research@hec - Issue #5 - (Page III)

Women Have to Choose Between Motherhood and Auditing Key Ideas • The ‘up or out’ model prevents mothers from moving up in the company hierarchy in their role as fathers. • Women follow atypical career paths to reconcile maternity with a career in auditing • It is no longer a ‘women’s issue’, as young male auditors now want to spend more time Although there are as many young female graduates as men entering auditing firms, only 15 % of partners are women. Maternity is without doubt one of the main reasons for this, as the biggest gap between men and women occurs when employees are promoted to management positions. This usually happens around the age of 30, when many women choose to become mothers. What are the barriers that prevent women from moving up in the company hierarchy? What strategies do they adopt to overcome them? How do men cope with their own paternity? Claire Dambrin and Caroline Lambert provide the answers. They have studied the professional status of mothers in the Big Four in France: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. M AN ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL THAT HINDERS THE CAREER DEVELOPMENT OF WORKING MOTHERS The ‘up or out’ organizational model that exists in major auditing firms prevents mothers from reaching associate positions. Claire Dambrin and Caroline Lambert believe there are two reasons for this phenomenon: • The loss of customers: pregnancy and maternity leave oblige female auditors to hand over some of their customers to a colleague, with no guarantee of getting them back. The customer portfolio plays a key role in the competition between auditors and is a major factor in hierarchical progression. • The absence of a time management policy: in the competitive world of auditing, auditors have to be able to work very quickly. Although women are offered opportunities to reconcile their family and professional lives, taking them up always sends a signal that the person has limited career ambitions and immediately stigmatizes them. Would they consider a four-day working week? Even in the best cases, they'd feel guilty and end up doing five days' work in four. MOTHERS WORKING AS AUDITORS ‘CONCEAL’ THEIR MATERNITY Many of them try to reconcile their private and professional lives by ensuring that their maternity leave doesn't interfere with the company's operations: • Before taking their maternity leave, they manage their customer portfolio by delegating their dossiers to trusted colleagues to increase the chances of coming back to them when they return. They very often leave their work with other women who will, at one time or another, face the same problems. • They adopt practices that maximize their immediate efficiency, but don't spend time developing their network of contacts, which is an important factor in hierarchical progression. • They bank on the sharing of domestic tasks at home. But in fact, things stay more or less the same. • They have ‘audit babies’ by planning (in so far as this is possible) their childbirth for the summer, thereby reducing the impact on the auditing ‘season’. And, all things considered, none of these practices encourage auditing firms to reconsider the employment of mothers. On the contrary, they're all aimed at achieving one thing: concealing maternity in the company. THE AUTHORS Claire Dambrin and Caroline Lambert are graduates of the ESCPEAP (European Business School of Management) and hold PhDs in Management from Paris Dauphine University. They teach accounting and management control at HEC Paris. In October 2006, they co-published ‘Le deuxième sexe dans la profession comptable: Réflexions théoriques et méthodologiques’ (the second sex in the accounting profession: theoretical and methodological thoughts) in the journal ‘ComptabilitéContrôle-Audit’. October-November 2008 • research@hec III http://www.hec.edu/hec/eng/professeurs_recherche/p_liste/p_fiche.php?num=123 http://www.hec.edu/hec/eng/professeurs_recherche/p_liste/p_fiche.php?num=126

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of research@hec - Issue #5

Cover & Contents

Five Principal Research Themes at HEC

Women Have to Choose BetweenMotherhood and Auditing

Small Splurges, Large Benefits

No Crystal Ball? No Big Deal!

research@hec - Issue #5