Keywords: Accounting profession; Motherhood; Identity; Self; Employment; Narrative; Oral history
1. Introduction
Becoming a parent is a major defining moment in people’s lives. Both fathers and mothersare potentially transformed by such an event, in their relationships between each other andwith other human beings, in relation to their employment and within wider society. Thispaper explores the transformations undergone on becoming a parent by women accountingprofessionals. It considers the complex relationship between the accounting profession and
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the identity of motherhood in particular, by exploring the experience of women accountantsin the UK who are also mothers. It analyses contemporary views concerning mothering andemployment within the accounting profession by examining the oral history narratives ofa group of accountants who have recently become mothers and returned to work followinggiving birth.
My interest originally stems from my own experiences some years ago, and the sub-sequent negotiation of the contradictions and juxtapositions of the two roles of being aprofessional accountant and a mother (Haynes, 2006). In seeking some illumination ofthese issues from the accounting literature, I found that whilst the gendered nature of theaccounting profession (Ciancanelli et al., 1990; Gallhofer, 1998; Kirkham, 1992; Kirkhamand Loft, 1993; Lehman, 1992) and professional identities within the accounting profession(Anderson-Gough et al., 1998a, 2002; Ahrens and Chapman, 2000; Grey, 1998) had alreadybeen the subject of some debate, few studies, consider the particular subjective experienceof women accountants, or explore the relationships between the institutions of accountingand the accounting experience of women in defining their sense of identity (with the notableexceptions of McNicholas et al., 2004 and Kyriacou, 2000). Similarly, motherhood as anemergent and politically contested identity has been explored from sociological and psy-chological perspectives (Bailey, 2001; McMahon, 1995; Woodward, 1997b), but has notbeen studied within the context of the accounting profession.
This paper, therefore, aims to link these two areas and contribute to accounting researchby extending our understanding of accounting identities interacting with the identity ofmotherhood. We may know something of what it is to be an accountant or to be a mother,but how are the identities of professional accountant and mother, in practice, made senseof by individuals in relation to the wider social and cultural norms of professionalism andmotherhood? How do these identities entwine and relate together? To what extent do social,institutional and cultural factors shape and restrict the ways in which the self is experienced?What is the process of a professional accountant becoming a mother, and making a shiftfrom one identity to another? As Hockey and James (2003, p. 10) suggest:
A young woman’s experience of motherhood and her taking on the role of, or anidentity as, ‘mother’. . .though a unique event for her as an individual, is also onewhich reflects and reproduces the symbolic meanings and practical realities throughwhich other births and the making of mothers has taken place within her culture.
The focus of the paper on the identities of individuals at a time of transformation andtransition in their lives, which becoming a parent inevitably encompasses, allows for aclose scrutiny of the coherence of their identity. The concentration on a small number ofaccountants who have recently had children, allows for an exploration of the juxtaposi-tioning and entwining of their professional and mothering identities. While the paper isan illustrative rather than representative study, aimed at examining the women’s experi-ences rather than making definitive claims about mothers and accountants, it offers theopportunity to elucidate aspects of accounting work and develop some implications forthe accounting profession. It explores the interconnections between the ostensibly privatesphere of the home and the public sphere of employment, which Walby (1997) argues are
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central to understanding gender inequality.1 Moreover, whilst attention to the interactionof private and public spheres of experience has often been at the level of labour marketrequirements and state policies, it is the meanings of such concepts and distinctions forwomen themselves that enables examination of the ways in which they may be invokedor resisted (Ribbens and Edwards, 1998), and which will be examined in this paper. Byfailing to understand the impact of public and private, of professional and mothering iden-tities, misunderstanding, reproduction of subtle forms of inequality, or even injustice maybe perpetuated. As Griffiths (1995, p. 1) suggests, ‘a discussion of self and identity mustbe both highly political and highly personal’ allowing implications for political change tobe drawn.
The paper uses an oral history methodology, which, as Hammond and Sikka (1996)suggest, has the potential to give voice to those marginalized or excluded from accountingresearch, as I suggest mothers have been. Narratives illuminate issues of identity construc-tion (Haynes, 2006), as people’s individual stories, through which they make sense of theirlives, are linked to broader social narratives (Somers and Gibson, 1994).
The paper is structured as follows: Firstly, it provides an overview of concepts of the selfand identity. Secondly, it explains the professional context of women in the UK accountingprofession; and thirdly, the politics of motherhood. The paper then outlines the method ofdata collection using oral history. The narratives of the women are evaluated to considerthe individual’s engagement with the collective identities with which she may be rou-tinely assigned by professional or mothering status. The complexities and inter-relationshipsbetween these two identities are discussed, and some conclusions drawn on transformationsof identity and their implications for the accounting profession.
2. Concepts of identity
Concepts of identity or the self pervade much contemporary social theory. In a sin-gle paper, it would be impossible to give a comprehensive overview of identity theory,which draws from the disciplines of psychology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and soci-ology, as well as being influenced by more recent post-structuralist perspectives. In thissection, I introduce some of the main theoretical debates in the study of identity and theself, drawing mainly from an interpretative sociological framework, which emphasises thecentrality of subjective meaning, rather than focusing on internal psychological concepts ofthe self.
One of the major areas of discussion within identity theory is the extent to which wepersonify a core essential self, expressed as our real self or a self acceptable to oneself, orwhether we embody a self comprised of multiple fragmented identities (Griffiths, 1995).Related to this is the issue of whether individuals have the freedom to pursue autonomouslyidentity projects, or how far our identities are moulded by various ideologies or discourses.
1 It should be acknowledged that studying gendered experience may include men and masculinities as well aswomen, but although the identities of professional male accountants and their inter-relationship with a ‘fathering’identity may be interesting and potentially the subject of further research, it is not the purpose of this paper whichfocuses on women’s experience in accounting.
