From women’s liberation to feminism: Reflections in accounting

academia

by

Christine Cooper

Department of Accounting and Finance

University of Strathclyde
Curran Building
100 Cathedral Street
Glasgow
G4 0LN
Tel: 44-141-548-3231
Fax: 44-141-552-3547
c.cooper”strath.ac.uk

I would like to thank Julia Cooper-Perks, Pat Arnold, Amelia Barrett, Maureen Barrett,
Lesley Catchpowle, Rhona Fraser, Sonja Gallhofer, Jacqueline Latraille, Cheryl Lehman,
Theresa Hammond, Grace Merridan, Leslie Oakes, Eileen Ulas, Lesley Whitehead and the
myriad of other wonderful women who have influenced this paper. Thanks also to Gregor
Gall for a very helpful discussion on “patriarchy vs class”.

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 From women’s liberation to feminism: Reflections in accounting
academia
Abstract

This paper argues that women from different economic, social and geographical background
have to confront a myriad of problems. For the majority of women these problems are class
based. While it is undeniably the case that the women’s movement has made significant
gains, they have largely favoured middle and upper class white women. In this sense
women’s liberation, as a liberation movement has been largely incorporated within society
and the state. Much contemporary feminism has taken up residence in universities and is
concerned with theories rather than issues. Despite the incorporation of “feminism” into the
status quo, there has been a backlash against women and feminism in the form of neo-
Darwinist Evolutionary Psychology. This paper considers some of the debates surrounding
Evolutionary Psychology and how they apply to mainstream accounting. The paper also
considers contemporary gender writing in accounting relating it back to the stand taken in the
paper that bourgeois feminism has made the best recent political, economic and social gains.
These might turn out to be at the expense of the majority of women.

women aren’t like men/they can do the things that men can’t do
Madonna, Time, 27 May 1985, p 81

doing it all does not turn most women into superheros; it merely produces strain,
stress -- and low pay.
Hewlett, S., A Lesser Life, 1988, p 268

Large American companies are finding that with women now reaching high levels of
management, and with a new generation of management fathers beginning to suffer
from paternal guilt, adequate day care for management’s children is essential. It can
be cheaper to send a paid nurse to care for a sick child at home than to allow a highly
paid mother time off to care for her own child... This situation is hardly comparable
with that of the Guatemalan Indian families for whom day care for their children
would mean the right for small children not to work for their own subsistence of
coffee or cotton plantations... While executive mothers agonize over whether their
children will be adequately emotionally adjusted, Guatemalan mothers agonise over
whether their children will survive hard labour, inadequate food, pesticide spraying,
and the violence of plantation owners and the state.
Ramazanoglu, 1989, p 18 cited in Gallhofer 1998, p 367

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When it comes to “feminism”, the question now commonly arises as to whether the existence
of a woman’s movement is still justified. Just look, we are told, at the success of feminist
publishing, or the plethora of women’s studies courses. Women are in more positions of
power than ever before-from private industry to an ex British prime minister (German, 1994).
So, to contextualise this paper, I begin by providing a picture of women’s “achievements to
date” in society and in accounting.

While men make up less than 50 per cent of the world’s population they own in the vicinity
of 88 and 95 per cent of the world’s wealth - the currency, the minerals, the timber, the gold,
the stocks, the amber fields of grain (Angier, 2000). In the US, white women earn, on
average, 71% of that of white men. More alarmingly, African American and Hispanic
women earn only 63% and 54% receptively (National Women’s Law Centre1). The World’s
Women 20002 survey found that in manufacturing, in 27 of the 39 countries with data
available, women’s wages were 20 to 50 per cent less than those of men. In the UK, women
earned only 81p for every pound earned by men (Hall, 2000, p 8).

It is certainly true that women have reached some of the highest positions in the corporate
world, the numbers are surprisingly small and hardly growing. In 1978, there were two
women heading Fortune 1,000 companies; in 1994 there were still two; in 1996, the number
had jumped all the way to four. In 1985, 2 per cent of the Fortune 1,000's senior-level
executives were women; by 1992, that number had hardly budged, to 3 percent (Angier,
2000). While women accounted for 12 per cent of the corporate officers of the 560 largest
corporations in Canada in 1999, they occupied only 3% of the highest positions in those
corporations. In Germany in 1995, between one and three per cent of top executives and
board directors in the 70,000 largest enterprises were women. Although the share of
administrative and managerial workers rose between 1980 and the early 1990s in every
region of the world, except Southern Asia, the proportion of women in these positions is
quite low. For example, women’s share in sub-Saharan Africa is 14 percent, in Western
Asia 9 per cent and in the developed regions outside Europe, the share is only 35% (The

1Http://www.nwlc.org/display.cfm?section’employment

2http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/ww2000/2

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World’s Women 20003). In the workplace sexual harassment, sexual stereotyping that bars
the door to advancement and hiring opportunities, and other blatant and subtle forms of
discrimination are still common (see National Women’s Law Center4). On average, women’s
place in the world of work is frequently less secure than the position of men, as Tagier (1999,
p 11) amusingly puts it

The most successful women in the world are more precariously positioned than
comparable men. In Hollywood, the careers and asking price of actresses and female
directors are easily derailed by the occasional flop, even when women are superstars
such as Sharon Stone and Barbara Streisand, while actors such as Kevin Costner and
Sylvester Stallone can appear in dog after dog and still command the salaries of
plutocrats.

Overall, the nature of women’s and men’s participation in the labour force continues to be
very different. Women still have to reconcile family responsibilities with outside paid work.
Women have always engaged in fewer formal types of work, working as unpaid workers in a
family business, in the informal sector or in various types of household economic activities.

The political picture for women is reflected in the work situation. In January 2000, of all the
countries in the world, only eight5 have women’s share of seats in national parliaments at
30% or above (Progress of the World’s Women6). In 1999, women represented 11 per cent
of parliamentarians worldwide (The World’s Women 2000 overview7). Even political
representation by women, however, does not necessarily mean that the cause of women is
progressed. It is likely that, many newly elected women (or men) parliamentarians will
discover that legislative representatives frequently have little independent decision-making
power due to the control exercised by political parties or executive arms of government. The
issue is made more complex by the fact that women representatives frequently come from the

3 See http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/ww2000/

4 See http://www.nwlc.org/display.cfm?section’employment

5These are Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands
and Sou th Africa

6http://www.unifem.undp.org/progressww/2000/

7http://www.un.org/Depts/unsd/ww2000/

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higher echelons of society and are likely to pursue policies which benefit their own social
group rather than policies designed to improve the lives of the majority of women. Given
these class barriers exist, women remain unable to change pre-existing policy as officials lack
an understanding of how agendas operate to disadvantage women.

There is a gender gap in education as well. In 22 countries in Africa and nine countries in
Asia, the gap remains a chasm. Data shows enrollment ratios for girls less than 80 per cent
for that of boys. Nearly two thirds of the illiterates in the world are women. Even in the
West where, in some countries women on average stay longer than men, in higher education
they are not benefiting economically from this. In the US the possession of a bachelor ’s
degree adds $28,000 to a man’s salary, but only $9,000 to a woman’s. A degree from a high
prestige university contributes $11,500 to a man’s income, but actually subtracts $2,400 from
a woman’s (Angier, 2000, p 11). According to findings from the UK Graduate Careers
Survey 2000, only one in five women expects to get a job matching their qualifications.

