Today I'm coming to you fresh from the Botkeeper's AI Unchained conference in Sonoma, California, and we're diving into a crucial topic: "More Women Partners, Please." This was the focus of a roundtable I led at the conference, and I'm excited to share the key insights with you.
The Current State: A Concerning Gap
Despite women making up a majority of the accounting workforce, fewer than 25% reach the position of partner, principal, or business owner. Even more alarming, over a million talented women exit the profession before attaining these senior roles. Why is this happening?
Barriers to Advancement of More Women Partners
There are many barriers as to why we don't have more women partners, and the first step is acknowledging this problem. By having conversations, we begin to normalize the challenge that women are facing. Otherwise, we'll continue to see more Partners throw in the towel.
Balancing Career and Family: Women often face different expectations at work and home, creating a challenging juggling act.
Overworking to Get Ahead: Many women feel pressured to overperform, leading to burnout and eventual exit from the profession.
Confidence Gap: Women tend to feel they need to meet all job requirements before applying, while men often apply with fewer qualifications.
Organizational Culture: Some firm cultures, especially in smaller practices, may unintentionally hinder women's progression.
Lack of Balanced Role Models: There's a shortage of women leaders who demonstrate a well-rounded, balanced life.
Current Challenges
Return to Office Mandates: This is disproportionately affecting women, especially those with caregiving responsibilities.
Billable Hour Requirements: Juggling billable targets with other responsibilities can be particularly challenging for women.
Imposter Syndrome: This affects different generations differently but remains a significant hurdle for many women.
Actionable Solutions
Work-Life Balance Initiatives: Implement flexible work arrangements and family-friendly policies.
Supportive Work Cultures: Create environments where women feel empowered and valued. This includes having both women and men as advocates.
Confidence-Building Programs: Offer mentorship, sponsorship, and leadership development programs specifically aimed at women.
Leadership Accountability: Hold firm leadership accountable for promoting gender equality and advancing women to partner roles.
Key Takeaways from the Roundtable
ERGs (Employee Resource Groups) alone are not enough. We need more robust mentorship, coaching, and sponsorship programs.
Women want opportunities based on merit, not gender. It's about being the right person for the role, regardless of gender or race.
We need more male advocates. This isn't just a "women's issue" - it's a profession-wide challenge that requires collective action.
What happens if we can't get more women Partners?
The cost of losing talented women is immense - both in terms of missed opportunities for diversity in leadership and the financial cost of replacement (which can be up to 200% of an employee's salary). We can't afford to keep losing women from our profession.
What's one actionable step you can take at your firm to promote more women into partnership roles? Maybe it's becoming a mentor, seeking out a mentee, or advocating for more robust support programs. Regardless of what you choose, consider it a step in the right direction.
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What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
The current state of women in leadership roles in accounting, law, and consulting
Main barriers preventing women from advancing to partner roles
Actionable solutions to promote more women into partnership positions
Watch The Full Episode:
Full Episode Transcript:
# Billable Hour Burnout Episode 30: More Women Partners, Please
Hello. Hello. We are live. Greetings, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We're getting started here. Hello and happy Tuesday. I hope everybody had a nice weekend. If you had a long weekend, I hope you had a great Monday. If you had to work yesterday. Welcome to billable Hour burnout. This is big. Today is episode 30. It's huge. Today's episode 30. And I am celebrating with you today with a whole new episode coming to you right now.
So we're talking about more women partners, please. That's the topic from today. It's a roundtable that I led at last week's bot keeper AI unchained conference in Sonoma, California. Got back last night, so, still feeling some of that jet lag, but let's get started.
So, for today, despite women making up a majority of the accounting workforce, fewer than 25% reach the position of partner, principal, or business owner. What's even more concerning is that over a million talented women exit the profession before ever attaining these senior roles. Why is this happening? There are so many reasons which we're going to discuss in today's roundtable episode.
But first, let me welcome you to the show. This is billable hour burnout. If you are looking for helpful tactical advice that actually helps you have the career of your dreams without the stress or the overwhelm, you are in the right place. If you want to enjoy the life that you spent decades building, you are in the right place. If you're finding yourself here today, it means you're ready to experience more work life balance, more ease, more confidence, and you're ready to do it without having to quit your job or burn down your life.