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The debate has often been framed around a number of dualities such as determinism andautonomy, self and other, or structure and agency (Elliott, 2001). Agency means that peopleare agents in the social world and are able to do things to affect the social relationships inwhich they are embedded, whereas structure refers to the social relationships themselvesand the conditions under which people act (Woodward, 2000). Two principle issues therebyarise: firstly, the extent to which human beings actively create the social worlds they inhabitthrough their everyday social encounters; and secondly, the way in which the social contextof structures, culture and institutions (such as the accounting profession) moulds and formssocial activity.
Notions of identity deriving from a humanist position suggests a person’s inner essen-tialist nature must be able to express itself through the exercise of autonomy and rationality,free to define his or her own desires and objectives, in the form of Kant’s or Rousseau’sself-fashioning individuals struggling to fulfil their potential as human beings (Sarup, 1996).Giddens (1991, p. 244), for example, has developed some of these humanistic aspects ofidentity into what he calls the ‘project of the self’—‘the process whereby self-identityis constituted by the reflexive ordering of self-narratives’ and incorporating the notionthat, in late modernity, individuals are increasingly forced to reflect upon and negotiatean expanding range of diverse lifestyle choices in constructing a self-identity. The result-ing individualisation translates into a condition in which the subject reflexively constructsher own biography, such that Beck (1992, p. 135) argues ‘there is a shift from a sociallyprescribed biography, constrained by factors such as gender and class, to a biography thatis continually self-produced’. Current social practices shape future life outcomes and therelationships between self, society and reflexivity is a dynamic one, involving the continualoverturning of traditional ways of being. Identity is therefore an ongoing project, whichdemands the active participation of the subject, and allows for levels of individual agency,although this may ‘stand(s) in tension, not only with barriers to emancipation, but with avariety of moral dilemmas’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 231).
Concepts of identity such as this, drawn from essentialist notions, may not be straight-forward, and, as Hall (2000, p. 15) points out, the deconstruction of identity deriving froma number of disciplinary areas, such as philosophy, psychoanalysis and postmodernism,tends to be critical in one way or another of the notion of an ‘integral, orginary and unifiedidentity’. Those working within the post-structuralist movement reject any single unifiedtheory of the self (Ward, 1997) in favour of one where the self is ‘flexible, fractured, frag-mented, decentred and brittle’ (Elliott, 2001, p. 2), where ‘the individual subject is viewedlargely as an affect of discourse, a product or construct of the ambiguous and unstablenature of language’ (Elliott, 2001, p. 11). With this more deterministic view of identityformation:
the subject is produced ‘as an effect’ through and within discourse, within specificdiscursive formations, and has no existence, and certainly no transcendental continuityor identity from one subject position to another (Hall, 2000, p. 23).
Thus, without an overarching integrated self we can no longer talk of ‘identity’ buta multiplication of identities that change and clash as the body is subject to differentdiscourses. Such a determinist stance raises problems for those who wish to retain somehope for individual emancipation and self-creation. Without any theorisation of agency
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and the individual interpretation of discourse, there is no basis for an explanation of theheterogeneity of individual responses to it (Hall, 2000; Hodgson, 2000; McNay, 2000).
Hall suggests the critique to which concepts of identity have been subjected puts them:
. . .under erasure. . . but since they have not been superseded dialectically, and thereare no other entirely different concepts with which to replace them, there is nothing todo but to continue to think with them – albeit now in their detotalized or deconstructedforms, and no longer operating within the paradigm in which they were originallygenerated (Hall, 2000, pp. 15–16).
Thus, some theories of identity, whilst acknowledging the dualisms of structure andagency, or freewill and determinism, strive to work beyond such dichotomies. If identity isdefined through a series of binary opposites it may form too rigid a concept that cannot easilyexplain change or ambiguity (Hockey and James, 2003). Instead of viewing social structureas a rigid framework, Jenkins (1996, p. 4) recognises it as a social ‘process’, a ‘being orbecoming’, which incorporates the agency of individuals without whom such a process couldnot take place, and which creates a synthesis between dualisms. Accounts of identity thatfail to explore how individuals are endowed with capabilities of independent reflection andaction, which allow them at times to respond to difference by accommodation, adaptationand even creativity, remain partial and within an essentially negative understanding ofsubject formation (McNay, 2000). An entirely fractured and multiple conception of identityhas also been criticised by Craib (1998), who argues that the concept of multiple or fracturedidentities only has meaning if there is an identifiable individual in whom multiple identitiesexist and that it would therefore be more accurate to speak of ‘roles’ rather than identity.For Craib (1998, p. 5), identity is distinguished from role by the assumption that identityis an internal biographical continuity into which different aspects of identity such as roleand performance may struggle and conflict but all refer to the story of a single individualwithin which there is a ‘dialectic of unity and diversity’.
Alvesson and Willmott (2002, p. 626) expand on the processual nature of identity, thenotion of being and becoming, with the concept of ‘identity work’, which refers to peoplebeing:
. . .continuously engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revis-ing the constructions that are productive of a precarious sense of coherence anddistinctiveness.
In relatively stable or routinized life situations, identity work is relatively unselfcon-scious, although contingent upon life history and the unchallenged position of the hegemonicdiscourses through which identity is reproduced (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). Whendealing with specific encounters, events or transitions, however, these can serve to highlightand heighten awareness of the constructed quality of self-identity (Alvesson and Willmott,2002; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). Identity is then concerned with the relationshipsbetween individuals and discursive practices. Thus, the experience of identity in many peo-ple’s everyday lives may be of continuity and connectivity, as well as fragmentation anddiscontinuity. Identity emerges from within the relationships between the self and society.
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Precisely because identities are constructed within, and not outside, discourse weneed to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional siteswithin specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies(Hall, 1996, p. 4).
In other words, in order to understand the identities of the professional mothers in thisstudy, we need further to understand the contexts and institutions in which they are formed,accounting and motherhood, and it is these to which I now turn.