Last, but not least, what about women in accounting? Academics in many Western countries
now teach accounting classes which consistently have around 50% women students. In past
fifteen years the number of women entering the US accounting profession has doubled. In
1977, females made up 28 percent of all graduating accounting majors. In 1992-93, according
to an AICPA survey, there were more female accounting graduates than male (52 as opposed
to 48 percent) and the gender breakdown of new accounting graduates hired by public
accounting firms was 54 percent male and 46 percent female. In 1989, only 4.1 percent of
the partners in the nation's largest accounting firms were women. "Three years later, the
needle had barely moved; figures for 1992 showed that just 4.9 percent of the partners in
those firms were women" (Gabriel and Martin, 1993, p. 18). The Annual Survey of Women
in Public Accounting 1999, reported that women now make up 11.7% of partners at the top
25 firms surveyed. This upbeat figure might conceal part of the picture. Of the 15 Arthur
Anderson Leadership Team members there are no women at present. 8 Of the 22 UK offices
of Deloitte and Touche there were no women “partners-in-charge”9. Ernst and Young (UK)

8Http://www.arthurandersen.com/WebSite.nsf/Content/AboutUsLeadership?
OpenDocument

9Http://www.deloitte.co.uk/offices/contact.html

5
have an Executive which develops and implements strategy and the day-to-day management
of the firm. This executive consists of five men. KPMG’s Australian National Board
consists of nine men and no women. 10 It is certainly the case that women are now very much
a part of the accounting profession. Even if they reach the top echelons of the profession,
and there is no sign that this is immanent, one would have to ask the personal costs to the
women involved. Even today women who reach “the top” are unmarried and childless.

The issues confronting women are many and varied and it would certainly be ridiculous to
argue that an economically deprived African woman with AIDS concerned about how she
would feed her children that day had much in common with a woman in Australia struggling
to become a partner at Arthur Andersen. As can be seen from the foregoing information,
more needs to be done on all fronts. The question remains as to exactly what. The answer to
this difficult question depends on each women’s interests and her own political/theoretical
agenda. In the feminist literature, this debate is sometimes played out between whether
gendered interests should dominate over other, for example, class or racial interests. It is fair
to argue that Western white middle/upper class women have achieved proportionately more
advances than women from other backgrounds (German, 1994).

A majority of middle and upper-class women have gained access to the once closed worlds of
men-in business, finance, journalism and higher education. Although there have undoubtably
been major advances for women in the past decades, these have nearly all been advances for
“bourgeois feminism”. Some (Greer, 1999) have argued that encouragement from these
changes can only be sustained by totally abandoning the original principles of the women’s
movement as a liberation movement and that this sort of advance has in fact made the
dominant ideas of the women’s movement more right wing than ever (ie concerned only with
the rights of upper and middle class women to “make it”). This, in turn, has brought fewer
real gains for working women, and indeed some major attacks on hard-won rights.

To consider whether “the dominant ideas of the women’s movement are more right wing
than ever” the next section briefly discusses the early days of the “women’s movement”. We
will see that from the outset there was never really one united woman’s movement. There

10Http://www.kpmg.com.au/direct.html

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were different organisations reflecting the interests alluded to above. I argue that some of the
political differences in gender research in accounting find their roots in the differences which
can be found in the early women’s movement. Today many factions of the early women’s
movement could easily be described as “legitimate” and incorporated into the state. Despite
this, there has recently been a huge backlash against some of the gains of the women’s
movement in the form of neo-Darwinian ideas in particular evolutionary psychology. While
on the surface this backlash does not appear to be related to accounting this paper uses
contemporary feminist debates to illustrate that there are strong links between neo-Darwinian
ideas and mainstream/positive accounting theory. That is, both promote a view of humanity
as selfish and both privilege “science” or “neo-scientific” theories over social theory. The
following three sections therefore discuss the Darwinian backlash against feminism,
evolutionary psychology and feminist evolutionary psychologists.

While we certainly need to look to society rather than our genes to find the roots of women’s
oppression, it would be unwise to neglect biological factors. In the next section I consider
an arena where biology is important B children. Many women find that their first serious
experience of discrimination occurs when they become mothers. Mothers spend a
disproportionately higher amount of time raising children than fathers, and are consequently
viewed differently in the workplace. This is not to argue that only mothers are discriminated
against of course. The inequality between men and women in the home prompts a return to
one of the central issues raised in the beginning of the paper concerning the class nature of
the women’s movement. If women’s main oppressors are men (sometimes in the home), it
surely shouldn’t matter whether or not the women’s movement is becoming “more right
wing”. If women want to emancipate themselves, then, they should struggle against men and
not become involved in left/right politics. The familiar way of posing this issue is to ask
whether women’s oppression comes from patriarchy (basically men), or the economic system
(class). Thus, “patriarchy and class” is the topic of the following section. It is interesting
that this central political issue was raised in a groundbreaking paper by Tinker and Neimark
(1987) and in the discussion on that paper Crompton (1987) which heralded in a new wave of
gender research in accounting. The final section provides coverage of gender work in
accounting since Tinker and Neimark.

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The early women’s movements in the US and UK

German (1994) contends that there were three main factors behind the expansion of the
women’s movement in the 1960s. The first was women’s position as workers which
demonstrated some of the contradictions in women’s roles in society. Women were expected
to play a role in the world of work but they were also treated as second class citizens with
lower wages and “women’s jobs”. Even if women were well-paid, they were often treated as
children. For example it was impossible for a woman in the 1950s and 1960s to buy a
washing machine without the financial backing of a man. The working, legal and financial
positions of women created a sense of grievance among many women, especially middle
class women. There was also a lack of fulfilment, especially on the part of middle class
housewives. Despite their home comforts, they experienced what Betty Friedan (1971)
described as “the problem with no name.” The second factor, expansion in higher education,
no doubt exacerbated the problem in the sense that it served to increase women’s frustration.
Well educated middle class women would be expected to give up work, if not upon marriage,
then upon pregnancy in the 1960s. Their sense of boredom and frustration was terrible.
Even when women took up careers, they tended to be shepherded into women’s jobs such as
teaching where they remained in the lower grades. As German (1994, p 164) put it, the
“grievances underlying Betty Friedan’s problem with no name continued to grow.” The third
factor was in some ways the changing structure of capitalism itself: the explosion of what
became known as “the movements”.

The above three factors confronted most Western women in the 1960s but the women’s
movements that grew out of them developed differently in different countries. Education
turned out to be one of the big differences between the US and the UK’s women’s liberation
movements. The expansion of higher education was much larger and richer in the US. The
US academic milieu was, and still is, an important feature of US political life. In the UK, the
organised working class movement had a much bigger impact on the newly emerging
women’s movement (German, 1994). The US women’s movement could certainly be
described as a product of the left, but the left at that time had all but been decimated by
McCarthyism. This background formed the movement’s politics and practice. The US

8
women’s movement began as a left-wing radical movement by the student daughter’s of
Betty Friedan’s generation. This meant that the National Organisation of Women (NOW),
founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan, was regarded by many as thoroughly middle class and
limited in its fights for reforms. Thus, from the outset there were two main streams of
women’s movements in the US that reflected different class interests. The Women’s
Liberation Movement tended to be much more radical than NOW. For example, it challenged
the notion of marriage, stressed the importance of alternative lifestyles, was anti war,
supported the Black panthers and even upset the Miss America contest!

Eventually, the hopes of the early years of the Women’s Liberation Movement were
redirected onto different courses. By the mid to late 1970s, two separate trends which
reinforced each other as time went on, began to emerge. The first was the incorporation of
much of the movement into society and the state at all sorts of levels. In short, a large part of
the women’s movement had become legitimate and respectable. US capitalism was easily
able to incorporate a thin layer of former radicals from the women’s black and student
movements into the system. Indeed the growth of women accountants was very much part of
this incorporation of a militant movement into the system. The second was the development
of radical feminism as the dominant trend within the movement as a whole (German, 1994).
A whole collection of radical feminist theories were developed on the premise that we need a
woman’s revolution against male power and dominance. Or, put differently, that the primary
source of the majority of women’s oppression is patriarchy (men). These two developments
were repeated in Britain although in a less extreme form.

