How CPA firms can win women back

If you reopen your accounting firm, will they come back? Women might not. Why would they?

The very phrase “coming back” implies a reflexive return to the pre-COVID-19 status quo: harried commutes, asking permission to actually use flexible work policies to attend their children’s school events, constantly wondering how their personal life must step back as they pursue the next steps to partnership.

Women were putting up with daily micro-conflicts before March 2020, when the pandemic forced the entire profession to work remotely. Now the recovery is accelerating, and firms and employers around the country fear the moment of truth. When they reopen their doors, will women come back to the office? Not if they can help it. At last count, 2.5 million women have dropped out of the workforce due to COVID-induced caregiving. A McKinsey report released in March found that 25% of working women have either quit work or want to.

In my work as the designer and project manager of the Accounting MOVE Project, I talk with women in accounting all the time. The mission of the Accounting MOVE Project is to equip both women professionals and their employers with tools and tactics for advancing women, especially BIPOC women.

With our partner, the Accounting & Financial Women’s Alliance, we’re bringing firms fresh ideas just in time — via a virtual summit June 23 and 24 — to ensure that reopening helps women.

Women in accounting are weary and wary. Weary because they’ve been rising to one challenge after another since the pandemic drove everybody home in March 2020. Constant upheaval and endless rapid responses, overlaid with urgent client needs, have drained stamina and the appetite for career advancement. Women are aghast that the entrenched opposition to remote work has proven to be a lie, and they wonder how firms will integrate remote work from now on, as firms did rather well last year, thanks in no small part to remote work.

And women are wary that things will actually get better. Prior to the pandemic, firms talked a good game about flexwork but developed laryngitis when it came to proving the case. According to the 2020 Accounting MOVE Project report, 83% of firms offered flexwork options, but only 10% formally measured the efficacy of flexwork. While 76% of them trained teams to collaborate virtually, only 45% of firms trained managers to lead virtual teams. That means that in March 2020, teams were better positioned to seamlessly transition to all-virtual, all the time work, while their managers scrambled. As the urgency of virtual work dissipates, will the ability to lead hybrid or remote teams become a core competency?

It should, if firm leaders want to retain women. Caregiving intersects with careers at most life stages for many women. Remote work and flexibility as standard operating procedure — not as a favor — are essential for women to steadily advance. If now is not the time to adopt a location-agnostic approach to work, when is?

Separately, mothers of young children will need additional tools to return. Prior to the pandemic, the 2020 Accounting MOVE Project found that 34% of firms offered childcare or eldercare referral services as an employee benefit. Referral services are moot if child or eldercare is not available.

Childcare services shredded in the pandemic and will be slow to return, according to one study. That partly explains why a tsunami of mothers of young children were swept out of the workforce by the pandemic, according to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, with their participation dropping by 2.8 percentage points in the 12 months ended November 2020. The bank found no net change for the fathers of young children.

Winning women back will be hard, but worth it.

Firms must adopt holistic career paths that offer a la carte options at each life stage: backup childcare when families are young, scaled business development synchronized to flexible workloads when accelerating in the partnership pipeline, no-questions-asked flexibility when eldercare collides with leadership responsibilities.

Firms with women’s initiatives can invest in them as powerful channels for problem-solving and cultivating peer relationships that retain women. There is plenty of room for improvement; the 2020 Accounting MOVE Project report found that while 76% of firms had created employee resource groups for women, only 21% offered such groups to new mothers, and 7% to working caregivers.

How such efforts actually retain women at all, and especially in the partnership pipeline, shouldn’t be a mystery, but it often is, with only 28% of firms formally reporting the progress of women in the pipeline to senior leaders.

Women will resume their careers, somewhere. They will continue to work with firms that, instead of welcoming them “back to the office,” welcome women no matter where they are.

Joanne Cleaver is president of Wilson-Taylor Associates. She designed and manages the Accounting MOVE Project, the only annual initiative that measures and supports the advancement of women in the accounting and advisory profession Registration is open for the June 23 and 24 Recovery Reset mini-summit, hosted at CPA Academy, and presented in partnership with the Accounting & Financial Women’s Alliance; the Accounting MOVE Project; and founding sponsor Moss Adams. Archived Accounting MOVE Project reports can be found at https://www.afwa.org/.