My name is Lauren Baptiste. I'm your big four auditor and regulatory tax consultant. And this turned life coach. No longer that consultant, and you're listening to billable hour burnout. On the show, I share simple tactics and mindset strategies specifically catered to the modern accountant, consultant, and attorney. You ready?
Episode 30. Hooray. 30 episodes we've been going at this week over week over week, and I am so honored to have you here with me. Each episode along the way started in sweaters, and we're back in sweaters now. It's October 15 over here, so I just wanted to give you a little personal anecdote.
I just got back from Napa after the conference. I have to fill everybody in. It was such an incredible conference. So what we had was a beautiful group of human beings that came together. I saw a lot from last year also here at the second AI unchained. But then there was also, thousands of participants online. So it's just an incredible event. They said it was highest attended, and then after that event, so I held two roundtables. So I'm doing one of them with you this week. And then I held a speaking event, and I talked about the five steps at end burnout. So there's a little hint that that's coming to you soon as my next webinar, which is going to be really exciting. And the five steps don't include taking a vacation or slowing down, because that just doesn't work in our profession. So I'm going to teach you a bigger and better way to do it.
So after the conference, I went to Napa. So I don't know if you've ever been to Napa. It's. It's beautiful. I've never been there before. I didn't know what to expect. I was thinking it was, like, going to be like Italy, and it's not. It's so different, but it's. It's wineries meets, like, the dryness. It has, like, a little bit of. For me, it was, like, utah vibes. I don't know. It had palm trees and it had greenery, and it was. For me, I'm like, where am I? But it was beautiful and lovely, and it refilled my cup.
So let's talk about today's client success story. We're talking about more women partners, please. So this comes from one of my clients. She is a senior partner at a small firm, and what I love from her story is how much one can shift with the power of coaching. So she's shared.
Lauren's coaching was exactly what I needed as a partner. I felt the pressure to step out of the shadow of my other senior partners and truly see myself as a leader. Lauren provided the structure and support that allowed me to delegate more effectively, advocate for myself, and plan for the future. These sessions helped me feel more confident in my role, and I could finally disconnect from my work without feeling guilty. The impact on my life has been significant, and I'm incredibly grateful for the clarity and direction Lauren has given me. I'm in a much better place now and know that I can continue to build on this progress. Yay. Love this.
So this is such a great. I love how on Instagram. I'm just getting a call. It's fine. So as we are. This is live, man. You're getting all the real deal.
All right, so this is incredible testimonial. As we're teeing up today's conversation so we talked about 25% of women. Only that small percentage make it to the top. 75% not making it to the top. So where are they going? Where are these women going? So there's another statistic that I thought would be really interesting and helpful here is it says, according to certain studies, that it will take women more than 100 years to find equality with Mendez. Now, do we see the same thing in accounting and law and consulting? Questionable. Now what I'm seeing. Right. And we'll talk about that actually in a little bit. But why are we not getting to the top? Why is it not a 50 50 split at least? Why is it 75% of women feeling and getting left behind?
Well, there's a few reasons. There's the need to balance career and family. The expectations placed on women are generally different than the expectations placed on men. Right. It's general, but we still see that generally women have expectations to show up fully at work and fully at home, which creates a barrier to advancement. If they have to show up fully at home, that's one of the things that they can't just let go of. So then what that means is then they're unable to fully show up in their job. That's why we see, like, Sheryl Sandberg's lean in, or we hear this idea of, like, picking and choosing of, do you want to be a full parent, for example, or a caretaking, like, caretaking for your parents, or do you want to have a career? And this is where we're having this conversation where it doesn't have to be one or all, but this is one of the reasons why women get held back.
So balancing career and family, this overworking to get ahead. So a lot of women come in with these type a tendencies of, like, I have to work really hard to get to where I want to go. I have to over perform and overcompensate to the consequence of burnout. And then when women get to that place, they decide, I'm going to quit. I'm going to go nonprofit. I'm going to decide, I don't need partner, I'm going to go in house. Right? So the overworking is a barrier.