Whether or not the women’s movement “has become more right wing”, it is certainly the
case that what was once a woman’s liberation movement which carried along all that
liberation might entail has to a large extent been transformed into a largely academic
discipline. This is why people today tend to think of “feminism” or perhaps “gender” rather
than the seemingly old fashioned “women’s liberation” which tended to be uniformed by
either psychoanalysis, postmodernism or structuralism. The shift from women’s liberation to
feminism however, is more than just semantics. In fact fairly diverse feminist commentators
have argued that the women’s movement has been pushed into academia’s ivory towers
(Segal, 1999; German, 1994). For women workers in academia this move is in some ways

9
ironic. Academic institutions (certainly in the UK) can be very hostile places for women. In
the academic year 1997 - 98 women comprised only 9.2% of UK professors 11. In Civil
Engineering there were no women professors. A brief look through much contemporary
academic feminist work reveals that it is now very much concerned with theory rather than
issues (Segal, 1999).

It is hard to believe that the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, for all its faults, has
turned into something which puts heaps of energy into doing things like deconstructing texts
in feminine ways. In short feminism ended up in the “post-structuralist” academy of the
1990s. Have its effects been felt beyond the ivory towers? Clearly, women academics have
to be concerned about publications since these, not political activism, gain promotions.
Unfortunately, the publication path is a hostile one. Perhaps serving to set women with united
political goals (but marginally different views on whether Foucault was correct about the
history of sexuality) against one and other. Though some progress has been made in
accounting academia, as in the accounting profession. It would be difficult nowadays to
publish a piece about the accounting profession in a Critical Journal without paying attention
to the gender issues involved (if not the class and race issues) (Hammond, forthcoming) 12.
This however, doesn’t necessarily imply that the writing is “radical” as outlined above, in
some ways it can be argued that the advancement of women in the accounting profession
(especially at lower levels) is part of the incorporation of a radical movement into the
“system”. Of course there is another side to “feminism” which might broadly be described as
feminist activism. The academic accounting community might have something to learn from
this13.

Despite the incorporation of much of the early women’s movement into the state, there has
11Http://www.thesis.co.uk:80/tp/20060529...nd%26M%3D8%26k
%3D43694%26R53DY%26U%3D1

12But in many countries in the Western world critical journals simply don’t Acount”
or rank as highly as mainstream journals. So still in the majority of Aimportant” journals
(and they are important for individuals in respect of tenure) gender, race and class are
invalidated.

13The majority of Agender” work in accounting could find its roots in Betty Freidan’s
middle class NOW movement or the respectable incorporated side of the women’s
movement.

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still been a huge backlash against feminism. In recent years the most pernicious backlash has
come from neo-Darwinists. In the next section I consider the Darwinian Backlash against
feminism. Very briefly, Darwinian inspired genetic and non-genetic theories have been used
to argue that women’s natural place is in the home supported by the most powerful and rich
man that she can get her hands on. Moreover, that naturally, the women who are likely to
“catch” the most powerful men are the youngest, most attractive ones who also happen to
have a certain waist to hip ratio. Neo-Darwinianism may seem of little importance to
accounting academics but it is included here for several important reasons. The pseudo
scientific nature of Darwinian derived work makes it very persuasive. It helps to perpetuate
myths about women and leave many of them languishing in low paid boring bookkeeping
jobs or bashing their heads against glass ceilings and walls and so on. Thus, the problematic
nature of neo-Darwinian work needs to be laid bare. It turns out that this challenge is
particularly important for accounting research overall since, in a similar vein to Darwinian
derived work, accounting research frequently accepts assumptions about the naturalness of
economic or decision behaviour (Oakes and Hammond, 1995). The metaphors used by
Darwinian derived work have become powerful reservoirs of shared meaning that have been
incorporated into accounting and finance (Campbell, 1986; Tinker, 1988). Neo-Darwinian
assumptions about gender and scientific rationality are historically intertwined. These
assumptions are embedded in accounting (Oakes and Hammond, 1995).

The Darwinian Backlash against Feminism

In recent years the popular press and TV have been full of stories about genetics. This is an
arena in which, diverse social elements seem, almost by magic, to mutually support and
enhance the interests of Capital. On the ideological side, genetics has inspired a backlash
against feminism by promoting the crass claim that gender divisions are genetically
determined and therefore unchangeable. Some now argue that there has been no significant
development in “human nature” since the stone age (see Rose and Rose, 2000 for excellent
contrary arguments). Perhaps more revoltingly we now have accounts of findings of genes
for “criminality”, “pauperism” and “shiftlessness”. Nowadays, it seems, there is hardly an
area of human behaviour, no matter how clearly culturally diverse and complex...from good

11
mothering to divorce or moral turpitude B that is not thrust back onto genetic foundations
(Segal, 1999). Such is the force of current cultural hegemony of genetic anti-culturalism that
few people even bother reporting that those who look a little closer at the research which
generates such media publicity find it not remotely conclusive. The fact that none of these
claims has ever stood up to genuine scientific scrutiny hasn’t stopped the popular press
spreading them (Segal, 1999).

It is important to be aware of the economic and social impact of genetics as well as its
ideological role. Firstly it is important to understand why it is that governments and large
corporations have invested so much in hugely expensive gene technology. Companies can,
by patenting genes, (both plant and human) claim a monopolistic power they have never been
able to obtain before (Monbiot, 2000). I will use the example of how this is impacting on
breast cancer, but we can be sure that gene technology is seriously impacting upon all areas
of our lives in a class distorted way. Monbiot (2000) outlines the case of an US company,
Myriad Genetics, which claimed that it had become the European owner of two key human
genes, certain of whose mutations predispose people to breast cancer. Since Myriad owned
the genes, public health laboratories testing women for the mutations in Britain would, the
company warned, no longer be able to carry out their own tests. They would have to use a
procedure developed and licensed by Myriad. This would double the cost of the tests.
Doctors and scientists in Britain were outraged not least because much of the work of
identifying the genes had been carried out by British laboratories, at public expense.

Despite stories like Myriad, the returns to companies investing in gene technologies have so
far been small compared to the investment or hugely negative. Even so, funding for the gene
projects has increased dramatically. Part of the reason for this is clearly the economic
potential of such projects. Funding through the less lucrative years has been kept up on the
basis of the potential of curing all kinds of social ills through science rather than through
progressive social change.

Some of the ideological seeds in support of our Anew genetically modified futures” supported
by a neo-Darwinist perspective reared their heads in the 1970s. Segal (1999) states that
without doubt, the first blast of resurgent Darwinism, in the mid 1970s, forcefully promoted

12
capitalist market values and patriarchy. This began with the publication of E. O. Wilson’s
Sociobiology in 1975 and Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene14 the next year, soon followed by other
influential publications in the social sciences, such as David Barash’s The Whisperings
Within (1979), and The Evolution of Human Sexuality, (1979) by anthropologist Donald
Symons. Following the publication of Sociobiology in 1975, the US magazine Business
Week ran a series of articles on “The Genetic Defence of the Free Market”, celebrating the
evolutionary origins of men’s competitive self interest. Mainstream accounting research
based on Agency Theory, transaction cost theories, or other economic models of the firm still
relies upon notions of “rationality” (Oakes and Hammond, 1995; Baiman, 1990) or bounded
rationality which assume intrinsic self-interested, individual preferences. The resonances
between these accounting theories which assume some intrinsic set of preferences and
Dawkins’s selfish Genes are profound. Just as the propagation of genes is natural and
inevitable, so is man’s competitive self-interested behaviour towards maximising individual
economic rewards.

Critics of the genome project are not only concerned with the astronomical costs that
sequencing entails, and the low probability of it producing useful knowledge, but even more
with the very high probability of its abuse and misuse. Most of all they fear the Agene
hunters” feed an ideological climate which diverts attention away from the analysis of social
and environmental problems, in a deplorable repetition of the thinking and rhetoric behind
the delusions of the eugenicists in the early decades of the 20th century: inventing genes for
“nomadism”, “shiftlessness”, “pauperism”, and “criminality” to condemn the working class,
immigrants and Anon-Aryans” alike. It would be possible to argue that much accounting
research is similarly premised in the sense that it fails to recognise the social implications of

14Richard Dawkins asserts that Aplants and animals alike are all B in their immensely
complicated and enmeshed ways doing the same fundamental thing, which is propagating
genes.” The eternal truth of Darwin’s grand narrative have returned with a vengeance to
reshape intellectual agendas this fin de siecle, just as strongly as they did the last. According
to Darwinian fundamentalism, the goal in life is two-fold: to survive and to mate. It is a goal
according to Dawkins, implanted in the genes of all living things B however redundantly the
components of genes lie on most chromosomes, never once triggered into any action at all.
Freud saw the ability to work and love as necessary for human happiness, and Segal has little
difficulty accepting that he is highlighting two crucial sites of human activity. But accounts
of loving and working direct us towards quintessentially human narratives; surviving and
mating strip away this human dimension.

