98. Why are we still not seeing more women in senior roles? - with Carly Moulang and Alessandro Ghio
Sep 06, 2021
Why are we not seeing more positive outcomes for women in the workforce?
What can employers do to help women overcome the barriers to entry for senior positions? These are some of the questions that researchers Carly Moulang and Alessandro Ghio asked employers in Australia. Their findings are now available in a report titled "Working women and wellbeing."
In this episode, I interview Carly and Alessandro to understand more about what women and their employers can do to overcome gender issues in the workplace. As always, I wanted to know more about Carly's career, Alessandro's career, how they started their research together, and then deep-dive into their research findings.
Do we still need research on this topic?
Carly Moulang: "When Alessandro and I started talking about this, we're like, what's going on here? Why are we not seeing a better representation of women at these more senior levels of accounting firms? [In Australia], 43% of the top 100 accounting firms have no female partners. And so that got us interested in this topic, particularly because we know that organizations are investing more money in having more formal supports in place to support women in the workplace. Despite having this growth, proper support, and things like flexible working arrangements, carers leave, maternity leave, why are we not seeing the outcomes for women? So really, it was like curiosity that drove this project and drove our interest in this area."
Listen to this episode to learn about their recommendations to employers to better support women and minorities. You can use their findings and recommendations to identify red flags in your current employment or during the recruitment and selection process. This may help you identify good and bad employers for women so you can make better decisions for your career moving forward.
I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
Podcast Episode Timestamps:
- 04:48 - Carly's career
- 06:11 - Alessandro's career
- 07:23 - Researching gender issues in the workplace
- 10:44 - Research findings
- 18:04 - Minorities in the workplace
- 21:12 - Recommendations for employers
- 30:42 - Recommendations for women and minorities
- 48:23 - Final words from Carly and Alessandro
Links mentioned in this episode:
- Renata's article on LinkedIn: Pitfalls of corporate 'small talk': embracing diversity also means including new themes in our repertoire!
- Carly and Alessandro's research website
- The Job Hunting Podcast episodes on women's issues in the workplace:
- The Job Hunting podcast episode is about job hunting and career progression for the trans, gender diverse, and nonbinary professionals - Jacob Thomas.
- Click here to download the transcript of this episode on our new blog.
About our guests:
Carly Moulang is an Associate Professor in Accounting at Monash University. She holds a Ph.D. in management accounting and a Graduate Diploma in Psychology from Monash University. She is a CPA Australia member and a Chartered Accountant (CA ANZ). Carly's research agenda incorporates psychological research within the accounting and finance disciplines. Her multi-disciplinary research has included whistleblowing, creativity, performance management, environmental management accounting, wellbeing, psychological capital, superannuation research, and decision-making. Carly's research has been widely disseminated via television, documentaries, podcasts, radio interviews, and news articles. Her work broadly contributes towards achieving better retirement, performance, and mental health outcomes for women. You can connect with Carly on LinkedIn.
Alessandro Ghio is an Assistant Professor in Accounting at Laval University (Quebec, Canada). He holds a Ph.D. in financial accounting from ESSEC Business School and a Ph.D. in management from the University of Pisa. His research interests focus on the sociology of professions, particularly concerning women and queer people in the accounting profession. His work contributes to understanding how accounting phenomena emerge and evolve in a social context and the mechanisms affecting such processes. Alessandro has published in several leading academic journals, and he co-authored three books. Alessandro received the prestigious 2019 Aspen Institute' Ideas Worth Teaching' Award and the 2019 Vice-Chancellor's Diversity and Inclusion Award. He is the co-instigator of the project "Queering Accounting," He has led and/or taken critical roles in competitive research-funded projects equating over one million Australian dollars. You can connect with Alessandro on LinkedIn.