Another is a confidence gap. You might have heard the statistic that on a resume or on a job description, if there are ten things they say, generally men check off one of the things and they apply for the job. Women feel like, unless I check off all ten I know apply, I don't qualify for the job. So self doubt creeps in here. And what that could look like is not stepping up for the big leadership roles, not having the mentorship or seeing the mentors of who they want to be. And it prevents women from seeking these high level roles because they're seeing a gap there. They're seeing, like, there's no seat for me here. So that gap creates a barrier for why women aren't making it to the top.
Then there's culture or organizational culture, the role in firms that are either supporting or hindering women's progression. There was an interesting conversation in the roundtable that I led last week that was saying how in this, if we're talking about women either supporting or hindering, sometimes it's the size of the firm. It might be really easy in a big firm for women to go on maternity leave and have families because someone else can step in. But think about a smaller firm, a solo or small firm, where you're trying to handle it all yourself. It can be really challenging. So culture can play into it? The work culture can absolutely play.
So let's look at the last one that I have here. The barrier that's also preventing women from getting to the top is that lack of the right. The right role models, women having balanced lives, having the life personally and professionally. I hear this a lot, that they'll see women as partners, but maybe they aren't married. Maybe they are working all the time. Maybe they don't have full, balanced lives. I know when I was working at the profession, it wasn't even about men or women. I just remember so many of the partners that were at the top didn't have fullness in their lives. They didn't have hobbies after work. They didn't get to spend time with those that they loved. It was work, sleep, travel, repeat. And for me, that didn't feel inspiring. And so we see that as a barrier as to why women aren't making it to that leadership rank.
So I want you to take a moment, right, if we're doing a virtual mini roundtable in this billable hour burnout episode, what barriers are you seeing as the main reasons that women aren't advancing to partner roles? So what barriers are you seeing as the main reason women aren't advancing to partner roles and whether that's partner, principal, leadership, whatever that means to you. But what was interesting in the roundtable that I was in is that things have changed. They're better, but they're not perfect. Right? We're not there yet.
So back in the day, there were no resources to support women. There was no structure to support women. And what that meant, right. Even now, we see that there are challenges with lactation rooms that didn't even exist then. Right. Even the way that we were dressed or the way that we were supposed to be, there was no flexibility. Not too long ago, there weren't even public women's restrooms. Right. So we have to be mindful that things have progressed significantly over the years, even if we're not where we want to be. But let's say back in the day, the structure didn't exist. What we also saw is when women did get to the top. One of the comments that came from the roundtable is that sometimes women that do get, become successful pull the ladder up. What that means is that they're not bringing more women with them. So they get to the top and they stay at the top, and they're not mentoring other women to come up with them.
Other feedback that I received, what I thought was really interesting, is this idea. Right. We talked about this a little bit of, like, the idea of a partner meant having kids, or partner either meant you had to choose between having kids or leaving the profession. Or if you were to have a family, then maybe you go on this floor, flexible work arrangement, or you go part time, but then there's no future promotion or progression. So it's like, okay, well, then you want to be mindful of when you have a family, because if you can't promote farther than that, then you need to just be mindful that this is. Then you're stuck. So that's an interesting perspective that we got from the roundtable.
Another thing that came up is that I was, what I mentioned here is how it can be really hard for, in smaller firms for women to make progress because there's no coverage. So we can see that in bigger firms, you are seeing better ratios, closer to, like, toward the 50 50. You can see that there's a lot more intention there and a lot more availability to get there. And they're. They're setting the trends, and I love that. But we have to be mindful in small firms that we may still be seeing a disproportionate share of men partners versus women partners.
Now, when we talked about what are the main reasons we're seeing struggles today, it looks like three things that were coming up in the roundtable. Strongest, one of the things that's holding women back now return to office. This is affecting women significantly. When Covid came right. Even before COVID things have changed. Your kids can't just walk home from school anymore. You need to pick them up at the bus. If you don't have a flexible schedule, who's supposed to be the one to grab the kids? Right. Return to office has created a lot of flexibility, but it's also created a lot of challenges. It gets pulled away when certain days of the week are mandated and you don't have the flexibility, then what happens is now something's gotta give. And a lot of times, again, it points to the women. So return to office is one of the biggest struggles we're seeing.
