The silent exodus
Apr 11, 2023
As more women become Chartered Accountants, a growing number are leaving mid-career, citing various factors ranging from work-life balance to lack of career progression, writes Liz Riley
In mid-2022, Chartered Accountants Worldwide (CAW) surveyed Chartered Accountants around the globe to gauge how they view the opportunities for women in the profession.
What they found about training and early careers is positive. There are no obvious gender-related barriers to entry into the profession.
In recent years, Chartered Accountants Ireland has had a nearly equal intake of men (52%) and women (48%) into training.
And although the women surveyed by CAW acknowledge that there are few women in senior positions within accountancy, this has not deterred them from entering the profession.
As the world of accountancy continues to evolve, however, a growing number of women are making the difficult decision to leave or pivot within the profession mid-career.
For years, accountancy has been viewed as a stable career path. Still, despite the profession focusing more on diversity, equity and inclusion, some women are finding that the barriers in their way are too great for them to want to press on.
Moving on from accountancy
Even though just one-in-five mid-career women believe their careers have progressed ahead of their expectations, 81 percent still believe they have much to offer the profession.
The CAW survey shows, however, that the willingness to make career sacrifices is at its highest at the mid-career stage when a person’s children are often younger.
The findings also reveal that mid-career women in Ireland and the UK are more likely to be interested in roles that offer work-life balance (39%), flexibility in working location (21%), and access to additional benefits (33%).
However, women at a mid-career stage are also significantly more likely to feel stressed (59%), exhausted (40%), and/or disappointed (25%).
In order to effectively address the issue of hiring and retaining women in their mid-careers, Sinead Donovan, Deputy President of Chartered Accountants Ireland, emphasises the importance of organisational leadership taking proactive measures.
“Having been in that position earlier in my career, I recognise the barriers, and I also recognise that putting the head down and living with the status quo, like I did in many ways, isn’t an option,” says Donovan.
“Our profession is in the middle of a recruitment and retention challenge and if partners like me and others across the industry don’t step up to harness this talent pool of ambitious mid-career women, we are missing out.”
Mid-career choices and challenges
According to Dawn Leane, founder and CEO of Leane Empower, a female-focused coaching, mentoring and training organisation, a number of factors tend to influence women’s mid-career choices and priorities.
“They have family or parent caring commitments, or both. Society has moved on a bit, but not enough, and women are still the primary caregivers for family members. So, at that point, there’s a lot of demand on their time.”
Patricia Monahan, Chief Executive of Monaghan County Council, remembers a profession that did not cater to women with families.
“Gender became a noticeable issue when I went to work in a Big Five firm in the ‘90s. That was a high-pressure, high-stakes job with very big clients,” she says.
“There were few, if any, women with children working in my division of the firm while many of the senior men had families.
“That was the first time I noticed a difference between men and women in the profession. Because it was a very pressured environment, I just think it wasn’t very family friendly.”
But the disparity that continues today isn’t just about family commitments. “Very often, women around the mid-career age come to the perimenopausal stage,” says Leane.
“At this point in their careers, women sometimes either leave the workforce if possible or look for a change because they find some symptoms difficult to manage, such as brain fog and poor sleep.
“They ask if they are getting back from their organisations what they put in, and they find that no, they’re not.”
Limited career options
Laura Maloney, now an executive and wellbeing coach offering a programme called Returnity, aimed at women returning to work post-leave, left the profession in 2016 after finding that her career options were limited after her role changed.
“In 2008, my role [in practice] moved sideways to risk management. The following year, there were swathes of redundancies, and I was lucky enough to be in a very secure role, even though it may not have been the right role for me,” she says.
“As the years went on, nobody at the firm was moving, and I felt that my options were limited. When it came to assessing where we were as a family and what came next in my career, my choice was not to return [to accountancy] after my third maternity leave.