3. Women in accounting: The UK context
To become qualified as an accountant in the UK, individuals have to train typicallyfor 3–4 years, pass examinations and obtain appropriate professional experience to beadmitted to one of six professional bodies. These are the Institute of Chartered Accountantsin England and Wales (ICAEW); the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Scotland (ICAS);the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI); The Association of CharteredCertified Accountants (ACCA); The Chartered Institute of Public Finance Accountants(CIPFA); and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA).2 The womenin this study are members of the ICAEW and ICAS, whose members have been favouredby large international companies for the provision of audit services and accounting advice.In addition, they have been seen as having a more rigorous and higher standard trainingwhich has set them apart from the other bodies (Power, 1991), although this may change inthe future as discussions regarding mergers between the accounting bodies continue. Theirmembers train in practice in an accounting firm and tend to either pursue their career withinthe firm or move into industry after qualification. A few large accounting firms dominatethe market,3 operating on a global scale, though there is also a tier of large to medium-sizedaccounting firms with national focus, and a whole host of small, local firms with a singlepartner or small number of partners.
Historically, the very opportunity for women to become accountants in the UK hasbeen problematic. Women were seen by some as both physically and intellectually unfitfor such a role and gender conflicts restricting their access to the profession persistedsince the early 1900s (Lehman, 1992). Kirkham (1992) argues that their oppression withinaccountancy interacted with the development of power and influence in the professionitself and the constitution of its knowledge base in terms of gender. Similar to the US,in which the professional echelons of accounting were a male preserve until the lat-ter half of the 20th century (Westcott and Seiler, 1986; Wootton and Kemmerer, 1996),the experience of the majority of women in the UK in the early 20th century was oflegal, socio-economic, constitutional and cultural opposition to their membership of the
2 There are also other forms of professional group within the accounting sector such as the Association ofAccounting Technicians (AAT), and other specialist bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) orthe Insolvency Practitioners Association (IPA).
3 There has been considerable merger activity amongst the firms in the last two decades. The largest firms inthe late 1980s and early 1990s were known as the ‘Big 6’, which, as a result of mergers, became the ‘Big 5’ andrecently, in the wake of the Enron scandal, the ‘Big 4’.
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profession (Shackleton, 1999), with women confined to the clerical and secretarial func-tions (Kirkham and Loft, 1993). In the later 20th century, women’s participation in theaccounting profession increased, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, aswomen surmounted the barriers to entry (Ciancanelli et al., 1990; Wootton and Kemmerer,2000).
However, the changing gender balance has not been straightforward. The deskilling andfeminisation of bookkeeping has persisted into recent decades (Cooper and Taylor, 2000;Loft, 1992; Roberts and Coutts, 1992). Despite an average growth rate of 12.2% for womenICAEW members in the decade to 1987 (Ciancanelli et al., 1990), this was not accompaniedby gender transformation in the profession’s hierarchy. In the 15 years from 1988 to 2003,the average annual growth rate for admission of women to the ICAEW had fallen to 7.8%,a figure which still outstripped the overall average annual growth rate of 2.27%, but whichdemonstrates that the rate of increase of women’s inclusion is slowing, particularly in recentyears (Haynes, 2005). Moreover, a recent Financial Reporting Council report (ProfessionalOversight Board for Accountancy, 2005) shows that the ICAEW and ICAS have the lowestproportion of women members at only 21% and 23%, respectively, and that approximately50% of their members are under the age of 45.4 There are no figures available to ascertain thenumbers of women with children in the UK accounting profession, but given the breakdownof the membership above, it is likely that being young women with children, the participantsin this study are in a minority in their professional accounting bodies. Moreover, whetherthey have children or not, there is also evidence of women earning significantly less thanmen (Brennan and Nolan, 1998).
Accounting professionals, however, whether men or women, are also subjected to pro-fessional socialisation into the norms of professional identity work, which moulds theindividual into the archetypal, desirable accountant, such that he or she possesses boththe technical, behavioural and embodied attributes required (Coffey, 1993; Haynes, 2005).The professional and organisational discourses forming the socialisation processes withinaccounting exercise a significant degree of institutional power in the shaping of the individ-ual’s professional identity (Anderson-Gough et al., 1998a, 1998b). The client service ethic(Anderson-Gough et al., 2000), the politics of time management (Anderson-Gough et al.,2001), the sacrifice of personal time (Coffey, 1994), the correct form of social behaviour(Anderson-Gough et al., 2004) and the prioritisation of work over non-work activities (Seronand Ferris, 1995) all serve to obscure the professional and private divide. Managing thisdivide can be particularly difficult for women, due to their role in childcare. It is to women’srole as mothers in society to which I now turn.
4. The politics of motherhood
Motherhood as an identity is problematic because the fact that only women are biolog-ically able to be mothers does not mean that they experience it in the same way. Equally,people who are not biological mothers may also develop the relationships of motherhood.
4 The ACCA has the youngest membership with 70% of its members being under 45, whereas CIPFA has theoldest with only 43% of its membership being under 45.
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However, the dominant view of society remains that it is women’s primary responsibilityto mother, and, whether mothers themselves or not, women are defined in relation to thisrole (Letherby, 1994).
Motherhood is a politically contested concept of identity, as it illustrates the tensionsbetween an essentialist view of identity, with a clear set of authentic characteristics whichall those having this identity share (such as the biological fact that only women can bearchildren), and non-essentialist views of identity, which focus on difference as well as sharedcharacteristics. However, ‘motherhood involves both the capacity for biological reproduc-tion and the exigency of social reproduction; it includes child bearing and childrearing’(Woodward, 1997a, p. 240), suggesting its identity includes both biological and socialdimensions.