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accounting.

Even in cancer care, where arguably the genome project may have some benefit to humanity,
the social factors involved turn out to be at least as important, and much more cheaply dealt
with. For example, in the UK women from poorer backgrounds are three times more likely
to contract cervical cancer than those from affluent homes (Scott, 2000). The study by
researchers at Glasgow University and Leicester Royal Infirmary, also found that women
from deprived areas tended to suffer from a more aggressive form of the disease, with faster
growing tumours. The report said that it was vital for women to have regular smear tests and
to increase their intake of fresh fruit and vegetables. Arguably, some of the huge amounts of
money spent on gene research would be better spent enabling all women to have better diets
and regular smear tests. Any money left over (and there should be lots of it) could perhaps
be profitably spent seriously tackling cancer causing pollutants.

Given the foregoing it is hard to imagine why genetics receive such a good press. Perhaps
part of the explanation of the neo-Darwinian genetic revival could be that it acted as an
ideological backlash against the liberation movements of the 1970s (worker’s, peace, gay,
black and women’s). Neo-Darwinian writing certainly gave a scientific rationalization for
the position of women at the time by promoting “scientific” explanations as to why, for
example, women’s natural place was in the kitchen and men’s in the aggressive, thrusting
world of work. Moreover, they made the argument that the market “survival of the fittest”
mentality was natural and beneficial for all (see Jensen and Meckling, 1976).

Aside from its desire to legitimise predestined class, gender and sexual divisions, Darwinism
has another ambition. It is a return to the allegedly more rigorous authority of the biological
sciences of much that has recently been understood as cultural (Segal, 1999). So this too is a
backlash against Social Theories in general, especially any theories which see the origins of
social change within society. The popular form of this Darwinian shift, or at least the one
which has been picked up upon by the media, is Evolutionary Psychology.15

15In fact as I was driving to work this morning, the topic of Melvin Bragg’s (BBC
Radio 4) AIn Our Times” programme was Evolutionary Psychology.

14
Evolutionary Psychology

Darwinian inspiration has caused a fundamental shift in Evolutionary Psychology which had
earlier espoused cultural explanations for understanding human behaviour. In recent years it
has moved to promote genetic or “hard scientific” origins of human behaviour. The cardinal
gender premises of evolutionary psychology are, 1) men are more promiscuous and less
sexually reserved than women; 2) women are inherently more interested in a stable
relationship than men; 3) women are naturally attracted to high status men with resources; 4)
men are naturally attracted to youth and beauty; and 5) our core preferences and desires were
hammered out long ago, a hundred thousand years or more and have not changed since then,
nor are they going to change much in the future.

Segal (1999) tellingly points out that, Evolutionary Psychologist, Robert Wright, throughout
the 1990s consistently ridiculed feminists seeking equality with men as doomed by their
deliberate ignorance or foolish denial of the “harsh Darwinian truths” about human nature.
He challenges feminists to face up to the evolutionary basis for “the natural male impulse to
control female sexuality”, Amen’s natural tendency to greater promiscuity”, natural selection
and so on. “Human males are by nature oppressive, possessive, flesh-obsessed pigs”. Wright
wrongly asserts in his The Moral Animal: Why we are the way we are, that despite that fact
that women have managed to win legislation on equal pay, sexual harassment and so on, they
will NEVER be as powerful as men because they just don’t have the Aright” genes. In an
article published in the American Psychologist in 1998, thirty empirical “discoveries” about
human behaviour allegedly generated by evolutionary theory were listed. Many of these
“explained” gender contrasts including sexually dimorphic mating strategies; men’s
preference for younger females; male risk-taking in intrasexual competition for mates;
patterns of spousal and same sex homicide; design of male sexual jealousy; women’s desire
for mates with resources; sex-linked shifts in mate selection across the lifespan; causes of
conjugal dissolution; mate guarding as a function of female reproductive value; waist-to-hip
ratio as a determinant of attractiveness judgements.

15
Of course it is not hard to suggest social explanations for the behaviour patterns listed by
evolutionary psychologists. One does not have to believe that evolution and genetics play no
role in human affairs, to point out that the universality of certain practices does NOT entail a
genetic origin. We are constantly bombarded with all kinds of images and language which
serve to reinforce the stereotypes proposed by the Evolutionary Psychologists. For example,
Hollywood still loves to perpetuate the myth that younger women find older men sexy. In
countless numbers of films men in their late 50s, 60s and even 70s are portrayed as desirable
to women in their 20s and 30s. The recently made “Space Cowboys” was applauded for its
recognition that its male stars were now of pensionable age. One of the “cowboys” (Donald
Sutherland) was in endless pursuit of very young women, and another (Tommy Lee Jones)
ended up developing a relationship with an “older” (ie 30ish) women.

As Angier (1999) puts it “In the end what is important to question, and to hold to the fire of
alternative interpretation, is the immutability and adaptive logic of the discrepancy, its basis
in our genome rather than in the ecological circumstances in which a genome managed to
express itself.” For example, evolutionary psychologists insist that the male sex drive is
much stronger than the woman’s. Yet women are universally punished if they display
evidence to the contrary. Cultures everywhere seem to brutally attack the female sex-drive.
Men are supposed to have the naturally higher sex drive, yet all the laws, customs,
punishment, shame, strictures, mystiques, and anti-mystiques are aimed at that tepid, sleepy,
hypoactive creature the female libido.... If female sexuality is muted compared to that of
men , then why must men the world over go to extreme lengths to control and contain it?
(Angier, 1999). Our everyday lives seem to be vastly different from what the Evolutionary
Psychologists tell us it “naturally should be.” Of course many of the things which
Evolutionary Psychologists “predict” would happen are also predicted by cultural theorists
(and indeed materialists). It shouldn’t be surprising that in a world which is so financially
insecure for women, so hateful/fearful of women’s sexuality and so obsessed by youth, that a
young and attractive woman might “choose” an older, richer spouse. Being younger may to
some extent, lessen the power differential for the woman and she may of course be attracted
to the security which wealth brings (Angier, 1999).

The more humorous side to the shallowness of all this research is that were men’s

16
promiscuous boasts, and women’s prudent protestations, to be accepted as indicatively
evolved behaviour patterns, rather than - in line with Segal’s (1999) own more sceptical
hypothesis - gender differentiating, cultural “identity work”, a tiny minority of enormously
hyperactive “young and attractive women” would have to be obliging an army of dedicatedly
randy men. The so-called evidence of much evolutionary psychology is flimsy and mostly
Aun-scientific”. We do not have to believe (as do many postmodernists) that we are slaves to
culture in order to reject the revolting regurgitated model of the ardent, forceful, naturally
high achieving male and passive, gold-digging female (Angier, 1999). Conflicts of interests
are always among us. These make social theory and studies essential.

