Damian Wild

These are the sorts of questions this year’s Accountancy Age Top 50 is bound to generate. To a degree, they are as unanswerable now as they have ever been; though, in truth, the relevance of the questions has waned. All the same, the statistics speak for themselves: accountancy remains a profession that is dominated by white men.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard sly mention over the past decade of how the make-up of the profession is about to change. Institute topping out ceremonies are regularly diverse affairs, yet there has been a failure to translate this into diversity at the top. One female managing partner in a Top 50 firm is not an impressive statistic .

Of course, it’s not confined to accountancy. A few weeks ago I attended the launch of the first Women in the City Awards. Val Singh, deputy director of the international centre for women business leaders at Cranfield School of Management, spoke at the launch and revealed some grim statistics about the state of female representation within the upper tiers of business.

Among FTSE100 companies, only 4% of executive directors are women. (She could have added that only 1% of its CFOs are female: Helen Weir of Lloyds TSB). Around 12% of top team members are female, at least, suggesting a pipeline that may push up the alarming top table statistic a little in the coming years. This rises to 16% among FTSE250 companies.

Interestingly, Singh recently interviewed chief executives and chairmen of many of these companies about what they wanted to see from their female executives and the answer certainly wasn’t for them to act more like their male colleagues. ‘They want women on the board who are honest about their emotional intelligence,’ she said. ‘They want women who are brave enough and honest enough to say when they feel something isn’t right.’

Author and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan’s explanation of why more substantial change hasn’t yet happened perhaps hit the nail on the head. ‘You can get the job - we’ve shown that. You can get the title and sometimes you can even get the salary. What’s difficult to get is clout so when as a woman you open your mouth, everybody shuts up and listens.’

Damian Wild is editor-in-chief of Accountancy Age