Second wave feminism has challenged biologically determinist assumptions aboutwomen’s position within the family and about motherhood in particular (Woodward, 1997a).Such feminist critiques expose the tension between motherhood as an institution of socialcontrol over women (Millett, 1971), on the one hand, and as a celebration of essentialwomanhood on the other (Rich, 1977). Oakley (1974) suggests that some feminists haveattempted to distinguish between the work of motherhood (which is socially organised inways which are stifling, overwhelming and oppressive) and the relationship of motherhood(which is seen as potentially rich and rewarding to women). There may also be a mismatchbetween the ideal of motherhood and the reality, in that what mothers expect to be and feelis very different from the resources and positions they are allowed to occupy. These areimportant issues to take on board in the interpretation of empirical material drawn from myoral history interviews. If I adopt a theoretical stance about the oppressiveness of mother-hood, then I could interpret much of what women describe as ideological, and view womenas passive subjects in their own subjugation. But if I adopt assumptions of socialisationand interpret women’s commitment to motherhood as gender role conformity, then I maytrivialise and neglect much of their experience and the meanings of their actions. Eitherextreme would fail to capture the complexity of mothering identities or reflect the empiricalparadox noted by Stanworth (1990, p. 296) that motherhood ‘is simultaneously women’sweakness and women’s strength’. As Innes (1995, pp. 155–156) suggests, being a mother‘is both a very ordinary thing to do and utterly extraordinary. . ..it brings emotional intensityand banality in equal measure’.
Motherhood provides a central cultural motif that structures female adult biography(McMahon, 1995). Although a woman is the subject of her own life as a mother (ornon-mother), she is also in a sense ‘simultaneously the object of her culture’s script’(O’Barr et al., 1990, p. 3). In other words, whether women do or do not become mothers,or mother in ways that veer away from the dominant mothering norms, cultural imagesof motherhood provide coercive prescriptions of gender behaviour that influence mostwomen’s lives. Maternal identity is constructed within a moral discourse (Gieve, 1989).Woodward (1997b) describes how the ‘ideal mother’ and the self-effacing Madonna areinscribed within Western culture, constructed within a moral context, and yet also some-how assumed as biological products, as if giving birth transforms a woman into the idealmother.
Having located the paper in relation to the accounting context, identity and motherhood,I will now explain the research methodology and collection of data.
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5. Method: Selection of the participants
The empirical data presented in this paper derives from a series of oral historyinterviews with five women, Deborah, Maureen, Lorna, Anne and Judith. Names havebeen anonymised to protect their identity. All the women were professionally qualifiedaccountants, three with the ICAEW, and two with the ICAS. Four worked in seniorpositions in large accounting practices in the UK, in roles involving audit, corporatefinance, business recovery and insolvency, with three of them working in the same firm.One, Judith, worked in a senior accounting role for a large commercial bank. The womenwere aged between 28 and 40 years, and all had one child each, having recently returnedto professional work after a period of maternity leave in the recent past.
The participants were not known to me but were obtained from ‘snowballing techniques’(Bailey, 2000, 2001), whereby they were referred to me through contacts. The women gaveoral history accounts of their experiences as both a professional accountant and a mother,which lasted up to 4 h. The meetings took place primarily in the workplace, during workinghours, and the women had not had to seek approval for taking part in the project from theiremployers, although a more senior partner in one firm was aware that they were taking part.This confirms the participants’ relatively high status within the firms and suggests that thewomen had a high degree of control over the way they allocated their time. Judith did notwant her employer to know that she was taking part in the research, for fear of disapproval,and the interview was therefore conducted in her home during the evening.
6. An oral history methodology
The research method used in the empirical work was oral history. The term ‘oral history’encapsulates various forms of in-depth life history interviews, biographical interviews, andpersonal narratives. Oral history is different from simple autobiography in terms of the‘degree to which the subject controls and shapes the text’ (Wright, 1986, cited in Reinharz,1992, p. 130). Both involve a person telling their own life-story, but oral history is interactive,drawing on another person’s questions. Oral history also differs from a straightforwardsemi-structured interview. While interviews have some similarities to oral histories, in thatthey are typically created through interaction drawing on another person’s questions, theyusually focus on a particular experience or phenomenon. In contrast, oral histories deal morebroadly with a person’s past, and range widely over many different topics. Some feministsuse the term ‘phenomenological interviewing’ to encompass oral histories (Reinharz, 1992)which suggests an interviewee-guided investigation of a lived experience that asks almost noprepared questions. For the purpose of this study, I use the term oral history to encapsulatein-depth personal narratives, in which I encouraged participants to reflect on their identity,aspirations, emotions and experiences within the accounting profession and within theirmothering role. I used open-ended questions to probe aspects of the narrative to maximisediscovery and description, but allowed the participants to shape the flow and structure of thelife history. I typically used statements such as ‘Explain to me how and why you becomean accountant’ or ‘Talk me through your experience of becoming a mother’.
While it has long been a methodological tool for historians (Thompson, 1988; Vansina,1985; Yow, 1994) oral history has rarely been used in the accounting context. Collins and
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Bloom (1991, p. 23) did call for the use of oral history in accounting but largely to suggestit should be used to ‘supplement and clarify the written record’ and verify other formsof history rather than as a methodology in its own right. For the women in my study it islikely no written or other form of record already exists which may be used to documenttheir experiences, and the oral history narratives may be the first time they have had theopportunity to voice their identities. Carnegie and Napier (1996, p. 29) reviewed the roleof history within accounting, specifically arguing that ‘oral history’s greatest potential liesin its ability to capture the testimony of those effectively excluded from organisationalarchives’, and ‘provide much insight into the effect of accounting on the managed and thegoverned’. Hammond and Sikka (1996, p. 91), giving Mumford (1991) and Parker (1994)as examples, suggest the main concern of oral history in accounting ‘has been to givevisibility to the views of well-known accountants rather than to give voice to the peoplewho have been excluded, oppressed and exploited in the onward march of the institutionsof accountancy’ and that ‘oral history can offer deeper and different understandings ofthe role and influence of accounting’ (p. 92). The accounting context renders some of itsparticipants ‘voiceless’, whether through race, gender or both (Fearfull and Kamenou,2006; Hammond, 2002; Hammond and Streeter, 1994; Kim, 2004; McNicholas et al.,2004). Oral history can be used as a vehicle for change by examining social structuresthrough an exploration of relationships and experiences within individuals’ everyday lives.