For women confronting the myth of the dominant man and passive gold-digging woman,
there is a problem. If she wants to achieve the modest ambition of being taken as seriously as
anyone else, she might be terrified that if she doesn’t “act like a man”, she won’t get
anywhere. She might also be extremely wary of any theories of difference (Cooper, 1992,
Shearer and Arrington, 1993). In accounting this fear can be completely understood if one
looks at theories of the firm commonly used in research (Oakes and Hammond, 1995). This
theoretical framework assumes that labour and capital markets are efficient and that
employees have an “objective marginal value to the firm”. The total disregard for the
importance of cultural and political elements of society is a key feature of Capital Markets-
based research. This research contains absolutely no assumptions about systematic social
barriers, biases and market ideology even though it purportedly looks at the behaviour of
individuals (for example whether managers will consume too many perks or whatever).
Oakes and Hammond (1995) correctly propose that the conclusion that could be easily drawn
from capital markets-based research is that if women are under-represented in upper levels of
employment it must be because real differences exist in the economic value of women to the
firm. Oakes and Hammond (1995, p 53), state that “considering the pervasiveness of this
work, women may be justified in their concerns that simple functionalist explanations of
possible gender differences will fuel arguments for or justifications of exclusionary
practices.”

Just as critical research has done an excellent job of explaining the flaws in so-called
scientific capital markets research, so many theorists have exposed evolutionary psychology.

17
As Segal (1999) so aptly puts it, evolutionary psychology’s flimsy evolutionary speculations
could be dismissed altogether if it were not for the almost daily promotion they receive in one
media outlet or another. Darwinian ideas are not simply a media preoccupation. Perhaps
surprisingly, Darwinian evolutionary psychological ideas have been picked up by a new
brand of feminists (mostly sociobiologists) who use Darwinian ideas to suit their own ends.
These will be discussed briefly next to add another categorisation to Lehman’s (1992)
tripartite feminist classification. Although it could be argued that Darwinian feminists could
be classified under radical feminists.

Feminist evolutionary biologists

Gender certainly seems to make a big difference when it comes to the gender of the
researcher16! It seems that when women primatologists look at tribes of apes they tend to see
the importance of the female apes’ activities in holding communities together. Whereas their
male counterparts tend to focus on the males’ violence, dominance and promiscuity (Segal,
1999). Arguably very similar things have tended to happen in mainstream accounting
research. As Oakes and Hammond (1995) point out, in accounting there tends to be a
hierarchy of research which privileges the “public (or the domain of men)” over the “private
(the domain of women)”. Whereby, research into the public sphere of manufacturing,
distribution and financing seems to be viewed as more serious and valuable than research into
areas that are seen as domestic or family concerns (education, health care, social services).
To this extent there should certainly be more “private” research in accounting. Yet the
Darwinian Feminists while disrupting the male dominant view of primatology and
challenging the possibility of “neutral science”, fall into a serious theoretical trap.

Perhaps the most well known examples of Darwinian Feminist research are by Frans de
Waal, and Wrangham and Peterson who observe communities of Bonobo apes 17. When

16I am not suggesting that the problems of science could be sorted out by simply
having more women scientists (see Harding 1986). The women primatologists discussed
here are working with a different theoretical perspective than many of their male colleagues.

17It
seems that it is generally agreed that bonobo apes are definitely dominated by
coalitions of females.

18
Bonobo apes live in gorilla free and fertile areas, they participate in all kinds of sexual
activity including female to female genital rubbing and male to male sexual activities. The
female bonding is achieved through genito-genital rubbing which, by serving to strengthen
female coalitions, decreases males violence (Segal 1999). It isn’t difficult to see how
feminist evolutionary biologists could use the Bonobo ape research to suggest that we should
immediately turn our society into a lesbian one, since same sex behaviour could reduce male
violence18.

Feminist sociobiologists’ findings are important in the sense that they throw into question the
findings of animal sociology, anthropology and biology that stressed competition, dominance
and hierarchy. Theories which stress the naturalness of selfishness, competitive behaviours
and so on, have been generalised into other fields and have become explanations of human
behaviour as these observations came to be seen as “natural” and “intrinsic” to all animals
and to humans. These studies have found their way into economics, psychology, sociology
and politics (Haraway, 1986, 1989; Hrdy 1986). In the history of economic thought which
mainstream accounting draws so heavily upon, theories of economy have developed in
tandem with theories of animal sociology. Neoclassicism has both implicit and explicit
assumptions about what is “natural” in human behaviour.

Segal (1999) is sceptical about the progressive impact feminists have managed to make
through their interventions in primatology. It is vulnerable to some of the same traps as
earlier sociobiological research. What we have here is a biological absolutism more
incompatible than ever with any serious recognition of the dynamics of culture and its role in
the formation of human existence. Yet, the majority of theorists argue that gender differences
result from extensive and continual differences in the socialisation, subject positions and
experience of women (German, 1994, Segal, 1999, Smith, 1974; Gilligan, 1982; French
1985; West, 1988). Socio-biological or Darwinian explanations consistently fail to explain
actual social practices.

Unfortunately, as Oakes and Hammond point out, sociobiology is prominent in the work of

18Moreover, it has been argued by these feminists that clitoridectomy has been
perpetuated by men in order to limit the establishment of female power coalitions.

19
Hirshleifer (1978, 1987), Jensen and Meckling (1976), and other economists and accounting
theorists who use Darwinian models of evolution and the survival of the fittest to describe
human behaviour (and the behaviour of organizations and markets). These competitive
assumptions are so deeply embedded in accounting that they are rarely explicitly stated or
questioned. Yet, “competitive behaviour” and the survival of the fittest are key to Agency
Theory, Positive Accounting Theory and transaction cost analysis. Oakes and Hammond (p
60, 1995) state:

In these types of research, competition plays a teleological role... Competition is

assumed to lead ultimately to efficiency as the fit survive. Therefore the current
economic behaviour must be efficient or those behaviours would not continue to exist.
Furthermore, there is no need for researchers to examine or discuss the
appropriateness of economic behaviour but only try to find tools and models which
will reveal how economic behaviour is efficient in terms of competitive markets or
contracting.

The faith that mainstream accounting researchers have in their priors is strong. So strong in
fact that if a data item doesn’t fit, they have no qualms about disregarding it (as an “outlier”).
It is rare to see a paper accepted by an academic journal if it doesn’t have “a result”. If the
beliefs of mainstream researchers were really shaken this would perhaps enable them to
question the type of research they do, and perhaps even consider whose interests it serves.

Thus despite the theoretical limitations of the female primatologists/sociobiologist they at

least encourage us to ask the questions about the implications of their work. In doing so we
begin to make scientists accountable for the choices they make and the social problems they
ignore. For example, what happens if we stop studying the male of the species and look at
the female? This would at least make scientists more responsible for the results of their
work. Of course scientists work within an economic and ideological environment but my
argument is that we should all be aware of what is at stake here and how accounting is
implicated.

This prompts us to ask questions about the choices made by accounting researchers.

20
Accounting research on the whole is designed to benefit the dominant groups in society. Yet
it is clothed in scientific language so it takes on the guise of neutrality. Accounting
researchers can claim that they only discover the truth B they do not choose the truth nor are
they responsible for the uses their truths are put to. This means that mainstream accounting
researchers ignore how accounting affects the lives of the economically disenfranchised.

In this and the previous section I have argued that our “biology”/genes have to some extent
been seized upon as a cause of our social ills and that many have begun to regard it as a cure
for them too. I believe that this is a mistake that we need to seriously recognise the dynamics
of culture and its role in the formation of human existence. This does not mean that biology
is wholly unimportant. In the next section I turn to an issue where biology clearly is
important. Even here, biology’s impact upon our lives is magnified by economic, cultural
and political factors.

Children

I argue that the issue of children is an important one for everyone, yet this issue is all too
often raised as a woman’s “problem”. To those who want children 19, and to those have the
economic means to secure a fairly comfortable upbringing for them, children are a genuine
joy. Yet in many everyday situations, including the workplace, one can have sympathy with
Greer’s (1984, 1999) assertion that our society is hostile towards children and motherhood is
virtually meaningless.

I think that there are two central issues here. The first is to do with women’s “biological
clock”20, and the second is concerned with the issue of childcare. If women, want children
(and OK it is difficult to know how socially constructed this want is) they have to get
everything pretty much sorted out by (say) 35ish. This is especially true for middle class
women who want to have their careers in place and a house in a decent school catchment area
before they can take even the minimum amount of maternity leave. This might easily explain

19No compulsion is assumed in this argument.

