Gender Discrimination? Evidence from the Belgian Public Accounting Profession*

Abstract

Prior research finds that women receive lower salaries than men. Similarly, we show that female audit partners in Belgium receive significantly lower compensation than male partners. However, there are alternative explanations for the pay gap other than gender discrimination. For example, the gap in compensation could reflect that men are paid more because they have higher levels of productivity. We provide new predictions and tests of gender discrimination by comparing the fees generated by audit partners (a measure of partner productivity) and the types of clients assigned to partners. Consistent with our prediction of female partners having to meet higher performance thresholds than male partners, we show that female partners generate larger fee premiums, but they are less likely to be assigned to prestigious clients. To test whether these patterns are attributable to gender discrimination, we examine whether the results are stronger in male‐dominated offices, because this is where we would expect to find the most discrimination against women. We find the fee premiums generated by female partners are larger in male‐dominated offices, while the negative association between prestigious clients and female partners is stronger in male‐dominated offices. Collectively, our combined predictions and tests are consistent with female partners facing gender discrimination in audit offices that are dominated by male partners.

Prevalence and correlates of sexual harassment in professional service firms

“…Accounting and law have traditionally been male-dominated, and both professions are still characterized by skewed sex distributions at the top (i.e., those in power, the firms' partners, are men). The culture in these firms is often described as masculine (9) and discrimination and sexism are still rampant (11,30). Hence, the current study's results align with research that links workplace sexual harassment with workplace culture (31).…”

“…Furthermore, despite the influx of large numbers of women into the accounting and legal professions over the past couple of decades, these organizational sites have remained largely resistant to pressures of social inclusion, diversity, and equality. A large body of research shows how these PSFs have masculinized working practices and management cultures, remain horizontally and vertically segregated on gender lines, and reinforce existing gender inequalities (9)(10)(11)(12)(13). In contrast, few studies to date have examined sexual harassment in PSFs.…”

Integrasi Agama dan Budaya dalam Komunitas Pemberdayaan: Studi Empiris Pemberdayaan Ekonomi Perempuan Payungi Metro-Lampung

“…Perempuan-perempuan hampir di semua sektor sejauh ini menerima berbagai macam pola diskriminasi (Fattore et al, 2020;SteelFisher et al, 2019), baik di dalam keluarga (Cerrato & Cifre, 2018;Sullivan, 2019), di ruang publik (Jones et al, 2018), di ruang kerja (Bastian et al, 2019;Hardies et al, 2021;Kim et al, 2020;Manzi, 2019;Pitot et al, 2022), pendidikan (Assoumou-ella, 2019;Baliamoune-Lutz & McGillivray, 2015;Cooray & Potrafke, 2011;Karoui & Feki, 2018;Zeng et al, 2014) dan sektor-sektor lainnya. Keadaan ini banyak dipengaruhi oleh pengarusutamaan gender yang tidak memposisikan perempuan sebagaimana mestinya dan mengabaikan nilai-nilai kesetaraan.…”

The Effect of Gender on Investors’ Judgments and Decision-Making

“…Research on gender and ethics has documented perceived discrimination and actual biases towards female professionals working in accounting, finance, and management (Bohnet et al, 2016;Cohen et al, 2020;Hardies et al, 2020;Hoyt et al, 2009;Kanze et al, 2018;Koch et al, 2015;Koenig et al, 2011;Latu et al, 2011;Leicht et al, 2017). With women representing less than 20% of sell-side equity analysts (Adams et al, 2016;Bertrand & Hallock, 2001;Bertrand et al, 2010;Brown et al, 2015), the skewed gender composition has led to stereotypes that associate characteristics of equity analysts with those of men (Bloomfield et al, 2020;von Hippel et al, 2015), and consequently, biases against female analysts despite similar (or superior) performance of female analysts in terms of accuracy and returns compared to male analysts (Kumar, 2010;Li et al, 2013).…”

“…Consistent with Messick's (2009) statement that "making personnel decisions on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, or other 'irrelevant' factors is unethical" (p. 73, emphasis added), the existing literature largely examines gender and ethical issues in the performance evaluations context, including evaluating leadership (Hoyt et al, 2009;Koenig et al, 2011), assignment of audit client portfolio (Hardies et al, 2020), as well as evaluating sell-side equity analysts for promotion (Bloomfield et al, 2020) and compensation (Lin & Neely, 2017) among others (see meta-analysis by Koch et al, 2015). Our study extends prior gender and ethics literature beyond the evaluation setting to a judge-advisor setting (Yaniv, 2004;Zaleskiewicz et al, 2016;Baeckstrom et al, 2018; for a review of the judge-advisor paradigm, see Guntzviller et al, 2020), where individual investors rely on and process the advice provided by an expert (i.e., an equity analyst) to make investment decisions.…”