7. The process of analysis
The oral history accounts were tape recorded, with the permission of the participants,and transcribed. Notes of my immediate impressions of each participant were madeimmediately after each meeting. The transcripts were subsequently read for a second timewhilst listening to the tape, and annotated with significant examples of emotion, changesof tone and emphasis, ‘as emphasis, mood, intonation and so on, can crucially elaboratemeaning’ (Jones, 1985, p. 58). During the third reading of the transcripts, commentsrelating to various themes, which had been identified as areas for exploration, largely fromprior reading of literature, were marked on the transcripts using coloured highlights. For thepurpose of this paper, the main themes in question are professional identity and motheringidentity, and their inter-relationship. The transcripts were also annotated during this thirdreading with my initial analysis of the narratives of the participants, with reference to thenotes taken after the meetings. Cross-references could then be made between the commentsand experiences of the participants, which were enhanced by ‘focusing on the ways inwhich different people relate their experiences according to the circumstances they foundthemselves in’ (May, 1997, p. 126). This process led to the interpretation of the oral historyaccounts presented in the following section.
8. Constructions of professional identity
All the women in the study had senior roles within their respective firms, up to manageror partner level, having progressed up the career hierarchy before having their families. Prior
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to having children, they presented themselves as professionals with a strong sense of theircareer values, ranging from relish for technical issues and contact with people (Deborah);a deliberate choice to pursue corporate finance deal making, an area of work ‘where all theaction was’ (Maureen); desire for travel and working abroad (Judith); to a strong desire tobe ‘pro-active’ in seeking promotion and work that ‘interested me’ (Anne).
All the women were in long-term relationships and welcomed their pregnancies, oftennoting their desire to have children:
I was always so completely focused on my career and progressing within it, and doingwell and being successful, and I always knew that I wanted a child, but I knew it wasgoing to be later (Deborah).
I think I’ve always know that I wanted children (Maureen).
However, the response of employers to the news of the pregnancies demonstrates thatthe women’s new future identity position as potential working mothers was not alwaysstraightforward within the firms. Line managers were generally ostensibly supportive:
I don’t think they felt it was unreasonable. . . and I think everyone was very positivethat I would be able to come back to work and everything would be fine and dandyand it wouldn’t be an issue (Lorna).
One his first questions was ‘Are you going to come back?’ and I said yes I think I am,but I don’t know if I want to, I might want to do something with my hours, and he said‘I want to be flexible as possible so that you feel that you can come back’ (Maureen).
Despite the positive and flexible response, there is also an intimation here that there wasa concern by Lorna that the pregnancy may have been felt to be unreasonable by the firm,and an underlying assumption by Maureen’s line managers that she may not want to returnto her job. As Deborah found, the attitude of her fellow partners was ‘mixed. . .and I didn’tpursue it because I thought, well, really I don’t want to know’.
Some of the ambivalence experienced by the women, in respect of the response of theiremployers and colleagues to their pregnancies, manifested itself in the form of apparentlyjoking but derogatory comments:
I felt that occasionally people were having digs at me if you like, for example whenI went and had a meeting with one of the female bankers who was also pregnant andabout to go onto maternity leave. . ., someone made the comment oh yes you can bothgo and knit booties together or something like that, and it was just sort of, probablyjust a, you know, a joke but it sort of hmm grates on your nerves a bit (Maureen).
Here, the comments undermine on a number of levels: the role of caring and providingfor the child, the new mothering identity, is rendered almost silly, whilst the wealth ofknowledge and professional skill of the women imbued in their professional identity isdiminished. For Maureen, this led to an element of self-doubt and retrenchment from herpeer group as she redefined herself as a future mother whilst colleagues expressed the view:
what a pickle you’ve got yourself into. . .as though, you know, I almost like got myselfinto a mess, whereas. . .it was something we wanted.
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Similarly, Anne found her professional identity being undermined as she suffered com-ments from a partner in the firm:
There was a start of a sort of spate of pregnancies round about the same time as me,so there was the odd comment like ‘oh it’s contagious’, and one person turned roundand very tongue in cheek said ‘oh that’s your career over then’ (Anne).
While Anne presents herself as rising above the implied criticism due to her own strongsense of self as a determined and tough individual, and her ‘strength of character’, theimplication is that the possibility of her career being over due to her pregnancy was a veryreal fear.
Having defined themselves as professional accountants, one common response when theybecame pregnant was for the women to seek to redefine their anticipated future identityas working professional mothers, a process of identity work. Just as trainee accountantslearn and redefine their behaviours through a professional socialisation process, part of thisprocess of professional identification as mothers was to seek out positive female role modelsfrom whom they might learn, particularly in the same firm or working environment. Theprevious examples available to Judith are overwhelmingly negative:
She is having horrendous problems going back at all, they’ve told her, her job can’t bedone part time, they can’t find a job share, she’s looking at sort of taking constructivedismissal. . .. (Judith).
This led her to feel very pessimistic about her future opportunities within the companyto balance professional work and motherhood.
Although both Maureen and Deborah were pregnant at the same time in the same firm, asMaureen pointed out ‘the history of people getting pregnant in professional roles in [firm]was thin on the ground’. Deborah was constructed as an idealised ‘high-flyer’, a positiveexemplar for Maureen of how to behave. As a partner in the firm, Deborah’s expectationsof herself to fulfil her apparent obligations to her clients during her short maternity leavewere extraordinarily high:
When you’re a partner and you’ve got clients, they want to call you and talk to youin the evenings, and at weekends and whatever. . .. they could always contact me athome, and I had my laptop at home and I responded to emails and I did correspondencefrom home and some of the managers brought the audit files out for me to review(Deborah).
For Maureen, this raised a daunting weight of expectation and self-doubt in achievingthe same kind of qualities:
I mean she was sort of the pioneer from that side, but I was a bit nervous I thoughtshe was going to show me up a bit, she worked right up until the end and she wasplanning. . .on coming back pretty quickly and she was taking emails, whereas I’ddecided that you know that I was going to have this time off as I was never going toget it back (Maureen).