“I wanted to be valuable. I wanted to contribute. I wanted to be useful, but I was in this role, and I was not happy. It wasn’t a great fit. How did I know that? Because I never felt like the role or the organisation was getting the best from me.”
Career pivots
Patricia Monahan qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1987 and, after working in tax in Dublin, and despite having a positive working experience, decided to relocate to County Monaghan ten years later for family reasons.
Monahan continued to take roles that had an accountancy element after relocating until a role for an assistant principal officer became available at Cavan and Monaghan Education and Training Board (ETB).
“All of my roles outside of Dublin were probably atypical for a Chartered Accountant, especially the ones in the public service. When I transferred from the ETB, I became an accountant with the council,” she says.
“Shortly after that, I got an opportunity to be a director of services at the council, which, again, took me away from the accountancy role. I had water and environmental services, the fire service, health and safety procurement and roads—all areas that were not in my training.”
From there, Monahan decided to dedicate herself to public service, eventually becoming the Interim Chief Executive of Monaghan County Council.
“When making career decisions, it didn’t matter whether [my role] was or wasn’t accountancy. It was more about whether it was a progression for me in my career,” she says.
“Moving to a director of service role from accounting was definitely a progression. It was a much wider remit of responsibility and a management job.
“Accountancy skills are still very useful and transferable, and the Chartered Accountancy qualification is a good base for any career. I wouldn’t necessarily say I left them behind. I’d say I took them with me, but they were just not the dominant skills I needed.”
Tackling the mid-career slump
While many women make significant strides in the early stages of their career, they often face various challenges as they progress up the professional ladder.
“Organisations need to be aware of what is standing in the way of women 10 to 20 years after qualification,” says Leane.
“They need to really engage with women to see what they identify as being the blockers to their careers. I’m a big believer in things like mentoring and sponsorship for women in organisations, and this doesn’t have to come from other women. Men are keen to support women in the workplace but might not always know what to do.”
“Research shows that, when a woman is working for a male manager, male managers often dilute feedback or don’t give women the feedback they need to develop their career because they fear an emotional response, even if that’s not valid,” explains Leane.
“If you’re giving feedback that you think a woman would like to hear, rather than what they need to hear, that is an enormous barrier in their career.”
Moloney thinks there has been an improvement but says that women need honest conversations and feedback, so that they can fully understand their options.
“One of the areas that has definitely improved since I left the profession is the willingness to have more honest, open and transparent conversations about things like satisfaction, values and purpose, and achievement. This isn’t a language we would have spoken when I worked in accountancy,” she says.
“This is highly dependent on the teams you work in and the managers you work for, and their willingness and how equipped they are to have those kinds of conversations, but they can be the difference between someone leaving the profession or staying.”
An important choice
According to Leane, there are several steps women can take themselves to ensure their career continues to flourish.
“A woman must think about her professional brand and networking – all the skills men got to develop when training,” she says.
“Women often see the benefit in getting the work done – we are taught the benefit of getting the work done – while men have been taught to make themselves known in their professional networks and pick their heads up.
“Women might not realise many of these unwritten rules and norms of behaviour exist in the workplace. Many women find they have been very qualified for, say, a certain promotion, but by waiting for the tap on the shoulder or not putting themselves forward, they didn’t play the game.”
Moloney says women need to figure out what they want before they can take the next steps in their careers.
“It’s all about empowerment and encouragement. So much of the experience I had in my professional career was waiting for validation and affirmation from other areas or other people to tell me that I was doing the right thing at the right time. I should have been able to depend on myself.
“Nobody is advocating for you, but it’s difficult to advocate for yourself when you don’t know what you want. What do you want to do? What do you value? What do you love? What motivates you? You have to answer those questions for yourself before you can communicate them to someone in your organisation who can help you.”
Organisations can only do so much, Monahan says, and there comes the point when a woman has to make her own choices.
“Ultimately, women have to make choices that will suit their own circumstances, and shouldn’t have to justify those choices.”