Hartford Business Journal

16 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | MAY 27, 2024 Susan Jackson was recently named managing partner of KPMG's Hartford office. Rising Up Greater Hartford's largest accounting firms are increasingly being led by women definitely are with each passing year." Nationally, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' 2021 Trends report showed that women held 39% of partnership positions in the profession, up from 23% two years previously. Work-life balance There are reasons beyond equity why these changes are important. Like most professions, accounting is facing a workforce pipeline crisis as baby boomers retire. "And there's more demand now for CPAs than there used to be," Stewart said — not just at public accounting firms, but also throughout government, municipalities and corporations. "We have much higher demand than we have the number of people right now." That means the push for diversity, equity and inclusion in the profession matters as a business case. So, while people coming into the profession are more likely to be women these days, addressing that mid-career drop off that Jackson saw among her peers is increasingly important. How can accounting retain women? "The firm itself, across the country, is very focused on diversity and is very focused on making the career a place that you can stay long term," Jackson says of KPMG. That means addressing excessive work hours and providing adequate parental leave, flexible work sched- ules and general support for work-life balance. And she says in some ways, the experience of COVID may have helped with this. By Harriet Jones Hartford Business Journal Contributor W hen Susan Jackson took the reins as managing partner at KPMG's Hartford office in May, she became the fourth woman to lead one of the 10 largest accounting firms in Greater Hartford. It's a slow shift in leadership gender balance that's mirrored on the national stage. It took until 2015 for one of the "Big Four" to be helmed by a woman, when Cathy Engelbert took over as CEO of Deloitte's U.S. operations. (She's now the commis- sioner of the WNBA.) Globally, when Janet Truncale steps up as CEO of EY later this summer, she will become the first woman at that level. And while Jackson and other women in the profession say these are all good indications that the historic gender gap in accounting has closed markedly in recent years, they also say there's more work to be done. When she started in the late 1980s, Jackson estimates the peers in her hiring class were two-thirds men to one-third women. "There was still a good amount of women that I started with — but after five or six years, a lot of them were gone," she said. "I was the first woman to make partner in Hartford, and that was in 1999. So, I think in my growing-up years, the mentors for me were men." She says more often now, there's at least a 50-50 gender balance within new hiring classes, and some are more women than men. Bonnie Stewart, CEO of the Connecticut Society of CPAs, says she's seen the overall gender balance in the profession shift in women's favor in just the last few years. "The CPA community now is just slightly over half female," she said. "Last year, we were 52% females and 48% male. And so with that, you would expect to see more senior-level individuals that are female, and we Greater Hartford accounting firms led by women Susan Jackson, managing partner of KPMG's Hartford office Susan Martinelli, Hartford office leader and assurance partner, RSM US LLP Melissa Ferrucci, office managing partner, CT offices, CohnReznick Amelia Caporale, office managing partner, EY Hartford office Bonnie Stewart HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER

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