ICAEW admitted the world’s first female chartered accountant, Mary Harris Smith, Women in techinto its ranks in May 1920. A series of events, led by current ICAEW President Fiona Wilkinson, has been planned across the world for this centenary year, and a book celebrating ICAEW’s pioneering female accountants has been published (see Resources, overleaf). The Tech Faculty, which covers a cross-over sector well known for low female representation, has had the issue on its radar for a long time. The faculty convened a roundtable discussion in 2016 to examine the issues. But is anything changing? And what do women think about the role gender plays in defining their careers anyway?
We asked members from across the generations to share their views in this centenary year.
Tech Faculty Board Member Anzo Francis knows the value of creating active champions in education and at work, having forged her path with the backing of strong personal role models. Anzo is also an Executive Committee Member and Business Board Committee Member of the London Society of Chartered Accountants
My mother was my role model and mentor; she encouraged me to aim high. A cousin suggested to her that I should consider a career in accounting. After 9 GCE O levels and 4 A levels, including maths, I studied law and computer programming at university. In my final year it was difficult for me to obtain a training contract offer despite very good qualifications and grades, which may have been related to being a BAME female. I applied to 20+ firms and eventually secured an offer. I didn’t meet any female accountants until I started my training.
Things have changed since then. I believe that many schools today have done a lot to embed IT into the national curriculum, but I think more needs to be done to offer career advice to girls so that they consider careers in accountancy, IT and tech and are encouraged to do A level maths. Employers, parents, volunteers from the world of work and professional bodies will need to do more in this space.
I try to do my bit. I’m a fan of Code First: Girls, an award-winning social enterprise working to increase the proportion of women in tech. It’s aiming to teach 20,000 young women how to code, free of charge, by the end of 2020, and is on track to achieve that goal. I also support a charity called Career Ready. It boosts social mobility by connecting more than 69,000 people aged 11-18 in the UK every year with employers and volunteers from the world of work. As a director of finance, I encourage my team to make the most of training and development opportunities. I registered a business as an ICAEW training organisation and mentored a trainee accountant on his journey to becoming an ACA. In addition, I support CIO 100, a network set up by Claire Priestly, Director of IT at City University. I myself have been inspired by two high-flying CIOs: Places for People CIO Norma Dove-Edwin and Jacky Wright, Corporate Vice-President at Microsoft, and former HMRC Chief Digital and Information Officer.
When I attended the 2016 women in tech event I met members of the ICAEW Tech Faculty for the first time. I was then invited to attend a Tech Faculty committee meeting as an observer. I became a full committee member in 2017. The faculty committee had recognised its membership was very male and not diverse. Before I joined, there was one female committee member (out of 12 members) which doubled to two out of 13 when I joined.
Caroline Rivett, Director of digital, security and privacy in the life sciences at KPMG, is involved in mentoring both men and women, and in reverse-mentoring, at KPMG
“I haven’t seen much improvement in the numbers of women in technology. However, I think things have improved in terms of an awareness of the impact of culture on people and people being more positive about diversity in all its forms. There is still the thinning out of the pyramid in terms of females as you get closer to the top.”
Nic Granger, Chair of the Tech Faculty and CFO at the Oil & Gas Authority, has taken care to focus her career on merit rather than gender
While on an information systems degree, my flatshare of computer science and maths students included three women and two men; gender just wasn’t discussed. Two of us started accountancy training, me and one male.
Only later in my career was gender spoken of as a “factor”. When I was appointed to my first senior role, the local paper wanted to do a front-page article about me being the first woman in the role. I declined on the basis that it was the qualifications and experience that had won me the role, rather than gender. The appointment went into the back pages where it had been previously reported for my male predecessors.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be encouraging more women into tech. I recently went to a presentation where a panel of five white male engineers introduced themselves as a diverse group on the basis of attending different universities. I was left wondering whether this group had a different understanding of “diversity” to me.
It’s important to have inclusive and diverse teams and to do this we need people with different backgrounds, skills and experiences to bring in new ideas and approaches.
At a recent ICAEW event, the booklet 100 Years: Celebrating women in Chartered Accountancy was handed out to the women in the room. It’s fascinating and worth a read, but could more value be added by sharing these achievements and successes with everyone in the room rather than purely the women who are already aware of the important role being played by women in tech?
ICAEW’s Senior eCommunications Executive Lucy Alfred and Digital Media Executive Birgit Lewinski are excited by the interest shown in their new Women in Tech initiative for members
A women in tech initiative was started by a former colleague and when she left we decided to continue. The main reason is because we buck the trend – 40% of those at ICAEW in a tech-based role are women, compared with 20% across the board. Without realising it, we were already pioneers of change.
Accountancy has traditionally been male-dominated, but that’s something we’ve been working on, and now more women are becoming accountants. Our standpoint is that accountants can’t do their jobs today without having a relative level of tech savviness, but the tech industry is also male-dominated. What can the accountancy profession do to change these imbalances?
One thing we want to do is put on more events for our members, to find out a little bit more about women working in tech. We’ve met women who were the only female working in a tech company. We invited them to speak at our soft launch last autumn, and at our latest event earlier this month.
We also want to use our platform to encourage young women to train for a tech-related career. A girl might look at accountancy and think it’s boring, but they might have maths and technology gifts so those skills would be perfect for it. Indeed most careers are now tech- and data-driven so we must alter the imbalance.
We’ve held two successful events so far and have plans to grow and embed the initiative within ICAEW. We’re welcoming members to share their ideas, so please get in touch.
In the mean time, we’re starting the conversation: putting our heads above the parapet, as someone has to speak first.
Monqiue Malcolm-Hay, Senior Consultant at PwC and Co-founder of New Gen Accountants, is driven to bring a diverse workforce together for the greater good
I was inspired to become an accountant by a PwC senior manager while studying at the University of Florida. I could see how passionate he was about his career, and how his ambitions were being exceeded by the opportunities. I am so glad I met him as I feel the same.
I now try to inspire others through a non-profit organisation I started, New Gen Accountants. It’s proven that diversity of thought leads to better problem solving and I wholeheartedly believe that collaborating with individuals of different genders will enable firms to create better and more inclusive tech solutions. I plan to continue running initiatives that enable diverse groups of accountants to upskill in tech so that they can combine these skills with their finance knowledge and create better solutions.
Originally published in Chartech, March/April 2020.