Education, Employment and Certification: An Oral History of the Entry of Women into the Canadian Accounting Profession

The success of the accounting profession i claiming social rewards has been attributed to strategies of "closure" which bound its body of knowledge, provide monopoly powers over areas of practice and limit who may have access to the rewards of practice [cf. Murphy, 1984, 1988; Macdonald, 1985; Lee, 1990; Richardson, 1998]. In this paper we examine gender as a criterion for closure in the Canadian accounting profession. We use archival and oral history materials to determine the mechanisms u ed to control the gender composition of the profession and to explore the subjective experiences of those women who imfially breached this aspect of the closure of the profession. Our review is divided into three areas: education, employment, and professional affiliation. We assume that professional status requires sequential movement through these three stages but that the extent and nature of discrimination i each will be independent. Our analysis of the role of gender in the closure of the accounting profession draws on feminist theories which seek to explain and understand the experience of women in patriarchal societies. What feminist heories hare is the assumption that systems of power and resource allocation in society are shaped by masculine values. These theories suggest how these systems negatively affect all people but particularly women psychologically, physically, and socially. One key aspect of a masculine system of power is the allocation of work roles on the basis of gender. Women, for example, are more likely than men to work at unpaid labor (e.g. domestic labor) in the private sphere of society without the protection of labor laws which affect jobs in the public sphere. Where women do enter the paid workforce, they are typically allocated