Critical Perspective on Accounting Conference 2014
‘Our Women Are Worth It’: a feminist critique of two counter-narratives on
valuing women in the Herceptin debate
Authors: Clare Markham and Judy Brown (Victoria University of Wellington,
Wellington, New Zealand)
Presenter / Discussant: Cheryl R. Lehman
Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York
Presenter’s conclusions: A paper of significant value, a welcome, innovative and
insightful contribution to accounting literature, unique, and genuinely “well
worth” reading.
1. Summary of purpose and introduction of the paper (pp. 2-4)
This provocative, important, and stimulating work takes its title from the “Our
Women Are Worth It” campaign slogan of the Breast Cancer Aotearoa Coalition
(BCAC), in reaction to the refusal to fund medication1 by New Zealand’s
Pharmaceutical Management Agency (Pharmac) (in 2006 and 2008). The paper’s
essential questions are how do we articulate, construct, and create meaning?
Particularly in relation to our discipline’s construction of value and society’s
articulation regarding meaning and applying this to women.
These questions emerge as part of the ensuing debate regarding breast cancer,
communicated in the language of accounting: cost-benefit as a major theme,
(including) what are women worth? Does their value change when diagnosed with
breast cancer? How is it calculated? Is it appropriate to weigh people’s lives and
health against (monetary) costs in this way?
Markham and Brown advocate for significant scrutiny of two counter-narratives
that emerged in the public debates because they contain elements of progress
regarding women in society, but also contain significant and problematic premises.
The first counter-narrative was an objection to Pharmac’s “accounting” i.e., a
mistaken “bottom line”, and thus Pharmac was neither rational nor objective
regarding costs and benefits, as Pharmac claimed. The second public counternarrative disputed the basic value ascribed women: a greater value – so the counteraccount went – should be credited toward women, reflecting the value of women’s
relationships to others, particularly their children. In both cases applying a feminist
lens, the authors correctly argue these two counter accounts are illuminating and
useful, yet also problematic as they “both disrupt and mirror the way the value of
women is constructed more generally in Western societies” (p. 2). Inquiry into the
meaning-construction of these two narratives is of extreme significance in
1
Pharmac refused to provide funding for a ‘full’ 12-month course of Herceptin for early HER-2
positive breast cancer.
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understanding accounting’s role in social justice and building critical analysis; this is
the main aim of the research and a welcome contribution to the literature.
2. Summary of theoretical framework (pp. 4-8)
Using a post-structural framework Markham and Brown recognize human beings
are meaning-making and although particular meanings may dominate in historical
junctures, cultures, life situations, economic regimes, and political processes, these
meanings are contested terrains. The authors provided instances of feminist
critiques of cost-benefit accounting, illustrating how a woman is valued in a negative
space or hidden space and thus disruption to meaning is demonstrated. Meaning
influences hierarchies, sustains power, silences possibilities, and erases potential;
making meaning matters (I return to this later in my reflections).
3. Background to the Herceptin debate (pp. 8-10)
4. Method (pp. 10-12)
Using a sample of 168 documents, a form of discourse analysis is conducted, with
the resulting categories of costs presented in Appendix 2 of the paper (p. 30).
5. Two counter-narratives and some feminist reflections (pp. 12-24)
This illuminating section presents the authors’ unpacking of the discourses and
rather than repeat their excellent observations I will merely list them, and then
build upon and present some ideas for further contributions.
Counter narrative one: “Challenging (or not?) cost-benefit” (pp. 12-14): reflecting
that using cost is problematic, the authors critique cost-benefit-analysis (CBA) – and
the failure of the counter narrative to challenge CBA.
Counter narrative two: “Women as mothers (and other relations)” (pp. 14 -15):
concern by the authors that women are presented, measured, accounted for, etc. by
their relationships, particularly motherhood as “value”.
Making sense of the counter narratives is accomplished by applying a poststructuralist feminist reading, into 3 main categories:
1. “Personal / public divide” (pp. 15-18): in the public discourse “masculine” is
constructed with “positive” characteristics and “feminine” as “negative”, devalued
and excluded; accounting perpetuates these constructions; objectivity,
quantification, rationality, and logics are reified.
2. “Media portrayal of women activists” (pp. 18-20): a need to contrast the media
portrayal, and for women activists to redefine the terrain of discourse, recognizing
that changing political discourse must inevitably be controversial;
3. “Valuing Women” (pp. 20-22): the need to probe and disrupt previous patriarchal
conceptualizations of how women are valued.
Discussant reflections:
The issues identified appear in much of the gender-accounting-nexus and one can
see where the link to measurement and refuting interpretations of “cost” and
“benefit” would emerge. Two interlocking issues emerge: (1) measuring and the
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significance of numbers in the neoliberal mindset – they DO matter and (2) the
dilemma for feminists in a non-perfect world to examine these issues.