Maureen did not aspire to the same category of identity as high flying workingmother, undertaking ‘macho maternity’ (Smithson and Stokoe, 2005, p. 161), in which
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women maintain their work responsibilities right up to the moment of labour, and/orduring a short maternity leave. As a result, she felt that she experienced some disap-proval from her managers for taking the full maternity leave entitlement, leading her toquestion whether she was ‘skiving’, gadding about’, ‘having a great time’, suggesting asense of guilt for not being at work and enjoying her self so much. Constructions andcategories of identity imposed both by self and others, and the discursive practices sur-rounding professional identity, render identity work a potentially problematic, consciousprocess.
9. Constructions of identity as mothers
As well as their professional identity, the women were subject to constructions of iden-tity as mothers. Part of the process of identification involved looking back to their ownupbringing, childhood memories and the experience of being mothered to define how theythemselves wanted to mother. Indeed, Judith anticipates her own child undertaking exactlythe same process at some point in the future, and wants to pre-empt it to ensure he has apositive childhood experience:
I don’t want him to have memories of his childhood of us being unhappy or me beingstressed at work (Judith).
Maureen’s expectations of motherhood derive from looking after her own younger sib-lings in ‘quite a big family’ where she was ‘quite familiar with babies’, expecting to ‘takeit all in my stride’, but in the event ‘I’ve found it very different to what I expected it to belike, motherhood, I would say’. One of the reasons for this is her memory of an idealisedchildhood that she might not be able to replicate for her own child, leading to a sense ofconsternation and guilt:
My mum never worked, you know, she was always there when I came home fromschool, you know, the house was always warm, the lights were always on, all thosesort of things. . ..I worry that he’s going to miss out on that (Maureen).
In Judith’s practices as a mother she strives to achieve what she defines as a form of‘perfect’ behaviour for a mother:
I want the best for my child. I’m making most of his food. . . but that’s my choice to dothat, so in some ways I could argue that I’m making it harder for myself. I have greatintentions of using terry towelling nappies...that’s more washing and stuff, again it’smy choice but it’s something I’ve chosen to do, so I’ve got to do it (Judith).
Judith’s experience and expectation of the often oppressive, exhausting workload ofbeing a mother, contrasts with her relish for the relationship of motherhood, though bothare part of the construct of identity as mother.
The practice of motherhood is further complicated by tensions between ideologies ofmotherhood and its relationship to work. The ideal mother of young children is still fre-quently represented as one who does not work outside the home (Blumenthal, 1999; Lewis,1991). Despite this, and their nostalgic recollections of their own mothers largely being at
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home during their childhoods, several women acknowledged that as professional, highlyeducated women, they regarded it as the norm that women should both want to work andbe given the same opportunities as men to do so:
I say it’s normal, it feels more normal to be at work than to be at home all the time(Judith).
I think the difference now is that you feel guilty if you don’t go out to work, andyou’re not earning your crust, and almost that you’re a bit of a layabout (Maureen).
On becoming mothers, they found it more acceptable to themselves and their peer groupto want to continue their professional life, having worked hard to achieve their relativelyhigh status within their career.
10. The interaction of motherhood and professional work
Having had their babies, all the women had strong expectations of how motherhoodwould inter-relate with their professional identity and their career. As Lorna found, thepractice of professional identity took place in an institutional long hour culture prevalentwithin her firm, which led to there being little understanding of the problems of professionalwomen with children, especially at senior level:
All the people above me are male, all have young families, and all have wives that stayat home and look after them, and that’s fair enough, that’s their choice, and they canafford to do it, but I think they found the pull on my time awkward at times (Lorna).
The constraints of managing childcare contributed to a feeling of guilt for letting col-leagues down who may not have the same constraints. Their feeling ‘awkward’ contributedfurther to her sense of guilt, and led Lorna both to question and have to prove her con-tinuing professionalism, with the repetition and emphasis on ‘I can’t’ suggesting a slightdesperation:
I felt also that I was not pulling my weight. . . I still feel that I have to demonstratethat I am trying to work as hard as everybody else, in different ways maybe becauseI can’t, I can’t. . . (Lorna).
Similarly, Deborah had severe pressures made on her time by the firm, which she founddifficult to cope with, having just had a new baby. This led her to question her abilities andcompetence as a ‘high flyer’:
I think if you are a high achiever maybe it’s worse because suddenly you’re not ahigh achiever anymore or maybe you’re still achieving quite well to the outsider butin yourself you know you’re not achieving anything like you used to (Deborah).
As Alvesson and Willmott (2002) suggest, when a familiar identity, associated with thesense of ‘being oneself’, is unsettled, feelings of tension, anxiety, guilt or shame arise.Contrary to Deborah’s expectations of her two identity positions as accountant and mother
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being compatible and straightforwardly entwined, she found them a source of struggle anddiscontinuity. The reality was quite different to her expectations:
When I was pregnant I thought well okay, I’m pregnant, that’s great, really happyabout that, have the baby, have a short period of time off, go back to work, go backto work full time, everything will be fine, and it’s not like that, at all . . .(it is an)enormous shock, an absolutely enormous shock (Deborah).
Her anguish at leaving her child was juxtaposed with guilt in terms of relationshipsand responsibilities at the firm, which led to Deborah feeling that she was not achievingsuccessfully in either identity, whether professional or mothering, and feeling inadequateas a result:
When I came back to work I really wanted to do everything really, really well, andreally ended up thinking that I’m not doing anything properly and feeling so guilty. . .
I used to work ridiculous hours, I loved it, I really, really relished it, I really enjoyedit. . . but I felt I was letting down the people that worked for me because I wasn’tsupporting them enough (Deborah).