Billable hours is one of the things that came up in the roundtable of, are women able to bill enough hours when they're trying to juggle all these other responsibilities? If you're in a solo or a small firm, think about every hour you bill is your revenue, is your salary. And so this can be a struggle that we're dealing with today as a barrier. And as I talk about billable hour burnout all the time, this is the name of the show. It's something to be mindful of, that getting to your billable hours can be a challenge if you are juggling other things outside of that normal day to day responsibility. So even single parents, how they handle that, the circumstances are just so different. Caretaking, that's a challenge, too.
So just being mindful of all that, the third struggle that we're seeing that came up in the roundtable and today's life and in today's conversation is this idea of the imposter syndrome. It's really that confidence gap that I talked about earlier, and we're seeing that different. It's looking different for Gen Zs than maybe even for millennials, and different from boomers. Right? So imposter syndrome is sneaking up in different areas for different genders, for different age groups. It's showing up. And this confidence, this lack of confidence feels pretty real when we're dealing with so much uncertainty, uncertainty in the political climate, uncertainty in regulatory updates. There's just so much uncertainty with, is my client going to stay with me? Are they going to go to someone a few dollars cheaper across the street? There's so much uncertainty. And when uncertainty arises, confidence drops. So we can see how imposter syndrome is playing into all of this, but it's felt even more for women than we see for Mendez. Women handle this much differently.
And so this is where we're not just talking about what's the problem, but we're going to talk about now shifting into what is an actionable solution. So there's a few things to think about as we move into solutions, and I want you to think about which one would resonate most for you and your company. Right? So start with thinking about you, what resonates most for you, and then think about, okay, now, for my company, what would work? And if you're like, no, none of these would work. Well, something's got to work, right? So we want to find something that works. And so let me know if you're like, hey, I have a different idea, or something. I have another. Or, this might not work for me. Or this would work for me. Let me know. Send me a message on Instagram or wherever you're watching this on LinkedIn. I would love to know your feedback and your actual solutions.
All right, so let's talk about some of the ones that were discussed at the table. Actionable solutions include work life balance. Right. We know this one. Work life harmony, work life integration, life work balance. I don't care what you call it. You know what I'm talking about. It's this initiative to find balance to retain your top female talent, which includes flexible work arrangements, family friendly policies, even. Right. We see, like, bereavement leaves and lactation rooms and things that need to be there so that we can find proper balance in how we live and how we work.
Now, just a side caveat. When I talk about work life balance, I use that term. I don't use the other ones, but it's really whatever you choose. I like to think of it balance as on a pendulum. If a pendulum is swinging back and forth, sometimes you're leaning more towards life, sometimes you're leaning more towards work. But the pendulum needs to always be swinging. You can't stay in one side all the time. You stay in work all the time, you end up burning out. If you stay in life all the time, maybe you don't have a job anymore. So you need to find that balance. And it's not about 50 50 split. Right. We have, you know, and I guess we have to do the math and figure out what that means for us. Let's include, if we're including our sleep as part of our work life balance, if we're including logging off and having evenings to ourself and work life balance. But we need to see the number of hours that we're expected to work. And in the profession, it's pretty high with our billable hour expectations, someas high as, like 200 a month or 2000 a year. Right. We can see where this goes. So we have to have those initiatives to give the balance of knowing. Okay, well, then if I have to bill this number of hours, how do I work backwards? What doesn't seem really balanced is when you have these billable hour expectations and then I, your vacation doesn't really count. So you still have to bill, let's say, 200 hours in a month, but you're still trying to take 40 hours of leave. It gets tricky because now you're going to be working essentially nights and weekends, except when you're on vacation, that doesn't feel balanced.
So we need to find ways and have, we'll move into our second one, supportive work cultures. So we need to encourage firms to create environments where women can feel empowered and valued. So supportive cultures can look like, could have really powerful ergs, employee resource groups. Some are good, a lot of them are not. A lot of them are not well budgeted or funded. They're more off the side of the desk. And while it can be collaborative, maybe it's not, or maybe it's supportive, but it's not like uplifting or even like effective. So we need to think about culture also, and we'll talk about this in a bit. But like, thinking about a supportive culture, it's not just women supporting women. We need men supporting women. We need everybody supporting each other. We need to be lifting up a rising tide for everybody so that everybody can be successful.
