Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies
A new book compares efforts in the UK and Germany to address the persistent gender imbalance at the top of professional service firms. Despite standardisation of recruitment and promotion procedures in the UK, women face disadvantages in both countries.
“Professional service firms in the UK are doing comparatively well in recruiting and promoting more women by focusing on equality, diversity and inclusion practices and standardisation in recruitment and promotion,” says Dr Patrizia Kokot-Blamey, a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London and part of the school’s Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity.
Dr Kokot-Blamey has been interviewing female partners in professional service firms in the UK and Germany about their career histories. Many of the women she spoke to have risen through the ranks in the ‘Big Four’ firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Dr Kokot-Blamey has written a book based on what she discovered called Gendered hierarchies of dependency: women making partnership in accountancy firms.
She continues: “Historically, a major problem in the industry was that people didn't understand how you got to that last hurdle to become a partner. In the UK, firms have done a good job professionalising this and organising internal hierarchies in a much more structured and transparent manner. We have seen more women come through the system as a result.
“In Germany, the industry is still comparatively more relationship-based, which means that the approval of your line manager is really key, and it can be difficult to get anywhere if you don’t have that.” Dr Kokot-Blamey says that this reliance on a line manager and on relationships can make it difficult to maintain boundaries, manage conflict, and make complaints.
“But in the book, I also look at the dark side of standardisation. The women I interviewed in the UK were more concerned about job insecurity; some had lost their positions.
“The women who had made partnership in Germany felt more secure in their positions. They were more likely to work with people they had known for a long time, often part of their network of family and friends. They took great pride in their firms and the importance of their work.
“In comparison, the UK partners were more ambivalent, they switched firms more often and had more of an arm’s-length relationship with fellow partners,” she explains. “I'm not saying one is better than the other, but there are costs attached to proceduralising everything.”
A chapter of the book is dedicated to ‘Mothering in accounting’ because as Dr Kokot-Blamey says: “Having children is still the point in a woman’s life where things can get more difficult. In both countries, the ‘unencumbered norm’ and expectations that we can work whenever necessary, do not budge for motherhood.”
“In Germany, the majority of women who had made partnership did not have children. Many felt strongly that children need their mothers to be available and that making partnership was a competing commitment.
“In the UK, more of the women I spoke to had children, but there were pressures for many to work like a normative father might, either by outsourcing much of the day-to-day care of children, or by initiating a gender reversal in the household. In half of the cases where children were present, it was the fathers who had given up work or prioritised looking after the children. This won’t appeal to everyone.
“There's always a trade-off,” Dr Kokot-Blamey concludes. “In Germany, mothers are pushed to stay at home. In the UK, mothers are pushed to focus on work in the way that fathers traditionally have.
“In both Germany and the UK, children's needs are invisible; neither context is really making space for the needs of dependants. So, until we see a change in working practices that allows people to prioritise caring for others, while keeping their foot in the door, there is a ceiling to the proportion of women at the top.”