, law and public sector).

Worryingly, we find that the inequalities in access to professional careers that we highlighted in our original report have increased between 2023 and 2024, by socio-economic background (SEB), ethnicity and their intersections, across all entry routes.

Larger barriers for lower SEB applicants

For the graduate entry route, independent school applicants were 20% more likely to receive an offer relative to similar state school applicants in 2024, up from 7% in 2023 (Chart 1 – ‘full models’). By ‘similar’ we mean the applicants we compare are of the same gender and ethnicity, from the same UK region, attended the same type of university, studied a similar undergraduate subject, reported the same personal/professional networks and applied for the same role with the same employer in the same location.

This trend of increased inequalities is also consistent for working class applicants relative to professional background applicants. Comparing similar applicants, those from working class backgrounds were 21% less likely to get offers than similar professional background applicants in 2024, up 5 percentage points from the 16% penalty in 2023.

 

 

Larger barriers for ethnic minorities

We also found an increase in inequalities in offer rates by ethnicity, with Asian and Mixed and other ethnic groups being increasingly less likely to receive graduate offers in 2024 compared to White applicants, relative to 2023 (Chart 2 – ‘full models’).

By contrast, inequalities in graduate offer rates for Black applicants relative to White applicants reduced slightly from 38% in 2022 to 31% in 2024, leading to an equalisation of inequalities across minority ethnic groups. This suggests any gains from employers hiring more Black applicants has come at the expense of lower hiring rates for other ethnic minority groups rather than White applicants.

Chart 2: Offer rates to graduate programmes, conditional on observable differences across applicants over time, by ethnicity

 

Intersectionality increasingly matters

Our analysis highlighted a double disadvantage for state educated ethnic minority applicants to graduate entry level roles which has increased over time. We found a widening of the gap in offer rates for this group relative to White state educated applicants from 16% to 32% and a corresponding increase in the gap in offer rates for White independent school applicants from 9% to 21%. State educated ethnic minority applicants are therefore losing out on graduate offers relative to White independent school educated applicants with similar characteristics. (Chart 3 – ‘full models’).

Chart 3: Offer rates to graduate programmes, conditional on observable differences across applicants, by ethnicity and school type

 

School leavers, apprentices and interns

Inequalities in offer rates to internships and school leaver and apprenticeship programmes show a similar increase in inequalities by school type from 2023 to 2024. While state and independent school applicants had a similar chance of achieving an offer to an internship and school leaver or apprenticeship programme in 2022 and 2023, independent school applicants were 15% more likely to receive an offer to an internship programme in 2024 relative to state school applicants who were otherwise similar. They were also 10% more likely to receive an offer to the school leaver and apprenticeship programmes.

And while Black applicants were more likely to get an offer to an internship programme in 2023 relative to similar White applicants, this trend reversed in 2024 where they were 23% less likely to receive an offer relative to otherwise similar Black applicants. This coincided with some employers removing internship schemes with a specific focus on diversity.

Recommendations

Our findings suggest an important role for both employers and universities in tackling inequalities in access to professional careers (see the full list of ten recommendations in our report.)

This worsening picture for inequalities in access to professional careers we have outlined here has led to us include these specific recommendations for employers:

• Inequalities appear to have worsened over time as competition for places has increased to record high levels. It is therefore important to be particularly vigilant about diversity across the recruitment process when competition for places is higher. Employers should be more proactive in managing the adverse impact for underrepresented groups who are more likely to lose out as competition increase.

• Consider keeping existing / introducing new schemes that have specific focus on hiring diverse candidates. The existence of these schemes for internship positions saw increased diversity while the removal of them coincided with a significant decline in diversity.
• Consider how to contribute to building a robust evidence base of ‘what works’ to support your colleagues, your sector and policy makers to refocus diversity initiatives and policies more efficiently.

Notes:

‘Raw’ models in this blog contain employer fixed effects, gender, SEB, and ethnicity. ‘Full’ models adds controls for region of origin, visa status, university category, subject studied, networks, region of office, and job role applied to. Points represent % estimates while lines represent 95% confidence intervals.