The third one, confidence building programs. If we know that there's a confidence gap and we're dealing with imposter syndrome across the board, then we need programs that build confidence for women. This is mentorship. This is sponsorship. This is leadership development and other coaching programs, other programs aimed at women to give them the tools that they need to thrive. We need to be taking this seriously. If women are some of our best talent, then we're doing ourself a disservice by not giving the women these tools at these pivotal moments when they're thinking, should I stay or should I go?
The fourth here for an actionable solution is leadership accountability. How firms can hold leadership accountable for promoting gender equality. The more women we get in there, the more women we can have advocating for each other. We need to stop pulling that ladder up. We need to start doing the extended ladder down. We need to get more women at younger ranks coming up. You know, even if at first we don't have a lot of women at the ranks, we need to work with men to make sure that we are thinking about gender equality, that we are thinking about giving women the promotability to get to where they need to go. And that goes to the other solutions that we talked about, right. If we're building a supportive culture, if we're creating work life balance, if we're investing in confidence building programming, we're likely to get there faster, right? So that's why leadership accountability, I put last because if we can build the other ones sequentially, then what we'll do is create an overall program, or what I like to call organizational resilience, where we can all thrive.
All right, so these are some examples of actionable solutions. I would love you to be thinking about what actionable solutions would be successful for your firm. So taking a moment to reflect, right, in our virtual roundtable or one sided roundtable today, what are some of the successful programs you've seen that have helped women advance into leadership at your firm? What are some of the programs you've seen? So thinking about, is it just been mentorship and sponsorship? Has there been something else that has gotten women to where they want to go?
So that's one thing to think about. Another thing to think about is how leadership can better support women in navigating their careers and support in balancing personal commitments. One thing that I hear from leaders at the top is they all feel like, they're like, what do they call it? Kind of like part time therapists. They're like, this is part of my job. This is my least favorite part of my job. And it's because you're putting this expectation of a therapist on an accountant or on a lawyer, and that's not what they're, that's not what you've been hired for. Right. It's one thing to help your people, but it's another thing to take on their burdens. And this is where we need those programming, the programming, the support, the cross functional support, right. From HR, from leadership, from other teams, to really create a better work environment for women to help create more balanced, balanced work life.
And I want you to think about, as you're thinking about even confidence building initiatives like coaching or mentorship or sponsorship, how do these really play into advancing women? How do these play into advancing women? So for me, I know coaching is such a critical point in helping in a woman in her life. I mean, for men as well. But I see often for women, there is this point where they get pulled. So it's like a rubber band. It's like you pull it, you stretch it so much that it's either going to break or it recoils. And there's a very fine point, right. If you took, like, AP physics of like, where it will actually break. So we have to be mindful. So coaching is like creating that extra resilience that when you let go, it bounces back. Whereas if without these mentorship, sponsorship, coaching programs, the rubber band breaks, the woman burns out, she decides she needs to leave.
The cost then of replacing her is so expensive, not just in the long term of now, we lost someone else who's not going to be a partner at our firm. But the actual cost of replacing this highly educated, highly up the ranks woman, right, whether she's a senior manager or whether she is a partner, it's just very expensive. I'm actually writing something right now for Thomson Reuters, and the cost can be up to 200% of their salary. Up to 200% of their salary, right. If you're thinking about advertising costs, recruiting costs, onboarding costs, interview costs, training costs, and then the time just to get up to speed, I. It is so expensive, right? And all the other people that are helping this person come in, we cannot be losing women anymore. It's way too expensive and it's a disservice to the industry.
So what I heard in the roundtable, ergs are really not doing enough. Ergs are not doing enough to get women to where they want to go. It's a nice little kumbaya session, but they're really not doing it. What the table was saying is we need mentorships, we need coaching, we need sponsorships, we need support in these tough moments, to not have to do it all ourselves and to help us get over these humps, these challenging points in our career where we can then thrive, but we all have them in our life. We all have these really challenging moments that come up in our career, and it either leads us to burning out or it can lead us to learning, growing and evolving.
