Changing Faces – Deconstructing “The Class Pay Gap – Why It Pays To Be Privileged”

To kick off the Changing Faces brief, I deconstructed an article that resonated with my own interests and beliefs. Written by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, the article examines the idea of the class ceiling, and how privilege can affect one’s progression through a career. The article argues that whilst privilege can act as a strong “following wind” for one’s progression within a career, it is often how one’s merits are received by sponsors from colleagues higher up in the career that determine their success – though ultimately, the acknowledgement of merit can highly depend on one’s privilege or similarity to their sponsor. It’s also worth noting that privilege’s effect on merit can be determined by the industry – the article examines several different careers and finds that privilege strongly aids an individual in accountancy, where higher class white men make up the majority, but not so much in television, which values a more informal and humorous individual.

A full annotation and deconstruction of the article can be read here: The Class Pay Gap – Why It Pays To Be Privileged

With a sound idea of the argument the article is putting forward, I took the opportunity to identify a target audience for my visual representation of this article before moving onto further research. I’d argue that the overall purpose of the article is to raise awareness of the class ceiling concept and how privilege affects success within a career, and thus, a primary target audience would be those ignorant to the concept (likely those who are affected by it without realising – the upper class). This gives me a general idea as to what direction I should take my later designs in – if designing to persuade the upper class, I should focus on a more formal approach, with a strong symmetrical layout and grid system and using serif text instead of sans serif.