20 This is where our biology becomes important.

21
why around 70% of high-flying women forgo children and marriage, whereas, only 7% of
male high achievers are unmarried. What is true for all women is that they can leave having
children “too late”21.

The second central issue, childcare, goes the core of some of the concerns in this paper. It is
partly to do with an ideology on the part of many managers which says that women won’t be
so committed once they have children and so after Aa certain age” when they may consider
having a child, they shouldn’t be taken seriously. Or, once they become a mother, even
though they are just as conscientious and hard working as ever, they should never be
promoted. It will take an enormous social change to reach the point when raising children is
very much seen as the responsibility of both parents equally. At present we are faced with
the prospect of fighting a distinct lack of social policies to ease the burden of child rearing
(for both men and women).

The issue of the unequal time spend raising children by mothers and fathers turns out to be
politically significant. In the next section I will argue that this inequality serves to perpetuate
the status quo. While it may be in the short term interests of many men to “allow” the unfair
distribution of housework and childcare, this to happen it turns out not to be in their longer
term political interest.22 Inequality in the home helps to perpetuate the broader system of
inequality in the sense that it divides people.

One the question of patriarchy vs class. The ways forward for social change.

Earlier in the paper I gestured to a class understanding of feminism and suggested that while

21A man in his mid 40s or older can discard his childless partner of 20 or so years
(with whom he always swore that he didn’t want children) and go off and become a father
with someone else. It isn’t fair. But this is beyond the scope of this paper.

22This is certainly true on the economic and political front, but it is also probably true
on a personal level. I can’t help that think (hope) that on my death bed I will be more proud
of rising my lovely daughter than ANY achievement in the workplace, any time out down the
pub with my mates, or any other Amasculine” activities I might have Amissed out” on. Sadly
many fathers don’t experience the joy that brining up children can bring. Even more sadly
they don’t know what they are missing out on.

22
it is certainly the case that the position of women in society has changed significantly over
the past 30 years, the fact is that the best gains have been made by upper and middle class
women. The majority of issues confronting women tend to affect different classes of women
differently23. So it could be argued that it is simply not possible to have a “one struggle fits
all” women’s movement. What about “patriarchy”? Do women have a “common enemy” in
the form of men, or is the “system” their worst oppressor? Or in other words, is gender
more important than class? This is important because if you want to bring about social
change you need to know where you should concentrate your energies. If the worst
oppression comes from men then it would be in women’s best interests to organise separately
from men. If class is the main oppressor then men and women should organise together.

The issue of patriarchy vs class was raised in Crompton’s (1987) critique of Tinker and
Neimark (1987). Crompton (1987) agreed with Tinker and Neimark that patriarchy and class
frequently work together to marginalise certain groups, but, she argues, they often work in
tension rather than cooperation. For example, for most of the first half of the 20 th century
accounting firms resisted appointing women. Since they could have paid women accountants
less than men, this would have lowered labour costs. Maintaining superiority of men seemed
more important (Hammond, forthcoming)24. It could be argued that this is a case where
patriarchy dominates over the normal drive to profit maximisation in our economic system. I
would see the situation somewhat differently and would argue (following Cooper and Taylor,
2000) that in the accounting industry (as in the rest of society) that class is the basic and
decisive division in society. The overwhelming majority of men and women are oppressed
by the economic and social system in which we live. While the basic and decisive division in
society is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat there is nonetheless a certain division

23Perhaps the biological timing for women who want children is one of the few
things that Western women, at least, have in common. In the UK about one in six couples
are now considered to be Ainfertile”. Without doubt, part of the reason for this is the fact that
women are Achoosing” (or being forced) to have their children in their 30s. But of course
even then, Ainfertility treatments”, such as in vitro fertilization and very expensive and as
such, not available to all, making infertility a class issue.

24Likewise in Hammond and Streeter’s (1994) research on African-American CPAs

they found that in the 1940s and 1950s many African Americans offered to work for free in
order to meet their experience requirements so they could earn their CPAs. But most CPA-
firm partners they approached were much more interested in maintaining the prestige of the
firmB which to them meant excluding African-Americans.

23
between men and women, (Molyneux, 1984) and between races. This division is powerfully
reinforced by the dominant sexist and racist ideology (of among others, the neo-Darwinists
outlined above). It is not merely a matter of ideology. A material explanation of what makes
this ideology so powerful is that these ideologies connect with the immediate (though
absolutely not the long term) material interest of many men.

The benefit that men get within the family, for example, at the expense of their wives is
significant. One of the main benefits that men derive from women is housework and
childcare. On average the “service” that women provide to their male partners is at least two
hours per day (Molyneux, 1984). As Molyneux (1984, p 117) correctly argues, “the
advantages a male engineering worker has over his wife are “marginal” compared to the
advantages the Duke of Westminster and his wife have over both of them.” In the same way
the “advantages” of a white woman bookkeeper, over a black woman bookkeeper are
marginal. The fact that for most working people the “benefits” of sexism and racism are
marginal compared to those of the ruling class doesn’t mean that they don’t exist or should be
ignored. This is especially true when trying to promote social change. Gramsci (1971) was
clear that the ruling class could induce political quietism by giving very small material
rewards to certain groups. It is the old tactic of “divide and rule”. Thus while it might seem
that Marxist theories must somehow be mistaken in their belief that Capital needs to drive
down the price of labour, in fact by throwing a few crumbs to certain groups, it is actually
helping to perpetuate the system25. Women, for example have historically served as a reserve
army of labour, thereby keeping all wages low.

Thus in the bitter argument over patriarchy versus class, I would argue that class is the most
basic and decisive one in society and it is the one which produces the most social inequality
and economic disenfranchisement and that sexism as well as racism are used as material and
ideological devices to divide groups within society thus weakening them. It is certainly
easier to blame a “nagging wife” or a lazy-slob husband for your alienation rather than
confront the big picture of the social monolith of capitalism.

25As Molyneux (1984) so aptly puts it, AEven the most revolutionary men are not
exempt from the influence of the short term benefit men derive from the oppression of
women”, p 121

24
The important arguments concerning the debate surrounding patriarchy vs class raised by
Tinker and Neimark (1987) and Crompton (1987) went to the heart of vital political issues.
There two papers were at the forefront of a welcome wave of serious theoretical gender
research in accounting. The last sections of the paper focus exclusively on gender work in
accounting since Tinker and Neimark.

ACCOUNTING RELATED GENDER WRITING

Women’s entry into the accounting profession

The vast majority of “gender” writing in accounting is either concerned with women’s entry
into the accounting profession, and/or, more recently women’s progression in the profession.
Much contemporary feminist/gender research outside of accounting is concerned with theory,
especially postmodern theories. This is perhaps a significant difference between more
contemporary feminist work and feminist work in accounting26. In a sense the postmodern
turn of contemporary feminist research is reflected in critical accounting research more
generally.

Many women academics will have had to at some time in their lives confront sexism in the
work place (perhaps in the accounting profession) which is incredibly frustrating, humiliating
and difficult. The opportunity to write about this is important. So much (though certainly
not all) gender work in academic accounting tends to be experiential rather than theoretical.
(Ciancanelli et al., 1990; Barker, Monks and Buckley, 1999; Doucet and Hooks, 1999;
Hooks, 1996; Hooks and Cheramy, 1994; Hooks and Tyson, 1995, Barker and Monks, 1995,
1998). I think that the best gender work in accounting produces theoretical and broader
social and economic explanations for the problems women (and other marginalised groups)
have confronted and continue to confront in the accounting profession.

26There
is in fact very little postmodern feminist work in accounting (exceptions
include Cooper, 1992 and Shearer and Arrington, 1993).

