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عبير يوسف إبراهيم السلوم

Assistant Professor

رئيسة قسم المحاسبة

كلية إدارة الأعمال
كلية ادارة الاعمال، قسم المحاسبة
المنشورات
ورقة مؤتمر
2014
تم النشر فى:

Women’s Desire for Change in the Accounting Workplace: Insights from Saudi Arabia

, Abeer Alsalloom . 2014

كتابة

Professional careers grant prestige, social influence and economic rewards (Johnson, 1972) therefore, women’s integration and successful representation in these sectors may be essential to our understanding of gender inequality (Percheski, 2008). The organizational practices of accounting firms continue to attract research attention because they appear to reproduce gender domination and seem to be resistant to change in spite of the growing number of women joining, and progressing, in the profession (Anderson-Gough et al., 2005; Benschop et al., 2012). Whilst the majority of the extant research has been carried out in Western contexts and has been preoccupied with the progression of women (or lack thereof) to the upper echelons of accounting firms, this paper investigates the experiences of women accountants working in the Big Four firms in Saudi Arabia, where the emphasis is on their recent entry to the profession, the career opportunities being made available to them and the barriers facing them in the workplace.
            The study primarily relies on 42 interviews of female and male accountants and adopts the feminist critical theoretical approach (Abbott et al., 2005) to analyse the findings. Insights from the interviews reveal that despite the growing interest in women’s integration into the profession, cultural aspects represent the major barrier to women’s integration and progression. In joining the profession and gaining access to professional knowledge and skills, women accountants in Saudi Arabia face various difficulties including clients’ expectations, physical segregation and women’s predefined social roles which all have influenced the way accounting and auditing are practiced. These difficulties arise from practices which are strongly rooted in local socio-cultural traditions and are overlapped with expressed religious values. Women’s recent access to the accounting profession has created the potential for two streams of the profession in the Saudi context, one for men and one for women. Saudi women accountants are trying to experience accountancy and change in terms of phases; they are being patient in order to open up the way for others and achieve the desired change. This study provides a theoretical contribution to our notion of change within the professionalization of accounting. This paper identifies and supports the importance of studying the dominant social context and its origins to gain an understanding of issues related to gender and accountancy. In the Saudi social context gender experience, at any one time, is a shifting set of multiple experiences where gender, religious and cultural and institutional aspects are interrelated and influence how accounting or auditing is practiced.
 
 

نوع عمل المنشور
Conference Paper
موقع المؤتمر
York University, Toronto, Canada
اسم المؤتمر
Critical Perspectives on Accounting Conference
المنظمة الممولة
York University, Toronto, Canada
مزيد من المنشورات
publications

This paper aims to examine how organisational ‘space’ is implicated in gendering practices in auditing and contributes to impeding the entry or progress of women within the profession.…

بواسطة Dila Agrizzi, Teerooven Soobaroyen, Abeer Alsalloom
2021
تم النشر فى:
Elsevier
publications

The adoption of religious nationalism as a public project by the Saudi state continues to intimately shape the experiences of Saudi women, despite recent initiatives facilitating the participation…

بواسطة Sian, S., Wright, T., Agrizzi, D., & Alsalloom, A
2020
publications

This study investigates the experiences of women accountants working in the Big Four accounting firms in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), to extend our knowledge of issues related to gender and…

بواسطة Abeer Yousef Alsalloom
2015