Note: This transcript has been adjusted to improve readability. Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and human transcribers. The context and more than 95% of the actual transcript have been preserved.  We strongly encourage our listeners to listen to the audio.

Nicole Giantonio: Hello, this is Nicole Giantonio with the Head of Global Marketing at Elevate. The podcast episode you’re about to hear is part of our expert series featuring Elevate President John Croft talking with the CEO and Founder of the 93% Club, Herbert Smith Freehills’ associate, Sophie Pender. Sophie describes her background, education experience and the work of the 93% Club to clear a path for legal professionals from non-traditional social-economic backgrounds.

John Croft: Sophie, very nice to see you and thank you very much for joining today. A lot of the people I’ve spoken to have covered topics that are very obvious in law, and what I mean is you walk into an office, you walk into a law firm or a law department, and you can immediately see the sort of gender or racial mix in the room, good or bad, but one of the things that aren’t immediately noticeable when you meet somebody is their socio-economic background, so I was really fascinated by you and your story, could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background and kind of what you hear today?

Sophie Pender: Yeah, of course. So, I am Sophie, the CEO and Founder of the 93% Club, and I’m also a trainee lawyer at Herbert Smith Freehills, although I qualify on Monday, so I can start calling myself a lawyer.

JC: Congratulations, that’s fantastic.

SP: Thank you. I’m excited to be able to say, “Okay, now I’m not a Bachelor lawyer now, I’m not a trainee lawyer, not a baby lawyer.” Over the last 25 years, I’ve had some incredible experiences; I have been to the House of Commons, I’ve been to the House of Lords, Downing Street, and I’ve presented on behalf of charities for fundraisers. I’ve travelled a lot through my work, so I just came back from my traineeship in Dubai. Day-to-day, I get to work with some of the world’s largest and most significant companies, I get to work with incredibly bright people, but I also spend time with people who have been dealt a very good hand in life, they were raised with nannies, supported by their parents, they went to top private schools, seem to speak several languages, and have several sports and hobbies under their belts.

These people are some of my closest friends, and it’s interesting talking about our respective backgrounds because it seems like they always knew where they were going to end up, and if you didn’t, you were doing something wrong. That was an interesting learning curve for me, and I think on the surface, I would come across as one of these people. I liked to think I’m relatively well-spoken; I’ve obviously got an incredible career; I went to Bristol University. I didn’t grow up that way; I was never someone who was expected to achieve any of these things. So, in terms of my upbringing, I was born in Edgware, North London, and I was born into a council estate called Grahame Park, where I lived with my mum and my dad. My mum is the youngest of 14 children, and my dad was from a similarly large family split between the UK and Ireland.

Both families very much had a traditional idea of what children should be doing with their lives. My mum was encouraged, aged 16, to leave school and get a job. She wanted to become an air hostess, but my nan just said they could not afford the books, you’re going to have to just go and get a job like the rest of your siblings. My dad had a very similar upbringing, I think he was kicked out when he was a lot younger before he met my mum. They both lived in a bedsit where the toilet was in the same room as the bed. My mum especially describes having an incredibly happy childhood but never really had a lot of resources, and then my dad was a lot more complicated as an individual because of everything that happened to him growing up; he developed a problem with alcoholism, and he had a drug addiction, and as a result of that, we were obviously quite poor, he was in and out of prison because of this, and it made him incredibly volatile as an individual.

I loved him very much, didn’t blame him for these things, you can’t blame people for sicknesses like this. When I was growing up, I very much remember things like having to fill up bathtubs with kettles because it was a cheaper way of doing things, or you had to put extra layers of clothing on when things would get cold. Despite all of this, I worked incredibly hard at school. The school was like a safe space where if a teacher told me that I was doing well, it was like the best pat on the head imaginable. I loved it, and I kind of felt like nothing could touch me within those four walls, but then when I was 12, I guess just to round off this chapter in my life, my dad passed away after his various issues, so that chapter was closed in my life and as bleak as it sounds, I was kind of ready to not have that hanging over me and just move on. I became the first person in my school to get three A stars, and I did this whilst balancing a job at McDonald’s and John Lewis. Then I got a spot at Bristol to study English. So, I guess that’s a bit about my background.