25
Early pioneers of this type of research include Lehman’s (1992) groundbreaking work which
explored the herstory of women’s relationship to accounting over an 80-year period and the
social changes parallelled in the accounting environment. In my experience this is the best
paper at sparking student’s interest and understanding of the problems they are likely to
encounter when entering the accounting profession. Even in the year 2001, women still face
residues of 100 years old prejudice. Kirkham’s (1992) commentary on Lehman’s paper adds
political weight by calling for more research into the social and political context in which the
changes occurred as well as an understanding of the input made by women into the change
process. Kirkham also made the point that gender issues go to the very nature of accounting.

Loft (1992) and Kirkham and Loft (1993) brought women into the picture as more active
players struggling to overcome barriers just as Hammond and Streeter (1992) brought to life
the active struggle of African American’s in trying to enter an institutionally racist
profession. Lehman, and Kirkham and Loft’s work points to the class nature of the problems
confronting women who wanted to enter the accounting profession. The debates within the
emerging profession surrounding the entry of women turn upon the belief that the only
women who would want to work as accountants were working class women since middle and
upper class women would naturally want to stay in the home as mothers and homemakers.
The profession would certainly not want either working class men or women to be able to
join them since this would serve to lower their status.

Some of the problems confronting women and African-Americans cited by Loft, Kirkham
and Loft, and Hammond are still happening today. For example if a white man is
accompanied either by a woman or a person of colour (say) on an audit, there is still an
assumption that the white man is senior to his colleague. Moyes, Williams and Quigley
(2000) document the fact that African-American professional in CPA firms face continued
discrimination (see also Glover et al, 2000; Mitchell and Flintall, 1990; Nkomo and Cox,
1997). Glover et al (2000) found that among the African American workforce of the Big
Five firms there was a feeling that the Big Five simply paid lip-service to the promotion and
retention of African Americans. One respondent to Glover et als (p188, 2000) survey
question on the glass ceiling, stated that “There is an iron ceiling B a glass ceiling can be

26
broken.” Other survey comments included, “It pains me to see myself working on the same
level with whites who are much less qualified than I am”, and “Yes there is the perception
that an African-American lacks the intelligence or commitment to hold a position of authority
or responsibility”. And these are the comments of successful African-American’s with jobs
in the Big Five. Glover et al found that structural/class theory best explained what is
happening to African-Americans in the accounting profession. Grey (1998) too, found some
of the problems confronted early women accountants to be enduring. He notes that managers
believe that their clients might be disappointed if a white male manager is not assigned to
their job. Grey also notes the class nature of the profession since “comportment and
appearance” of a specific middle class type were more important components of
professionalism than expertise.

Thus it seems that some of the worst sexist and racist aspects of the profession are with us
today. Role models were certainly very hard to find. Yet they did exist. An interesting
historical account of one the US women accounting pioneers, Jennie M Palen, (Spruill and
Wooton, 1995) gives a surprising account of a working class women who worked her way up
as far as was possible for a woman in the 1920s/30s US accounting profession. Palen became
the head of Haskins and Sells report department and accordingly was responsible for the
review of the financial reports of the largest companies in the United States. Although her
job carried important responsibilities she was not eligible for partner status because she
lacked the required audit experience. Palen’s enormous energy made her a key player in
many of the organisations of the day. She campaigned throughout her life for both women in
accounting and accounting in general. Palen believed in women’s support groups and their
potential for leadership in securing opportunities for women. Recognising the economic
importance of earning a decent living to many women, Palen stated in 1947 that:

According to statistics compiled from income tax returns, five million families in the
United States are wholly dependent upon the earnings of women. These significant
figures should convince anyone that to women jobs are a serious matter, not as has
been charged in some quarters, just a source of pin money.
Palen 1947, p 20 cited in Spruill and Wooton, 1995, p 379

Arguably Palen was a flawed heroine (Lehman, 1990). On occasions she either didn’t say or
write what she really felt or she denied what was sometimes obvious. In other ways she was

27
politically astute. For example Spruill and Wooton (1995) note that (citing Reed and
Kratchman (1990, p 108), it is still (all too) commonly accepted that A...a man is expected to
succeed... in contrast, superior female performance is caused by good luck, special effort of
some other unstable factor that cannot be sustained in the future”. Yet even in 1953 (p 51)
Palen wrote:

At that time (1933) women were not frequently seen on the staffs of public
accounting firms. Those few who were found there were usually highly spoken of,
but were universally described as exceptions... Public accounting, it was said, was not
a suitable field for a woman... to be sure, the speaker would ad, so-and-so is excellent
B the best accountant we have. Clients have always asked to have her back. The staff
like her. But she is an exception....
(Spruill and Wooton, 1995, p 379)

Shackleton (1999) also considers the history of women’s entry to the profession. This paper
traces in depth the male dominated discourses on the subject of the admission of women.
The paper shows how socio-economic, constitutional and legal arguments were deployed to
resist the admission of women. The apparent public consensus among Scottish Chartered
Societies on this issue hid the divergent opinions which were uttered in private. Proposals for
the organisation of the profession in a gender-segregated manner were eventually subsumed
by the passing of the Sex Discrimination (Removal) act, 1919. This statute precluded
disqualification of membership on the grounds of sex. While the Act formally removed one
set of barriers to the admission of women, more enduring social and cultural obstacles
remained within chartered accountancy firms and most practising offices remained unaffected
by the reforming legislation.

More recent work of the liberal humanist/experiential type includes Barker and Monks
(1995, 1998) who chart the obstacles women experience in their progression to the top of the
accountancy profession. Strategies for women’s advancement in the profession, for example,
through mentoring have also been developed. Barker, Monks and Buckley (1999) look at the
role of mentoring in the career progression of chartered accountants in two Big Five firms in
Ireland. This research found, contrary to some previous studies that men had a strong mentor
experience when their mentor was a man but women had the same mentoring experience
regardless of whether their mentor was male or female. They suggest that the reason for this

28
could be that senior women mentors are few and display masculine behaviour models.

Brennan and Nolan (1998) examined factors influencing remuneration of Irish chartered
accountants. Employee-related and employer-related factors influencing remuneration were
examined including gender, work experience, level of responsibility, employment contract
and size and industry. Gender was a significant explanatory variable in explaining differences
in salaries paid to employees working in non-audit businesses. Gender, however, was not
found to be significant in explaining differences in salaries paid in audit practices. Wootton
and Kemmerer (2000) note that the accounting profession in 1930 was predominantly a male
workforce - 90% male. By 1990, the gender composition of accounting had changed
dramatically such that women represented over 50 per cent of the workforce and earned 53
per cent of the accounting degrees. Wootton and Kemmerer found that increases in the
aggregate workforce were not accompanied by subsequent proportional increases in
participation at the upper-management levels of accounting firms. Thus, they found a
stratified regenderization of the aggregate workforce rather than an overall regenderization of
the accounting profession.

Sonja Gallhofer’s brilliant (1998) article looks at the implications of the liberal humanist
perspective in accounting research. Noting that it is the liberal humanist feminist perspective
which forms the majority of research in accounting she refers to this brand of theoretical
research as mainstream. Asserting that “women” is not a universal category in the sense that
not all “women’s” issues are of equal importance to all women, Gallhofer makes the point
that a failing of liberal feminism is that it helps displace attention from differences between
women which are reflective of very substantial issues. Indeed Gallhofer insists that in
privileging a particular group of women (white middle/upper class), other women are
displaced to negative effect. This is very close to the arguments made above that bourgeois
feminism has actually pushed many women further backwards in the struggle for social
equality. Gallhofer (p 363, 1998) clearly states that:

In order for feminist accounting research to be more relevant for women from a lower
socio-economic class it would have to develop objectives and policies that take into
account broader issues, including that for these women the issue of equality of
opportunity is initially one of entry into a middle class profession rather than progress

29
 in the profession B something raising more critical questions about the character of
society.