The emotion of guilt towards her firm expressed within Deborah’s narrative is alsocomplicated with feelings of jealousy caused by her strong desire to be the primary carerfor her child, to the extent that the full-time nanny she had engaged for her return to workwas dismissed:
I just thought I don’t want you to look after my baby. . . .. I kept saying I don’t needyou yet, I’m fine, yes I’m fine, I’m fine, I don’t want you to come at all. First of all,I didn’t think I don’t want you to come at all, not yet, not yet, it’s mine, I don’t wantyou, I need to make the most of the time, but as time went on I thought I don’t wantto this girl to come at all (Deborah).
The stresses and repetition of particular words and use of language in this extract pow-erfully demonstrate the complicated emotions of the process of identity transformationDeborah is undergoing. In delaying having the nanny start her post, she is resisting thereturn to her earlier identity as hardworking accounting partner—‘I don’t need you yet. . .notyet. . .not yet’—whilst trying to persuade herself that she remains in control throughout thisdifficult transitional period—‘I’m fine, yes I’m fine, I’m fine’. The impersonal possessivephrase ‘it’s mine, I don’t want you’ is a strange phrase to use for her child, indicating heralmost irrational need to retain her exclusivity of care. There is a development of identityhere as Deborah’s strong professional identity is being challenged by her new motheringone, the conflicting loyalties to the firm competing with her child. Identity work is oftenperformed with a sense of self-doubt, anxiety and emotion, but when it is practiced betweencategories of identity, such as here between accountant and mother, a feeling of difference,lack and contradiction may become pervasive.
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11. Renegotiating professional work
To try to minimise these tensions between identities, all the women negotiated somekind of change to their professional working hours and conditions after becoming a mother.Ultimately, all five of them mostly worked a 3–4-day week, to spend more time with theirchild.
The employers appeared mostly to try to accommodate the women’s requests to reducetheir working hours. For Lorna, this included both reducing her hours after she had herchild, and raising them again when her husband was made redundant and the family neededextra income.
They were very good, they’ve been very, very understanding at all the changes in mylife (Lorna).
Anne anticipates that the firm have an obligation to award her equal opportunities as aworking parent, but suggests that she would have to demonstrate flexibility to the firm, byaccepting a redefined role in a department where it was easier to undertake part-time work,if she were to expect flexibility from the firm, in a reciprocal relationship:
I’m flexible for them and in return they’re flexible for me (Anne).
Despite the employer being supportive, Anne had to assert herself to renegotiate her wayaround the institutional structures of long hours and working away from home, which pre-vail, to ensure she attains the type of professional working conditions that she desires afterhaving her child. Where opportunities for investing in the professional self are maintained,however, the women appeared to experience less discontinuity between their profes-sional and mothering identities, and a more successful entwining of the professional andpersonal.
In contrast, Judith’s return to work after the birth of her baby coincided with a periodof restructuring within the company during which her job role and responsibilities wereredefined, even her desk removed, and she was offered a voluntary redundancy package,which she is convinced is linked to the fact that she now wants to work part-time. Theresponse to her inquiry about job-sharing was rather negative:
He didn’t say no, but sort of said well we’ll have to find some else who wants to doit and how would you job share it? How would you? You know, what people did itthere? Who are the people to talk to? (Judith).
There is a strong sense of retrogression in her oral history, in terms of having ‘gone back’to a redefined job in a role she was in some years ago, contributing to her negative attitudeto her current employment, stressed with the use of repetition:
Here it’s just a load of old crap. It’s very rigid. Oh it’s just horrendous, horrendous, it’shorrendous. . .. [Firm] never was a great career path for me but now it’s quite clearlyzero career development, there’s zero personal development, it’s everything I don’twant (Judith).
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This contrasts acutely with her sense of fulfilment and enjoyment of motherhood, againstressed, this time positively, with the use of repetition:
I really like it, I really, really like it and I get infinitely more satisfaction from changinga crappy nappy than being at work, it’s just, you just feel more useful (Judith).
In attempting to achieve a balance between her professional and mothering identities,Judith experiences a degree of despair, leading to a strong sense of discontinuity of the self.
12. Fragmenting, transforming and refocusing the self
Women experienced a redefinition and refocusing of their sense of self after becomingmothers that was transformative. Deborah experiences a desperate quandary as she attemptsto understand and refocus her post child identity. On the one hand, she has come to thedecision to leave her job, at least for a time, because she cannot bear the emotional pain ofleaving her baby, yet on the other, she does not really want to have to leave the career sheloves. Whichever option she chooses, despite it partly being what she wants, it is the causeof further pain and contradiction. She finally left the firm because:
I thought I could compartmentalize everything when I came back, I thought it wouldbe—this is my job and my career, as it had always been and it would carry on likethis—and this is my home-life, with my daughter and this will carry on like this, andthey’ll be separate in separate compartments and they’re not, because you can’t do it,you can’t at all (Deborah).
Deborah had experienced her transition to motherhood as a profound and not entirelyeasy experience to negotiate and was unable at this stage to come to a satisfactory resolutionto entwining her professional and mothering identity.
Other women also expressed the notion that becoming a mother had transformed themin some way, often using a discourse that encompassed reference to changes experiencedbetween a pre and post-child self.
I just wanted to get my life back to normal, you know I found it frustrating that Icouldn’t do any of the things I wanted to do before, and that I did do before (Maureen).
In a reference to a past self, which encompasses the professional that she once was andfeels that she would like to be again, Maureen expresses a slight sense of regret at the lossof her pre-child identity.
I think I’m beginning to feel back to my old self, I can almost, it sounds dreadful this,I can almost forget that I’m a mother really when I’m here, you know when I’m backto my old self (Maureen).
Judith, however, revises her past self reflexively, reformulating her view of other womenwith children with what she now understands from her own experience of being a mother,in a process of continual revision of the self:
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I think I actually have retrospectively apologised to them, because until you’re thereyou just don’t realise the implications of childcare, what if your child’s ill?. . .It’s likeyou start to realise (Judith).