JC: That is amazing; what extraordinary strength you’ve shown through that period in your life. I’m delighted; it’s ended up where it has here with you in the job you’re doing. And if that’s your background, it might be obvious, but we also have a global listenership here. So, I know what the 93% Club stands for. Many people don’t. Would you like to talk a little bit about what that is and how you came to start that?

SP: The 93% Club, a nationwide student charity in the UK, supports state school students at university. And it came to be because when I was in my second year of university, I had enough, to be honest. So, I went to Bristol and was very excited, but within the first week, I realised that the university wasn’t necessarily this community of like-minded individuals interested in higher education. It was, to an extent, but mostly it was an extension of what we already have in the UK, which is the private-public school system. And I thought it was weird because, in my first week, everyone would say, “Oh, nice to meet you. What school did you go to?” And I’d think, “They’re not going to know what school I went to.” But what I realised was there are ten or so top schools, where if you say one, you’re going to know someone who went there, or their brother went there. It was I think my first experience of realising that people in the UK do judge others on the basis of their financial circumstances or their upbringing.

I remember people used to say to me, “Are they of good stock?” And I thought, “I have no idea what that means.” And I Googled it, and then I realised that it was referred to cattle or something, and it’s all to do with your upbringing and how you were reared. It was my first time experiencing this, and I think it just got worse and worse, to a stage where I felt incredibly lonely. I felt completely disconnected from myself as a person. I didn’t really know who I was anymore. I changed my accent a lot; my accent now is a lot more refined than it used to be. I took stuff out on finance because my phone wasn’t good enough, my laptop wasn’t good enough. And all these things I felt so pressured into because of how I was treated by students who had gone to certain schools.

At the time, I didn’t really feel like I was supporting those from working-class backgrounds or state schools. They were very hot on the other D&I fronts; as you’ve noticed, socio-economic status has been left out for a long time. I’m a working-class woman. I can find no support for being a woman. The disadvantages that I’m seeing in my life right now is stemming from my socio-economic background. So why is there no support for me in that? That’s when I founded the 93% Club, because I thought, firstly, I need some mates. The term, the ‘93% Club’ comes from the fact that 93% of the UK population is educated at state schools. So, when you compare that figure to the stats when it comes to how many say “educated individuals” are actually in law, medicine, journalism, it makes it all the more stark.

JC: So, did you start it at university or when you left university?

SP: I started it in university. I put a Facebook post out, I said, “Oh, guys, is anyone interested in joining the state school society?” And I created a Facebook group, and it just absolutely blew up. It was huge that we had about 500 members in the first three months, but it also blew up in the opposite way, which was that I had a lot of kids from private school coming for me. Even some kids from state schools, to be honest, who were like, “You’re creating a divide. This is a terrible idea.” People would write think pieces about me. It was a wild time.

JC: Once you left university, what happened then? You obviously have ended up doing what you’re doing now. But how has the 93% Club sort of morphed from being a, let’s call it ’a student body’ to a more professional establishment?

SP: So, I founded the society in Bristol, and then the next year, it was found in Durham. A girl messaged me and said, “I’ve read about what you’ve been doing; the messaging really resonates with me. Do you mind if I set one up at Durham?” And I was like, “Of course, yeah, if this is something that resonates with you, you should definitely do that.” After that, I took a break because I was training to be a lawyer, spending what felt like the most part of a year and a half arguing about the issue and saying, “This is important. You should care about people from working-class backgrounds, or you should care about people from state schools.” I was exhausted, so I felt like a shell of a human being, and thought, “I need to focus on myself because you can’t pour from an empty cup.

What happened was then the pandemic hit, I gave a talk talking about my journey into law, and I mentioned the 93% Club because my work with the 93% Club helped me to get my job at HSF. I met HSF through the 93% Club because when I was trying to fundraise for the 93% Club, I would go to graduate recruitment fairs with a little notepad, and I would walk around to all the different stands and speak to the graduate recruiters and say, “Do you want to give me some money for this because I know that you definitely need some more diverse students?” And HSF replied  “Yeah, we love this idea. It’s an area that we’re keen to focus on, and it’s something that we’re not doing very well at.” So, they were our first sponsors.

I told the students a bit about that and what the 93% Club does. It ended up in a situation where I was getting an absolute barrage of messages on LinkedIn from students saying, “This is my experience. I feel like I need support. Do you mind if I set one up at my university?” And in 2020, we went from having two societies, Bristol and Durham, to just under 50 nationwide, and it’s now a fully established charity.

