I’m Choosing Which Interns Will Get Job Offers. Do I Take Privilege Into Account?

We live in a class society. People who are rich in financial terms tend to be rich in cultural and social capital too: They have social assets, resources and connections. All these forms of advantage can contribute to an employee’s actual performance. But they can also contribute to the employee’s perceived performance. People often make judgments about the intelligence of speakers on the basis of their accents, for example, and one form of cultural capital is having the accent of the white, educated, Northern-coastal, middle classes.