Whatever happened to all the bright young male accountants?

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Whatever happened to all the bright young male accountants?

By Jon Ashworth The chief executive of ACCA muses on why women are taking over and other matters

THE accountant of the future is female, ambitious and Asian. Women from the Far East are poised to outnumber men in accountancy in the coming decades. “There is a gender wave coming through,” says Allen Blewitt, chief executive of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the world’s largest accountancy organisation outside China. “If you look in the Far East and the developing world, the vast majority of entrants to the profession are female. In ten years’ time, in most countries, the profession will be dominated numerically by women.”

Some 38 per cent of ACCA’s members — and 50 per cent of students — are female. “I talk to lawyers, even some of the engineers, and they’re seeing the same thing,” says Blewitt. “The interesting question is, what’s happening to the bright young men?”

ACCA has more than 105,000 members and 240,000 students in more than 170 countries. It recruited 68,000 students last year alone, a quarter of them in China, Malaysia and Singapore.

Blewitt, 54, is 18 months into a five-year stint as the chief executive of ACCA. A former university lecturer from Sydney, he has taken to banging the ACCA drum, lobbying politicians, making speeches and jetting around the organisation’s international network.

It is no easy task. In the notoriously snobbish accountancy profession, ACCA has stumbled along in the shadow of that elite club, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). When the ICAEW announced plans to merge with the body representing public finance accountants, it was no surprise when ACCA openly attacked the idea.

Those plans are continuing. Blewitt, who witnessed two failed attempts to merge institutes in Australia, believes the ICAEW will find it hard going. “The model for merging accountancy bodies is probably flawed,” he says. “We educated accountants to be sceptical and conservative, yet you are asking people to forget years of entrenched mindsets.”

He believes that institutes should collaborate first, then worry about whether or not to merge.

As for all that snobbish rivalry, Blewitt adopts the tone of the underdog. “I think there’s probably a need for the profession in the UK to take a bit of a helicopter view and say, ‘forget your own narrow piece of turf, there are bigger issues that we have to face as a profession.’ That means compromise and mutual respect.”

Where the ICAEW speaks for the City and large blue chip companies, ACCA, with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) making up nearly 60 per cent of its membership, brings its own perspective. “If the whole model was based on mutual respect and collaboration, we might get somewhere,” Blewitt says. He may well be right, but there’s no incentive for the ICAEW to find common ground.

Accountants outside the UK wear the ACCA badge with pride. The organisation is fast increasing market share in Central and Eastern Europe and in many parts of Asia. Critics would say that that is because ACCA is “easier” (and hence devalued as a qualification), although Blewitt argues otherwise. “Technically, we know that the qualification is very strong. The first nine papers are the equivalent of a degree,” he says.

Surprisingly, Africa speaks for only 5 per cent of ACCA membership (against 48 per cent in the UK). Blewitt blames the low penetration on poor education, poverty and the blight of HIV/Aids.

“There is the possibility that 30 per cent of young professionals who graduate in subSaharan Africa will be dead by the age of 40,” he says. “Our practical contribution is to make sure that we can provide an accessible qualification so that people can use accountancy as a career mobility tool.”

Inroads are being made in China, where ACCA recently formed a link with Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Blewitt has undoubtedly brought some stability to ACCA. His predecessor, Anthea Rose, departed amid some controversy at the end of 2003. Two successors accepted — but then rejected — the job. With Blewitt, it was a case of third time lucky.

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Without openly criticising Rose, he hints that ACCA needed to change. “I think that it was a little bit more inward-looking than it should have been and probably focused on growth as the principal measure of success. Now, we’ve got a much more diversified set of measures. It’s not just ticking off growth; it’s more about influence and reputation building. Ultimately, we can best represent members if key stakeholders like regulators and governments take us seriously.”

ACCA recently appointed a head of public policy and communications to help to raise its profile at Westminster

Blewitt left his lecturing job at Sydney University in 1985 to take over education and training at Australia’s chartered accountancy institute. “It was a three-year assignment that ended up, 19 years later, in the UK.”

He was ACCA’s executive director for the Asia-Pacific region when the chief executive’s job came up.

Blewitt says he is enjoying himself — he is certainly enthusiastic — and he seems to thrive on his round of meetings and speeches. “Anyone who thinks that a modern professional body is a piece of cake should come and share my desk for a week. It’s important for the chief executive to be visible.”

Old attitudes are hard to shift and it is difficult to imagine that the association will ever achieve parity with ICAEW. Blewitt says this is to see things from a UK perspective. Internationally, the picture is shifting. “We probably produce more accountants globally for the big four firms than any other designation. People should stop constantly evaluating the accounting profession through a UK frame of reference.”

Warming to his theme, he adds: “We just have to keep broadening it to say, look globally at what’s happening. There is no other profession that can transcend boundaries the way that accountancy does.”

Even the chartered accountants would have to agree with that. The chief executive of ACCA muses on why women are taking over and other matters.