Lecturer in Accounting
Accounting can be used to understand and address social issues, including gender inequality. But research reveals the practical challenges in quantifying equality and shows the risks of implementing crude measures, such as quotas.
“Usually, people perceive accounting as bookkeeping and tax returns,” says Dr Ulrike Marx, a lecturer in accounting at the School of Business & Management, Queen Mary University of London. “But as a community of accounting academics, we engage with social studies of accounting. We investigate the role of accounting in all areas of life by looking at how numbers are produced and how they’re used.”
She continues: “Accounting is literally everywhere. And what we've seen recently, especially with the climate emergency and cost of living crisis, is that social issues are targeted using accounting practices.
“If somebody is interested in achieving gender equality in their organisation, they need somehow to measure this. The problem with quantification is that you often measure things that are very easy to measure.” According to Dr Marx, these simplistic quotas often have unintended consequences. For example, a company might celebrate achieving 40% female staff, while ignoring that fact that those women are unhappy about working long hours in a male-dominated environment.
Dr Marx studied for her PhD at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, at time when the country was changing its constitution to enshrine gender equality in budgetary law. Between 2009 and 2012, she conducted qualitative research to understand how the idea of gender budgeting was being implemented in practice.
Dr Marx published her research in a 2018 paper ‘Accounting for equality: Gender budgeting and moderate feminism’ in the journal Gender, Work and Organization. Since then she has also authored a chapter on ‘Measuring and Managing Gender Equality: The Case of Gender Budgeting in Austria’ in a book on Feminism in Public Debt: A Human Rights Approach and a chapter on ‘Accounting for gender equality’ in the Handbook of accounting in society.
Reflecting on her work, she explains what she learned: “Because there was a political demand for gender budgeting, everybody had to do it and they did some version of it, so you could say it was very successful. But I'm critical of the outcomes of some of these gender budgeting initiatives because what we've seen in this project is that the radical feminist discourse, where these ideas first emerged, has been lost.
“During this time in Austria, we had the first wave of people coming out of university with a degree in gender studies and they were taking up government roles as gender experts. These ‘femocrats’ were trying to put feminist policies onto the existing political agenda, and they have done amazing work. However, if you work through mechanisms that are already there, you often lose the critical lens, and the result is a version of gender equality that looks a little bit more neoliberal than what you envisioned in the first place.”
Taking a critical look at gender budgeting, can often reveal its unintended consequences, as Dr Marx explains: “For example, if a university has a quota of 40% for female staff and students, it might decide that it needs more women on committees to give a female perspective. However, if you only have one or two female professors in your department, they have to sit on every single committee, they have no time to do their research and it ruins their careers. That is one of the dysfunctionalities of indicators such as quotas.
“On a European Union policy level, we might try to get more women into work. But very often it’s without any other support. Women still do the majority of the unpaid labour in society, so taking on paid work can mean doubling up on women’s commitments.”
As a result of her research, Dr Marx has been invited to take part in the European gender budgeting conference where successful gender budgeting in cities such as Vienna, Austria and in Reykjavík, Iceland were discussed.
“One thing we have learned is that gender budgeting should be done from both the inside, by institutions themselves, and from the outside, by critics who can hold governments accountable for their spending decisions.
“Organisation like the UK Women's Budget Group are doing that by reporting on national budgets and showing who will be hit by expenditure cuts and tax benefits, but I think we need much more of that.”