The Auditing Standards of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s (PCAOB) provide authoritative guidance to auditors of U.S. public companies during their audits. However, these standards predominantly employ masculine generic pronouns instead of gender-specific or gender-neutral pronouns. Reflecting the audit profession’s and the PCAOB’s emphasis on equity and inclusion, as well as the significance to the profession of the “tone from above” set by regulators, it is crucial to analyze how language used in these pronouncements affects the assessment of equity and inclusion in accounting.
A recent study explores how the use of masculine language in professional guidance affects assessments of the equity and inclusion of historically marginalized gender and sexual orientation groups in the accounting profession by employing three experiments.
The first experiment involves manipulating the pronouns used in auditing standards, presenting them as masculine vs. gender-inclusive. The participants in this experiment consist of practicing accounting professionals and recent accounting alumni. The results reveal that masculine pronouns reduce accounting professionals‘ assessed equity and inclusion of women and LGBTQ+ people in the audit profession.
The second experiment involves U.S. college students who read a neutral-language accounting job ad, followed by professional guidance that uses masculine vs. gender-inclusive pronouns. Afterwards the students are required to evaluate the accounting profession’s equity and inclusion of women and LGBTQ+ people. The findings demonstrate that the use of masculine pronouns reduce students‘ equity and inclusion assessments, and this effect is stronger for women and LGBTQ+ participants.
The third experiment involves LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ U.S. residents assessing the equity and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the accounting profession. The results indicate that pronouns have a stronger impact on LGBTQ+ participants compared to non-LGBTQ+ participants. For LGBTQ+ participants, the effect of pronouns is not conditioned on participant gender. However, pronouns affect non-LGBTQ+ women’s, but not non-LGBTQ+ men’s, assessments of LGBTQ+ equity and inclusion.
By conducting three experiments, this study shows evidence that gender-exclusive language in authoritative professional guidance affects the assessments of equity and inclusion of historically marginalized gender and sexual orientation groups. Regulators and audit firms should take note of these findings as such language may convey regressive gender attitudes and cis- and hetero-normative biases, undermining inclusion efforts within the profession.
You can find the study here.