'Doing gender' in a regional context: Explaining women's absence from senior roles in regional accounting firms in Australia

Abstract

While the majority of accounting graduates have been women for 15 years, women remain underrepresented in senior roles in regional accounting firms. This paper explores women's absence from senior roles in small and medium sized accounting firms in regional Australia. The intersectionality of their regional context and the gender stereotyping of the women in the study exacerbate their chances of being absent from senior roles in regional accounting firms. Drawing on the topology of 'doing gender', we show how gender is enacted through structures, hierarchies, identity and can be flexible and context specific. Thirty-one interviews with accountants from small and medium sized accounting firms in regional New South Wales were conducted. Results suggest 'doing gender' continues to be reinforced and reproduced as women's aspirations are constrained by the day-to-day practices shaping expectations about women in regional small and medium sized accounting firms. The internalization of gender stereotypical beliefs about what women can do intersects with the regional and small to medium size of the accounting firms in the study to entrench a specific type of disadvantage for women. We discuss the ways that doing gender can be subverted or redone, in order to challenge the status quo and open up more pathways for women to progress into senior roles in regional accounting firms.