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The “nepo baby” discourse isn’t going away. Underneath the celebrity gloss — Willow Smith, Gwyneth Paltrow and Lily Rose-Depp being just three of many nepo babies held up for examination — there’s an important conversation about social equality waiting to happen. Current nepo baby discourse essentially boils down to a single question: to what degree is it tasteful to celebrate the achievements of people who owe at least some of their success to their parental or other family connections?
While there’s an undercurrent of concern about whose place these nepo babies took when they ascended to the cultural and artistic elite, only half of the conversation is being had. What can we do to redress the balance of opportunity?
My take is that to move the conversation forward, it’s worth looking beyond showbusiness — the industry I work in — and more specifically, show business in the United States, and to look at the sort of structural inequalities that genuinely keep talent from rising to the top. Lily Allen attempted to bring the UK and the worlds of politics and finance into the debate, as Larisha Paul’s December 2022 Rolling Stone article distilled brilliantly.
Without wanting to start a bizarre rivalry over who has the least palatable flavor of nepotism, I would contend that when it comes to the influence of family networks, the UK (where I grew up, live and work) has it slightly worse (or better, depending on how well connected you are) than its friends across the Atlantic.
Our nepotism is different. It’s less conspicuous. Yes, we have famous sons and daughters of famous mothers and fathers; Benedict Cumberbatch (son of actress Wanda Ventham and actor Timothy Carlton Congdon Cumberbatch), Lily Allen (daughter of actor Keith Allen) and Matty Healy (son of actors Denise Welch and Tim Healy) to name just three.
But our nepotism is uttered in hushed tones, heavily influenced by class and status, and there are numerous high status apologists ready to defend it. To provide a recent example, our former Prime Minister Boris Johnson nominated his own father for a knighthood. It’s not Boris’ first bit of cronyism either. In 2020, he nominated his brother — now Johnson of Marylebone — successfully for a peerage. If Johnson senior receives his knighthood and becomes a sir, this won’t technically fit the nepo baby framework. It’ll be a “reverse nepo,” with an already well-connected and wealthy parent benefiting from the influence of their child. But it’s an exception that proves the rule. The people in the UK with the most cultural capital simply expect to be able to leverage it for the benefit of their nearest and dearest without much censure.
With class status comes connections. And the problem with this dynamic is that it quietly disadvantages those without it. One of the easier-to-decode facsimiles for class privilege is education. I’m not just talking about the quality of education; lots of state schools outperform their fee-paying counterparts on certain metrics, but the environment in which a person was educated.
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A 2019 report by the social mobility charity The Sutton Trust examined the over-representation of privately educated people in the UK’s elite professions and showed that “two fifths (39%) of the elite group as a whole were privately educated, more than five times as many as the population at large, while a quarter (24%) had graduated from Oxbridge.”
The report added that “politics, the media, and public service all show high proportions of privately educated in their number, including 65% of senior judges, 59% of civil service permanent secretaries and 57% of the House of Lords.”
Private education doesn’t just buy you smaller class sizes, rich extra-curricular programs, more experienced teachers and nicer surroundings. It buys you connections. And those connections are often enough for people of mediocre talent to move ahead of people of outstanding talent who lack their networks. And a lack of connections is quite often self-fulfilling. Research by Netflix and the National Youth Theatre in the UK found that most people think connections are more important than talent when pursuing a career in film, TV and theatre.
Is anything being done to change things?
Back in 2018, my record company Ostereo enacted a tweak to our recruitment processes that effectively “banned” applicants from telling us where they went to school. Music is still a highly elitist business and people without the requisite social capital can be discouraged from even trying to enter it. By telling applicants not to mention the school they attended in their application, we are trying to remove the unconscious biases that affect hiring processes and to encourage people without expensive educations to see us as a potential home for their talents.
I’ve also been pleased to see positive initiatives like the mentoring platform CoachCube, founded by London entrepreneur Sylvester Lewis. He is attempting to help those without networks connect with people in prestigious sectors — who may well have leveraged their own networks to get there — in order to learn from them the things that traditionally only get discovered via osmosis to those with established networks to tap into. It’s effectively creating networks for the off-network community.
If you’re wondering how you might contribute to this change in your organization, it makes sense to start small and build outward. Look at your hiring processes in the first instance. Are there any blind spots? For example, are your recruitment ads posted outside of your immediate professional network so they reach the sort of people we’re advocating for? Is the language inclusive and accessible? Small stylistic tweaks to recruitment copy can do wonders for accessibility.
These are baby steps. We’ll probably always have class-based nepotism in the UK, but the important thing is that we move beyond just caveating the success of those with good connections and focus on nurturing that talent that exists in all walks of life.
