Accounting's diversity money is aimed at the wrong stage of the career

Two accounting researchers read 81 peer-reviewed studies on diversity in the profession and concluded that the standard remedy of the past three decades, tutoring and scholarships and mentoring aimed at students, rests on a premise the more recent evidence does not support ^[6][7][9]. For anyone allocating a diversity budget, that is a routing problem: the spending sits at university entry, and the research points at the institutions graduates walk into afterwards ^[10][16].

The distance between those two stages is measurable. Women now outperform men in tertiary education globally, yet hold only 29.5% of senior manager posts among people with tertiary qualifications, according to the World Economic Forum's 2025 Global Gender Gap Report ^[3]. The same report puts full gender parity an estimated 123 years away at the current rate ^[2], which is to say somewhere around 2148 ^[3]. Representation in top management moved from 25.7% in 2015 to 28.1% in 2024 ^[4], which is 2.4 percentage points in nine years, roughly a quarter of a point a year ^[1]. Hold that pace and the remaining climb to half takes about another 82 years ^[2]. The WEF also records progress slowing since 2022 ^[4].

The review, by an accounting professor based in South Africa working with researcher Joanne Sopt, traces how the academic framing shifted ^[6][5]. In the early 1990s, underrepresentation was treated as an individual problem: students who struggled needed to catch up, so the answer was tutoring, mentoring and financial assistance ^[8]. Those programmes assumed the barrier sat inside the student, and that the task was preparing people to fit existing institutions ^[7]. From about 2020, researchers began asking why capable students still hit obstacles after receiving that support, and why some already-qualified professionals did too ^[9]. That question moved the object of study from perceived individual deficits to the environments people are expected to learn and work in ^[10].

What the studies found repeats across continents and demographic groups. Students were drawn to accounting because it promised stable jobs and financial security, and then reported that they did not belong ^[11]: language barriers, limited access to professional networks, few role models who shared their backgrounds, and institutional cultures that assumed everyone arrived with similar experiences and resources ^[12]. In South Africa, the author notes, changing gender and racial representation in the profession has been slower than expected ^[5]. Getting more students through the university gates turned out to be the easier half of the job ^[17].

The review does not tell anyone to stop funding scholarships; it says those programmes remain important ^[14]. What it adds is that meaningful support goes past financial assistance to visible role models, culturally responsive teaching, strong mentoring relationships and institutions that recognise the experience students bring rather than discount it ^[13], and that designs have to fit local histories, identities and institutional realities rather than be imported wholesale ^[15]. The authors place the obligation on universities, employers and professional organisations, and argue the next phase is changing institutions to fit the people they were created to serve ^[16].

Two limits worth holding onto. This is a literature review rather than an evaluation with effect sizes, and it attaches no cost to any intervention ^[6], so it locates the blockage without pricing the fix. And the tell for whether employers have absorbed the finding is where they put their measurement. Intake and graduation counts are cheap to publish and, on this evidence, no longer the binding constraint ^[3][17]. Promotion and retention rates by cohort, step by step through the manager grades, are the ones that would show movement.