Born at the wrong time? An oral history of women professional accountants in New Zealand

Abstract

Although New Zealand was the first country within the Commonwealth to allow women to enter the profession of accountancy on a continuous basis, this did not result in a large number of women becoming professional accountants until the 1990s. This paper focuses on the development of the status of women within the accounting profession in New Zealand. Documents from the early and middle part of this century provide evidence that the accounting profession was almost entirely male in these years. A number of women who joined the New Zealand Society of Accountants in the 1940s and 1950s were interviewed and their testimonies were interpreted using insights gained from the extant literature on gender and the professionalisation of accounting. It was found that, while there were no formal barriers to entry, the obstacles to progression, identified in the literature on other countries, existed within the New Zealand context.