JC: Well, that is an extraordinary achievement. I think you’ve hit on something that’s resonated with people. Having done that, I know from other conversations I’ve had with people… I think you and I were talking about this the other day; there’s a group I do some work with called “She Breaks the Law.” They were the same. It started with a very similar to you, a very personal story, and it suddenly ballooned up. And the worry is sort of where do we go from here? Where do you go from here? Before you answer that, touch on what is 93% Club hoping to achieve?

SP: Our ambitions are two-fold. Firstly, what we’re trying to do is to bring a conversation about this topic; it’s okay to talk about socio-economic status. The UK has a real issue with that, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this, John, as well. It’s very tight-lipped about the fact that if you have money, it makes things easier for you in life. I’m trying to encourage a conversation where we address that. There’s nothing wrong with it; there’s nothing wrong with being born with privilege; what matters is how you use it. For a long time, people have felt very threatened by the idea that if you say, “This person went to a state school,” or “because not everyone from state schools is disadvantaged, from a lower socio-economic background, that’s very important to know.”

JC: And not everyone that went to private school is either, so yes, it’s not as binary as that.

SP: Exactly, it’s a very grey issue. I think it’s important that we talk about these things, and what I have found amazing is that the more I’ve opened up about my story, and the more I’ve spoken about it and the more vulnerable I’ve been with the people around me and the people that I work with, the more they’ve actually opened up themselves, and it’s been a really beautiful thing. We need to stop looking at people and valuing them based on their upbringing or how much money they have in the bank. And it’s a very important message that I don’t think the UK has got quite right yet, and that’s what we’re working towards.

The second arm of it, is the more practical arm, which is we acknowledge that we’re not going to change things overnight. In an ideal world, we change it all, but unfortunately, it’s going to take a long time for things to change properly. While that happens, we want to equip students with the necessary skills that they need to get into these top employer roles. What I was finding through Bristol and law school was that I was having very informal conversations with friends of mine who had gone to some very good schools, and they would tell me the privileges that they’d had. They’d say, “I had someone to check my CV”, “I know this person I can call upon”, or “I had debating lessons.” And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we’re really going to work towards a meritocracy if I could package up everything you are saying that you had, that you paid for at school or got because of your upbringing, and I just gave it back for free to those people who can’t afford it?” And that’s what we’re doing, effectively trying to package up privilege and give it back to those who need it the most.

JC: That is absolutely fantastic, because it’s something that I personally have always wished I could do more of, and it was actually the conversation I had with Richard, which is that people that come to me to ask things like that, I will gladly help, but I know that most of the people that come to me kind of know me and are in that little privileged bucket already, and sort of how do we connect with people that might not be able to reach others? Depending on which side of the fence one was sitting on, how does this work? If I wanted to help sort of mentor somebody or give back in some way, how would that work in the 93% Club?

SP: We don’t have a formal mentoring scheme in place. So, the way that we currently run our events is that we work with predominantly big corporates who have lots of resources and have a real drought when it comes to diverse talent. And the reason we tend to work with them more is that they have a ton of resources. They’re very easy to work with, and what they do is they put on skill sessions, so we have one coming up with Accenture where they’re going to be doing things like personal branding, how to sell yourself, and we’re going to be paying for the students to have their LinkedIn headshots taken for free by a professional photographer, and they can use it on their profile. So that’s one way that we work with the students. Another way is that… For example, John, if you got in contact with the 93% Club and said, “I’m a professional, I’ve got some time on my hands, I really want to look after a student who needs some support.” We would look at your professional profile and your connections, and we could just put you in touch with someone who needs it. So, it’s very flexible, very organic. It’s meant to replicate the experience that you would get, John, if someone that you knew came to you and said that. So that’s what we’re hoping to build up, and that’s what we’re currently doing.

I’m very keen for it to go one step further than mentorship because you hear a lot about mentoring schemes that rely on both parties being very active in it, and what I want to transform it into is effectively sponsorship. So, if we put you in contact with someone, John, you would feel personally responsible for them. Obviously, there has to be an element on their own part, but you would put them in front of the right people, you would give them honest advice and feedback, and that’s how it would work.

JC: Well, that is absolutely fantastic. One of the things that we just touched on in passing was 2020, and the world took a battering last year, and everyone had a new set of challenges that they weren’t expecting. How has that affected your colleagues in the 93% Club?

