Accounting's diversity gap persists despite decades of support programs

For decades, accounting has marketed itself as a pathway to stability and prosperity. Universities, firms, and professional bodies have poured resources into scholarships, mentoring programs, and student support initiatives, betting that removing financial and logistical barriers would open the profession to people from marginalized backgrounds. The logic seemed sound: talented students just needed help getting through the door. Yet the door has remained stubbornly narrow. A new analysis of 81 peer-reviewed studies on diversity in accounting education and practice reveals why—and the finding cuts deeper than most diversity initiatives have been willing to look.

The research, conducted by accounting professors in South Africa and reviewed through the lens of Canadian academic work, shows a profession stuck in a particular way of thinking about its own problems. For the past thirty years, when accounting struggled to diversify, the response was almost reflexive: provide more tutoring, more money, more mentors. The underlying assumption was that the barriers lived inside the students themselves—that they needed to be fixed, shaped, prepared to fit into existing institutions. But newer scholarship tells a different story. It asks a harder question: what if the institutions themselves are the problem?

The numbers make the stagnation visible. The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, tracking disparities since 2006, projects that full gender parity in the profession remains roughly 123 years away at the current pace. Women now earn more university degrees than men globally, yet they represent only 29.5 percent of senior managers with tertiary qualifications. Between 2015 and 2024, women's representation in top management crept from 25.7 percent to 28.1 percent—a gain of 2.4 percentage points in nine years. The momentum has slowed since 2022. In South Africa, where one of the study's authors is based, the pattern repeats: decades of diversity work have yielded less transformation than anyone expected.

What the research reveals is a shift in how scholars have come to understand the problem itself. In the early 1990s, underrepresentation was framed as a student problem. If someone struggled, the answer was support—catch them up, help them adapt. By the 2020s, researchers began asking why capable students continued to hit obstacles even after receiving help, and why qualified professionals still felt they did not belong. The focus moved from individual deficits to institutional environments. And what emerged from that reframing was a catalog of barriers that no scholarship could solve alone.

Students across continents reported the same experiences: they came to accounting for the promise of good jobs, but once inside, they felt like outsiders. They navigated language barriers, found themselves locked out of informal professional networks, rarely saw people who looked like them in positions of authority, and encountered institutional cultures that assumed everyone arrived with the same background, resources, and ways of being. Some interventions worked remarkably well—joining professional associations strengthened belonging; cream-colored exam paper instead of white helped students with dyslexia; inclusive language in job postings signaled to women and LGBTQ+ applicants that they might actually fit. Culturally responsive teaching, visible role models, and genuine mentoring relationships made measurable differences.

But the most striking finding cut to something deeper. Many of the barriers that professionals faced had almost nothing to do with technical competence. Instead, they involved organizational culture, unspoken expectations, psychological safety, and the constant pressure to conform to dominant professional norms. Professionals described having to repeatedly prove their worth, modulating their language and behavior, hiding parts of their identity just to survive. These are not problems that another mentoring program addresses. They are structural. They are cultural. They require institutions to change, not just students.

This realization has begun to reshape how organizations think about diversity work. Mentoring and scholarships remain important—they open doors. But the research makes clear that what happens after someone walks through that door matters just as much as whether they walk through it at all. Lasting transformation requires restructuring recruitment practices, promotion systems, curriculum design, and the everyday experience of belonging within organizations. It means asking not just how many people from historically marginalized groups enter accounting, but whether the profession has actually changed enough for diverse talent to flourish once they arrive. The gap between entry and thriving has been the profession's blind spot for thirty years. The research suggests it is time to look directly at it.