Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I'm Ashley Milne Tite. This time, career and class, because even if we don't talk about it, it absolutely is clearly a part of how people think about themselves, how people understand each other, and as our study

showed, how people get ahead or don't.

And having a different background from everyone else at work can leave you feeling isolated.

The people that I deal with now, they probably have never met anyone from where I grew up.

They probably would live their whole lives,

and they would never meet anybody like I was when I was a young child.

Coming up, you can move up the socioeconomic ladder, especially with a good education.

But what's it like when your career and your background don't match?

Julie O'Hare works for an adult education program at a university in the American Midwest.

She wrote to me a couple of months ago, and she said, have you ever thought about doing a show on being in the professional world when you come from a working class

background? She said a lot of her colleagues seem to have a toolkit for the workplace that she

didn't because of her upbringing. My mother was a teacher at a Catholic school and my dad worked for a

construction company. And most of the people in the area that I grew up in in the Midwest were

either police officers or firemen. The women were crossing guards, teachers, nurses,

all they pieced together part-time jobs around looking after their kids. When Julie's mother retired, she was earning less than

$30,000 a year. But Julie and her siblings were able to go to college, and when she got there,

she found herself surrounded by students who have their own cars, credit cards.

I had to work my entire time at university, and that was when I realized all of kind of the

things you miss out of in the college experience when you have to work. I could not take an

unpaid internship. I could not take an unpaid internship.

I could not spend an extended period of time volunteering.

Before we go on, I want to dial back to what you said about how you grow up,

...