Education, Employment and Certification: An Oral History of the Entry of Women into the Canadian Accounting Profession

Carol A. McKeen · Alan J. Richardson

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Gender Diversity and Inequality Gender and Feminist Studies Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies

Abstract

The success of the accounting profession in claiming social rewards has been attributed to strategies of "closure " which bound its body of knowledge, provide monopoly powers over areas of practice and limit who may have access to the rewards of practice [cf. Murphy, 1984, 1988; Macdonald, 1985; Lee, 1990; Richardson, 1998]. In this paper we examine gender as a criterion for closure in the Canadian accounting profession. We use archival and oral history materials to determine the mechanisms used to control the gender composition of the profession and to explore the subjective experiences of those women who imfially breached this aspect of the closure of the profession. Our review is divided into three areas: education, employment, and professional affiliation. We assume that professional status require sequential movement through these three stages but that the extent and nature of discrimination in each will be independent. Our analysis of the role of gender in the closure of the accounting profession draws on feminist theories which seek to explain and understand the experience of women in patriarchal societies. What feministheorie share is the assumption that systems of power and resource allocation in society are shaped by masculine values. These theories suggest how these systems negatively affect all people but particularly women psychologically, physically, and socially. One key aspect of a masculine system of power is the allocation of work roles on the basis of gender. Women, for example, are more likely than men to work at unpaid labor (e.g. domestic labor) in the private sphere of society withouthe protection of labor laws which affect jobs in the public sphere. Where women do enter the paid workforce, they are typically allocated

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1990Women and minorities in management.1987The “real” cultural significance of accounts 1985Social Closure and Occupational Registration 1996Radicalizing accounting history: the potential of oral history

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