Gendered Hierarchies of Dependency Women Making Partnership in Accountancy Firms

Accountancy is an elite profession, wielding its influence in every step we take in business and political life, from takeover to bankruptcies and from Brexit to war: we need accountants to help us see the bigger picture and to enable us to trust one another in public life. But for much of the profession's history, women were excluded from it and, while we have seen great advances in women's access to the profession, women remain significantly underrepresented at the top of the hierarchy and amid partnership ranks across the industry and globally. Importantly, there are noteworthy differences in the severity of this underrepresentation across national borders which remain underexplored.

Gendered Hierarchies of Dependency considers this underrepresentation of women at partnership level cross-nationally and through a feminist lens, analysing interviews with female partners in Germany and the United Kingdom. In doing so, Kokot-Blamey innovatively merges insights from accountancy and organization studies, political economy, and the feminist ethics of care literature to contribute to contemporary debates about women at work, neoliberalism and the capitalist fiction of the autonomous self. Beyond career advancement to partnership, Kokot-Blamey examines several timely issues such as the persistence of discrimination and sexism at work, motherhood, and weathering recessions and economic crises in accountancy. Revealing important insights into the day-to-day working and private lives of modern elites, this book shows how hierarchies are negotiated differently across borders, but that the outcomes are always gendered.

Patrizia Kokot-Blamey, Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Queen Mary, University of London

Dr Patrizia Kokot-Blamey is a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. She completed a Master's degree as well as her undergraduate studies in Economics at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Before pursuing an academic career, Patrizia worked as a financial journalist and correspondent for Reuters News and Thomson Financial, reporting on European equities and economics.