New avenues of research to explain the rarity of females at the top of the accountancy profession

What is it about?

Women rarely reach the top echelons of the Big Four audit firms: at KPMG, Deloitte, PwC, and EY, they represent only 10-20% of executives (i.e. partners). Why is this particular glass ceiling proving so hard to break? Existing explanations suggest either that women may just be “different”, or that they face societal-level barriers in terms of stereotypes and expectations.

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Why is it important?

Our paper, “New avenues of research to explain the rarity of females at the top of the accountancy profession”, argues that the study of existing gender disparities in top leadership accountancy positions across countries may also benefit from using language to measure gender inequality. We substantiate our proposal by performing a thorough and systematic literature review on gender, accountancy and language (90 years of research, looking at papers from 1926 to 2016) and by collecting data on the presence of the Big Four throughout the world, including their linguistic environments and the characteristics of their global boards. We find that the research that links gender in accountancy to the linguistic environment is scant and that the Big Four indeed operate in diverse linguistic environments. These findings allow us to suggest a set of avenues of future research, which we discuss in detail. We review existing explanations of the rarity of women in the Big Four and how these would change if we consider language.

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