A Woman's Place Is in the Firm
Accountancies Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC all place in the top 10
in a best-workplaces survey by Working Mother magazine. Where's
Deloitte?
Three of the Big Four auditing firms — Ernst & Young, KPMG, and
PricewaterhouseCoop ers — have ranked among Working Mother
magazine's
top-10 list for best places to work for mothers.
Other companies on the top 10 list: Baptist Health South Florida,
Booz Allen Hamilton, General Mills, IBM, McGraw-Hill Co., UBS, and
Wachovia. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, however, is conspicuously
missing from the list.
Why do accounting firms rate so high? Those that made the list
offered some explanations.
"Women want more time — whether to bond with a newborn or adjust to
their role as a parent," Roy Weathers, a partner with the title
chief diversity officer at PricewaterhouseCoop ers, told the
magazine. He said that at the beginning of the year, the firm gave
mothers three extra weeks of fully paid maternity leave, which can
be used at any time up to one year following a child's birth or
adoption.
James L. Freer, vice chair of people at E&Y, told the magazine that
this past year it enhanced its parental leave policy to include six
weeks of fully paid leave for primary caregivers, in addition to six
weeks of fully paid short-term disability for birthmothers. "The
firm also introduced the Working Moms Network to help women make the
transition back to work following parental leave," he said.
KPMG vice chair of human resources Bruce Pfau told the magazine that
the firm launched Web-based training for employees and managers this
year to create more productive conversations about career
development. "We also introduced an interactive website to help
staffers identify steps for building more satisfying careers," he
added.
While the three companies certainly will be lauded for their
commitment to diversity, some motivation may be due to good old
fashioned supply and demand, however.
The Economist recently pointed out that there are never enough
skilled or promising accounting people. It noted that baby-boomers
in the U.S. are flooding into retirement; in Europe the market is
graying; and in India and China the large number of graduates masks
low numbers of truly high-quality candidates.
Also, job cuts earlier in the decade have created a shortfall of
employees now. And regulatory changes like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act
have boosted demand from clients for both accountants and their
staffs.
As a result, global accounting firms are directing much of this
recruitment at what they deem to be hard-to-find experienced
professionals, especially important in the advisory businesses where
corporate knowledge is highly valued.
The magazine noted that each of the Big Four wants to promote more
women, who make up about half of their recruits, but only a quarter,
at best, of their partners. They are offering career breaks and part-
time work. "The Big Four are ahead of most in managing talented
women," Sylvia Hewlett, author of the book "Off-Ramps and On-Ramps,"
told The Economist.
This is certainly heartening to women who want to enjoy successful
careers in finance, but still take time out to raise a family. After
all, a CFO survey in June 2006 found that fewer than 10 percent of
CFOs at companies in either the Fortune 500 or the Fortune 1,000
were women.
At the controller, treasurer, and tax director levels, the numbers
increased to about 20 percent of the Fortune 500.
In June this year, CFO analyzed the relatively better progress of
women compared to minorities in corporate finance posts, estimating
that 16 percent of Fortune 500 controllers and treasurers were
women, for example, while only 4 percent and 6 percent,
respectively, were in minority groups. Sixty percent of survey
respondents estimated that their finance departments had more female
employees than the rest of the company, while in contrast, half said
their department lagged the company as a whole in terms of African-
American, Hispanic, and Asian-American staff.
Meanwhile, CFO noted in 2006, for more than 20 years women have
outnumbered men in undergraduate and graduate accounting programs,
and women comprise the majority of new hires by public accounting
firms. Further, for the past decade they have earned 30 to 40
percent of all MBA degrees awarded.
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