So that's it. This is today, right? So in the round table, the conversations we talked about really focusing on helping women, right? Getting helping women as we move up, turning around and helping those behind us come up. So let's not, no matter where we are, let's not pull the ladder out from the women that are on their way through our future and they're the future replacement of us so we can retire and be happy, right? So we want to make sure that women are helping women. We also want male advocates here. This is not just a woman's problem. This is by any means, this is something that we need to do collectively as a culture, as a firm for the future of work, for the profession.
So that's something we need to be really mindful of the other things that really came up strongly in the roundtable is this idea of confidence. And building confidence. Confidence is sneaky. You know, it's one of those things that just looks like it's. It's invisible, right. But it erodes at us on the inside. If we're not confident on the inside, it will eventually reflect on the outside. And we need support to make sure our professionals can stay. Can build their confidence and stay confident.
All right, so what I want you to be thinking about today as you move forward is really taking charge. How do we get more women partners? Please. Right. What's one actionable step you can take at your firm to promote more women into partnership roles? Maybe it means pseudo mentoring, being a mentor for some woman that's coming up the ranks. Maybe it's having conversation and being a mentee for someone who's a couple steps ahead of you.
Now, the one thing that I heard that was really interesting. So I want you to be thinking about that actionable takeaway. But what women were saying at the roundtable was, I want to be given the opportunity, but not because I'm a woman. And this I find really interesting. I think this goes beyond gender, beyond race. We want to just earn the opportunity, right? We want to have the option to get the seat at the table because we worked for it, because we earned it, because we deserve it, not because of a gender, but because we've earned it. So that I thought was really interesting. We're not just, like, looking for handouts. I think sometimes we go on the spectrum of, like, give women all these resources because they need it, and then it goes to the other side of give it all, give it to them because they, like, they have to have it. And I think, really, the best thing is to think of, let's support our professionals in any way for them to be their best version of themselves. So let's make sure that we're giving opportunities to women because they're the right person for the role. Let's make sure that we're hiring the best person for the job. Similar said, but not because of gender or race. I love that takeaway at the table, and I love the idea of let's make sure that we're educating the men more. We need more male advocates.
So in on our route to more women partners, please. We need more empowered male partners, por favor. All right, everybody, this is today's virtual roundtable. I would love to know what you think, but before I close out today, here's one thing. Are you on my newsletter? This is one of the best places to get consistent. I call it a love letter in your inbox with inspiration, tips, insights, simple, practical advice and I want you on it. I want you to have it and my incentive November some hot stuff is coming. You're going to want to be on that newsletter because there are things that I'm not sharing on Billabauer burnout. I'm not sharing on instagram and I'm not sharing anywhere else.
So if you want in on the scoop of the good things coming, you want to make sure you're on my newsletter. So you can get on my newsletter by going to www.akaloawellness.com newsletter. So that's a c h e l o a wellness spelled out.com newsletter make sure you get on my newsletter this is the best place to be and the last little thing I'll give you for today. I am doing my next and last virtual networking for 2024. Virtual networking is one of my favorite events that I do all year. I've been doing a lot of in person networking at all the conference I've been at, and I wanted to make sure that we finished 2024 with a bang. This is going to be 1 hour of bringing smart women that are either in or support the professions of accounting, consulting and law. And what we're going to do is have time together. I always start with a breath work just to get us grounded and here and ready to mingle. And then what we're going to do is set an intention for what we want to finish the year strong and to make sure that 2025 is strategic and set up best for the year ahead.
So you're going to want to join that. It's going to be one of the best hours I get time and time again. So many women are like, this was the best. I am already signing up. They always sign up for the next one before it even finished, you know, before the first one even finishes. So I invite you to join me there. That's going to be this Friday, the 18th at 12:30 p.m. eastern.
All right, everybody, starting to lose my voice. So I guess this is the end of today's episode. Make sure you're on my newsletter, make sure you subscribe to or make sure you sign up and register for virtual networking this Friday. I hope to see you then. But until then, I'll see you next week for another amazing episode of Billable Hour burnout. Thanks for joining. Bye.