Gallhofer’s characterisation of liberal humanist feminism in accounting demonstrates how in

practice liberal humanism erases class and race concerns. For example French and Meredith
(p 233, 1994) state that Amen and women have equal access to training programmes in
universities and thus to new knowledge”. This clearly erases class differences in educational
opportunity and entry to the profession. It also doesn’t take into account the problems well
documented by Theresa Hammond confronted by African-Americans and their entry into
accounting courses and the profession. Gallhofer reinforces Hammond and Oakes’ (1992, p
55) telling quote that when women gain entry into male middle class professions Ait is usually
women of a different race and class who make this possible by taking care of the
professionals’ children”. Gallhofer believes that in feminist accounting research there should
be more explicit concern to understand and critically explore the experiences that these (black
and working class) women have and the barriers they face when attempting to join as well as
to work in the accountancy profession.

In a move to fill in part of the gap created by the academies concentration on the profession,
Cooper and Taylor (2000) looks at the clerical ranks of the accounting industry. In this work
they pay attention to class, gender and race, since clerical positions are more likely to be
filled by working class blacks and women. Arnold (1998) too, pays attention to the issue of
the working class exclusion from much of the accounting literature. This section considered
academic research into women’s position in, and their promotion prospects within, the
accounting profession both historically and of late. Gallhofer’s work serves to remind us of
the problems created by the liberal-humanist agenda which concentrates solely on white,
middle class women’s concerns. While sexism in the workplace should always be confronted
and I would certainly support women’s struggles within the profession, as I am sure would
Gallhofer, we need to be wary of the pitfalls of the liberal humanist agenda. The next section
considers two exemplars of work which avoids the pitfalls of the liberal humanist agenda.

30
The impact of accounting upon women

To me, some of the best recent work in accounting has demonstrated empirically how
accounting is used in the exploitation of women. The two papers I will discuss briefly here
(Armstrong, 2000; Sikka et al, 2000) wouldn’t normally be categorised in the “gender camp”.
Both deal with the exploitation of groups of workers which consist mainly of women.
Armstrong ( 2000), argues that modern systems of budgetary control are implicated in the
exploitation and production of insecure forms of employment. This is in part driven by the
assumption that direct labour is totally flexible in the core techniques of costing and
budgetary control. Previous historical studies of the development of these forms of control
have shown that they were used to shift the costs of economic fluctuation from capital to
labour. Armstrong hypothesised that the use of budgetary targets that incorporate direct
labour costs would be more prevalent where workers are least able to resist various forms of
“labour flexibility” and encourage recourse to redundancies where the performance within
business units within a company falls below expectation. Both of these hypotheses are
confirmed by data from a survey of industrial relations practices in large UK companies.
There is a strong and positive association between the proportions of women and part-timers
within the workforce and the use of unit labour costs and the direct labour costs/sales ratio as
performance targets. Armstrong notes that for those to whom insecurity of employment
constitutes a social problem rather than a managerial convenience to be celebrated as
“flexibility”, these findings indicate that the accounting control systems typical of the modern
company constitute part of the problem.

In addition, Sikka et al (2000) claim that contemporary accounting practices are adding to the
impoverishment of low-paid “insecure” employees. In a study of 1,199 quoted companies,
Sikka et al found that in some cases company directors’ salaries (excluding share options and
perks) were more than 200 times the average wage in their companies. High street retailers
such as Kingfisher, Tesco, Safeway and Somerfield showed some of the biggest differentials
because of their tendency to employ women as part time casual labourers on low rates of pay.
This study contrasts with the UK’s Institute of Directors’ argument that excessive “Fat Cat”
pay is a media myth.

31
These two papers both resonate with the first section of this paper which is concerned with
women’s insecurity in employment. I think that this is a field which is under- researched.
The last section of the paper will consider research in accounting which specifically considers
the gendered nature of accounting rather than the impact of accounting upon women or
women in the accounting profession.

Accounting Praxis and feminist theory.

There is a small stream of both postmodern (Cooper, 1992; Shearer and Arrington, 1993) and
modern (Broadbent, 1995, 1998) research which considers the gendered nature of accounting.
While each of these papers could be considered to be very different both theoretically and
politically they all argue for a different kind of accounting. We all would agree with
Broadbent’s Manifesto:

I would wish to see the issues of equal rights for those of colour or who are socially
disadvantaged raised and brought to account. I would seek to make issues such as the
impact of low pay on people’s lives visible, not just through objective statistics, but
through addressing the more emotional issues of what it feels like to be at the bottom
of the pay range in a company or to operate at the economic margins of society. I
would seek to raise the issues of the environmental impact of the activities and extend
the account to consider the impact on people’s lives.
Broadbent, p 291, 1998

While it seems highly unlikely that Broadbent’s wider vision of accounting would be
“institutionalised” or become part of “generally accepted accounting practice”, there is no
reason why accounting academics, practitioners and others should not produce the types of
accounts outlined by Broadbent. Arguably this might stretch the meaning of accountancy to
breaking point.

A small but significant number of papers have reflected upon the role of gender within
accounting as a practice. Such papers (Hines, 1992; Cooper, 1992; Shearer and Arrington,
1993; Broadbent, 1995, 1998; Burrell, 1987; Crompton, 1987; Hopwood, 1987; Tinker and
Neimark, 1987; Lehman, 1987; Moore, 1992; Oakes and Hammond, 1985) throw into
question our unreflectively acquired value systems. Cooper and Shearer and Arrington

32
(1993) disrupt the liberal humanist desire for women to progress through the accounting
profession on the same terms as men by asking, why women would want to be like the type
of men who reach the top hierarchy in the accounting profession anyway.

Conclusion

This paper began by outlining how far women still have to go if they wish to achieve
“equality” with men. By concentrating upon various global issues confronting women I
hoped that the reader would realise that it is very difficult to find single women’s issues.
Women from different classes and cultures will have different concerns and indeed different
class interests. The “best” gains made by women have originated from the respectable,
bourgeois strand of feminism, which has been incorporated into society and the state.
Despite its incorporation, feminism has to a large extent ended up in university departments.
It is undoubtably the case that the academic study of gender issues has proliferated over the
past 20 or so years. This is in some ways ironic since universities are not necessarily
“women friendly” institutions. Much contemporary feminist work is concerned with theories
(especially postmodern ones) rather than issues.

Despite the fact that feminism’s potential was diffused by the state there have still been
several significant backlashes against feminism. The most recent pernicious one has been
theoretically (mis)informed by Darwin. This has taken the form of neo-Darwinian inspired
Evolutionary Psychology. To bring this literature into the accounting arena is important in
two main ways. Firstly, evolutionary psychology’s backlash against feminism is hitting the
popular press with all too regular monotony. The message put out is that women will never
achieve equality with men because of genetic factors or because of some Asocial hard wiring”
set up in the stone age. Their central idea is so reactionary that it needs to be confronted head
on. Secondly, the neo-Darwinian backlash serves to reinforce mainstream accounting and as
such it needs to be carefully considered. Neo-Darwinist thinking effaces any possibilities of
bringing about social change. While I find extreme problems with neo-Darwinism, I do not
think that we have to argue that all explanations for social activities are cultural. For
example biology is important to women when it comes to deciding whether or not to have

33
children. So, I looked more closely at children. For the purposes of the arguments in this
paper childcare turns out to be significant in the sense that unequal shares of the burden of
childcare can serve to divide men and women. This division serves to maintain the status
quo, and as such can’t be considered to be a trivial issue.

The last section of the paper considers contemporary research in accounting. I find that much
of the liberal humanist work concerning the entry and progress of women in the accounting
profession diverts from the real problems confronting the majority of women. This does not
mean that sexism should go unchallenged in the workplace. The liberal humanist work
should be aware of what it is excluding and that it may well be that profound social change is
needed to really improve the position of all women. I think that a newly emerging stream of
research which is concerned about exactly how accounting serves to perpetuate insecurity and
impacts very badly upon women should be encouraged.

So many women have come a long way in the past century. We’ve won the vote, we have
equal opportunities and anti-discrimination legislation, far more women go through higher
education, we are more accepted in the workplace, and yet, there is still such a long way to
go.

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