Lorna found that she had been transformed from her previous ambitious professionalself, after having a child, into a person who was more content to gain fulfilment from othermeans:
I had to accept that coming back to work when I was a mother, I was a different personand I hadn’t anticipated that, I really hadn’t, I thought well I’ll just go back and dowhat I was doing before, but your personality changes. . . there’s always been theunderlying ambition, I’ve always tried, and that was almost gone completely (Lorna).
But the firm too perceived her differently in a way that could be taken as negative, as shewas told by her boss that they wanted the ‘real Lorna’ back, as if becoming a mother makesher any less real. The implication is that they equated her lack of ambition with a lack ofcommitment.
As the women negotiated their transition to motherhood and its reconciliation with theirprofessional identity, they expressed degrees of understanding of their revised dual identity:
It really has changed my focus, and for the better, I think. I think I’m a more roundedperson. . . (Lorna).
Having presented herself as ‘judgemental’ about approaches and procedures of others inthe work environment, Lorna has begun to accept that that the experience of mothering hasenabled her to acknowledge ‘what works for you works for you, and what works for some-body else works for somebody else’. Similarly, Judith demonstrated that the transformationwas a process of compromise and increasing self-awareness, as she reflexively revised herprevious expectations of both professional work and motherhood in the light of the realityof experience:
I can’t expect them to give me all the really good work and for me to have everythingthat perfectly suits. That’s what’s hard actually, you’re going to have to compromiseon both sides. . .. So you take a bit of crap work, and you give him water during thenight, or you’re just prepared to miss a bath a couple of nights, and it’s just trial anderror, I think, so I’m still on a pretty steep learning curve with the whole workingmum thing (Judith).
The relationship between these two selves, professional accountant and mother, is com-plex, with women all too commonly experiencing self-doubt and guilt in the transformationand negotiation process between the two identities, rooted in the social and cultural practicesand expectations of professional work and motherhood.
13. Conclusions
The purpose of the paper was to consider the interaction and expectations of moth-erhood and professional work in accounting, by highlighting the ways in which women
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conceptualise the relationship between these two spheres of existence and negotiate theresponses, loyalties and emotions of transition. It also intended to evaluate the social,institutional and cultural aspects of accounting and motherhood, which shape and restrictthe ways in which the self is experienced.
The women in this study found motherhood a very powerful experience, bound up withstrong emotions, at times joyful, and at times equally painful. They expressed a strongsense of their expectations of themselves as mothers, as motherhood is subject to highlyidealised representations (Woodward, 2003). These ideals of mothering derived partly fromthe experience of being mothered themselves, as women who are mothers often interprettheir experience through having had a mother of their own, and the experience of motherhoodis reconstructed through the past and by memory. As Radford (1989, p. 137), suggests:
the desire for motherhood is also about the past. It’s the desire to relive my childhoodwith the mother I desired to have, rather than the mother I actually had. Is it the lostchild or the lost mother I want to regain?
Thus, in the mothers’ reflections on their own childhood as well as the childhood theydesire for their own children, there is a play between the identity of mother being continuousand permanent, and the idea that it has been and might be different.
The paper also explored the interaction of an identity as mother with an identity asprofessional accountant. Motherhood and its interaction with the accounting professiondemonstrate an area of social life where private, domestic and personal lived experienceinterrelates with professional, public-facing working life. The distinction ‘between privateand public ways of being takes a gendered form because women, especially mothers, havea particular social positioning within the private domestic sphere of home and family life’(Ribbens and Edwards, 1998, p. 10). It is not only the private that takes a gendered form,however, as the public life of the accounting profession and the changing gender balancewithin it has historically been problematic for women. The interaction of personal and publiclife for these women was challenging, with their understanding of idealised motherhoodand childhood often being in contradiction with their desires to continue their professionalcareer. While the women in this study had reached senior manager or partner status, andhad received some degree of accommodation by the firms to their new status as mothers,they were still subject to varying degrees of inequality. This was manifested in the lack ofrole models, derogatory comments, institutional long-hour culture, lack of understandingof childcare constraints, and in Judith’s case, apparent virtual constructive dismissal, suchthat her experience of employment was uncontrovertibly negative after she returned towork after maternity leave. Although these women are not necessarily representative, thesemisunderstandings and experiences demonstrate that the accounting profession continuesto reproduce these inequalities.
The experience of becoming a mother is transformative through the way the womanreformulates her sense of self, a process of ‘reappropriation and empowerment intertwine(d)with expropriation and loss’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 7). Human beings can be transformed byevents whether they like it or not, not just economically or socially, but ontologically andphenomenologically. The altered self is explored and constructed as part of a reflexiveprocess of connecting personal and social change. The women in this study negotiated thistransitional stage of their lives in a process of entwining their professional and personal
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identities. Fusion between their experiences of their mothering and professional selvesbrought about elements of continuity, discontinuity, fragmentation and refocus.
Professional identity and mothering identity, therefore, rather than being simply opposedto one another, are entwined; the continuities and contrasts between them being multiple andcomplex. Women’s identities as mothers and as accountants are forged within the social andcultural practices of motherhood and professionalism, both of which are subject to genderednorms and socialisation processes within the structures of the profession and wider society.Social institutions, such as professional accountancy work, or motherhood, hold out thepossibly of emancipation of the self by achieving one’s aspirations, but at the same timethey create mechanisms of suppression and oppression, rather than actualisation of self, suchthat women may be confined to experiencing both certainty and anxiety simultaneously,leading to insecurity and lack of well-being. Identity work, and the practice of identity, ofmother and accountant, illuminates the perpetuation of subtle forms of inequality withinthe accounting profession itself, allowing us to understand women’s location within socialrelations and the resistance they encounter as being due in some part to a gendered struggleover power, even though they are not involved in collective action.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the help and support of the following people in developingearlier drafts of this work: Anne Fearfull, Jane Frecknall Hughes, Alan Murray, Steven Toms,participants at the 2004 Asian Pacific Interdisciplinary Research on Accounting Conference(Singapore), and the two anonymous reviewers. I also extend my grateful thanks to the fivewomen whose oral histories were used in this paper.
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