Beautiful SWAN, or ugly duckling? The attempt to reduce gender inequality by the Society of Women Accountants of Nigeria

The global issue of women’s marginalisation in the accounting profession has receivedsignificant attention from researchers but tends to focus on women’s work in publicaccounting firms, rather than their leadership in professional associations, and has as yetfailed to explore the African context. Additionally, it is often argued that when womenare involved in leadership positions, they can transform inequality by highlighting andreversing practices that marginalise women, but whether this happens in practice isoverlooked in the accounting literature. In this study we begin to address these gaps byusing Huffman’s (Huffman, 2016) conceptualisation of women leaders as agents ofchange or cogs in the machine to articulate the role and impact of a Nigerian femalebody of accountants on inequality in the Nigerian accounting profession. Our findingsreveal a complex scenario showing that while women leaders may transform inequalitypositively, underlying sociocultural pressures have the potential to divert and subvertlong run change. Thus, our findings suggest that either women leaders play a transitoryrole in transforming gender inequality in the accounting profession and society, or thattheir role becomes transitory if focus on the original emancipatory objectives is lost.