SP: I would say that most people haven’t had a great time, of course. What we found at the 93% Club is that a lot of employers were talking about how amazing it was that they could reach a huge number of students nationwide who would otherwise be excluded because they might not be able to make the trip to London. And so that’s been a huge positive. I think geographically, they’ve been able to reach students who wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to those employers.

At the beginning of the year, in January and February, we did a working environment survey, so we released a survey to our members saying, “How are you finding it? Give us some examples of your experiences? And if you feel comfortable, would you mind attaching a photo of your working environment to the response?” We wanted to see where the students were working and what they were dealing with. And we received 689 responses in that short period of time, most of which also attached an image, and honestly, John, I cried reading them because it deeply upset me. So many of the students said that they didn’t have access to Wi-Fi.

Then the saddest thing for me was that so many of them said that they felt too embarrassed to put their cameras on because of the working environments they were in. A lot of the photos we received were students sharing bedrooms with siblings, someone on their bed with a dinner tray to put their laptop on, and that’s where they were working from. And some of the testimony we had… So, one person said “I have a very cluttered space, my desk chair and desk aren’t ergonomic, and they’re very old, and so it’s very uncomfortable to be in any place for more than five to 10 minutes. We have a dump, so I keep getting chest pain. And I also have to share a space with my mom and my brother,” which broke my heart.

And then there was another student who said, “My flat is very, very cold. I have to wear at least two jumpers and a blanket most of the time because my dad can’t afford to have the heating on.” And I just thought these people were having to interview for jobs and put their best selves forward. Some of them described getting quite degraded because they had to put their cameras on, and they were worried that someone would judge their backgrounds and it would be naive of us… For us to say, that doesn’t happen when someone puts their Zoom background on; if you see a nice background, you’re like, “Oh, that’s nice.” If sometimes they put their camera on, they’ve got a little brother or sister running around in the background or the Wi-Fi is patchy, you automatically don’t get to have that connection, the person. So, I think that it’s been positive in several ways in that geographically you can reach more students, and obviously, it removes financial barriers in terms of travel, but we just want employers to be mindful of the fact that if you are interviewing students give them the option to come in and pay those expenses upfront.

JC: We’ve got a problem in the legal sector, well it doesn’t matter whether you work in a law firm or a law department, it is a simple fact that it is not equal. What could we do to make a difference?

SP: If you are going to give work experience to someone, make sure that you also do it to someone else who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity, make sure it’s paid. Give them expenses, make sure you give those expenses upfront because a lot of things I used to do when I was a student were stressing me out so much. So, when I have a work experience student now who comes into a law firm, the first thing I say when I see them is, “Hey, I’d love to take you out for lunch, and I’ll pay for it on my firm card,” and it’s a real relief to hear that you’re not going to have to sit at the table and be like, “Oh, who’s going to pick up the bill.” Even with things like coffee, is not knowing what to do in that situation. So, I think those are really small things that you can do.

Once the individual is in the organisation, I think; first, it’s really important to have conversations like we’re having. John, like I think what you’re doing on this podcast is incredibly important, which is talking about these issues and not just assuming that if you ignore it, they’re going to go away because they’re going to continue to exist for a small proportion of your workforce. You ignoring it as a senior employer or someone in the position of power isn’t going to help that. You can do focus groups for your employees, sit down with them, and say, “Listen, I may not have the same life experiences as you, I recognise that, but I want to learn, and I want to know what it is like to be you in this organisation.” And I think also preparing yourself to hear something that you don’t like is important, be uncomfortable and that’s all right, as long as you learn from it.

I think another thing that employees could do that I’d like to see more of is additional training. Things like how to do client pitching, how to present, how to go to a fancy networking events. If that’s the way that things are going to continue to work, if we are going to go to these fancy events and wine and dine, some people don’t feel comfortable in those spaces, and it’s really daunting, and you need to allow people to feel comfortable in those spaces, or you change the way it is, and you find something that’s a little bit more accessible for everyone.

I think there’s a lot that could be done. I think fundamentally, we all recognise that this is a systemic issue, and the issues start way down the road like before they even walk through the doors of law firms or organisations. But I think once these individuals get into the law firms, once they get into these city jobs, it’s important for senior management to communicate that message that you do matter, your experience is valid, also making sure there’s a no-tolerance culture for mocking.