Expanding on these issues would be useful in examining further the accounting link,
as increasingly in neoliberal societies life is characterized by markets-are-best ideologies,
extending market logic to all arenas of social life. Accounting is a vital technology in the
regime of neoliberal governance and rule, implementing and sustaining social policies
and practices. Thus accounting, valuation and consequence take place and more
discussion might be useful in the paper, as many have conceived of accounting as a
practice by which neoliberal policy is made operable. Among the more well known,
perhaps, is Merino et. el. (2010) advocating for accounting researchers to “unmask
neoliberal myths” (p. 775).
Thus the drive for emancipation in an environment of neoliberalism is complex including ambivalences of feminism between marketization and social protections,
and how these have purportedly been “worked through” (manifesting as the
Romance of Micro Entrepreneurship, and the Romance of Women’s Financial
Empowerment). Without a doubt, unburdening women financially and reducing
poverty is necessary and empowering, but it not sufficient transformation. What
looms large is the enduring neglect of basic political, medical, and educational rights
for women, violence against women, and treatment of women as second-class
citizens – an incomplete emancipation – as addressed in the paper. Accountants –
unaware or uninvolved with the lives affected -- are often arbiters without thoughts
of social justice. “Feminists rightly demand that theories dealing with women’s lives
show their understanding of women’s experience of subordination and exclusion…
how their lives might be improved, and what governments should be doing about
that” (Nussbaum, 2000, p. 301). More linkages to the effects of meaning-making
might be pursed in the paper, and it would be useful to point out some of the more
recent discussions of these gender-accounting connections, and thus some selected
research is attached.
The presentation on page 15 “Personal / public divide” is very interesting, and is
similar to the important identification in feminism that “the personal is political” as
well as the debates over “nature versus nurture” and the social constructions of gender.
I refer below to a wonderful articulation of this by Katha Pollitt in “Marooned on
Gilligan Island: Are Women Morally Superior to Men?” (in Good News of the Twentieth
Century academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/hhd2005).
“Some years ago, I was invited by the wife of a well-known writer to sign a women's
peace petition. It made the points such documents usually make: that women, as mothers,
caregivers and nurturers, have a special awareness of the precariousness of human life …
and would prefer nations to work out their difficulties peacefully so that the military
budget could be diverted to schools and hospitals and housing. It had the literary tone
such documents usually have, as well as…We are wiser than you poor deluded men folk
… please-please-please listen to your moms. To sign or not to sign? Of course, I was all
for peace. But was I for peace as a woman?
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The tendency to conflate "mothers" with “women” has a long history in the peace
movement but goes way beyond issues of war and peace. At present it permeates
discussions of just about every field … from management training to theology…the
media like to caricature feminism as denying the existence of sexual differences. For the
women's movement and its opponents alike "difference" is where the action is…business
writers wonder if women's nurturing intuitive qualities will make them better executives.
Educators suggest that female students suffer in classrooms that emphasize competition
over cooperation…horror of aggression and concern for others' health”
“Plot is male… even logic and language are male. What is female? Nature. Blood. Milk.
Communal gatherings. The moon. Quilts.
Haven't we been here before? Indeed we have. Woman as sharer and carer; woman as
earth mother; woman as guardian … Although it is couched in the language of praise,
difference feminism is demeaning to women. It asks that women be admitted into public
life and public discourse not because they have a right to be there but because they will
improve them. Even if this were true, and not the wishful thinking I believe it to be, why
should the task of moral and social transformation be laid on women's doorstep and not
on everyone's-or, for that matter, on men's, by the you-broke it- you-fix-it principle.
Peace, the environment, a more humane workplace, economic justice, social support for
children-these are issues that affect us all and are everyone's responsibility. By promising
to assume that responsibility, difference feminists lay the groundwork for excluding
women again, as soon as it becomes clear that the promise cannot be kept.
No one asks that other oppressed groups win their freedom by claiming to be extra-good.
And no other oppressed group thinks it must make such a claim in order to be
accommodated fully and across the board by society…to want to earn a living, exercise
one's talents, get a fair hearing in the public forum…Why isn't being human enough?
In the end, I didn't sign that peace petition, although I was sorry to disappoint a woman I
liked, and although I am very much for peace. I decided to wait for a petition that
welcomed my signature as a person, an American, a citizen implicated, against my will,
in war and the war economy. I still think I did the right thing.”
In summary, it is a pleasure to review and discuss the research by Clare Markham
and Judy Brown – it re-imagines in vital and significant ways research on the
gender-accounting nexus. It is creative, innovative, and essential in an
underdeveloped area of our literature.
Selected References
Anderson-Gough, F., Grey, C., & Robson, K. (2005). “'Helping Them to Forget.' The organizational embedding of
gender relations in public audit firms” Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 30 No. 5, pp. 469-490.
Broadbent, J. and Kirkham, L., (2008), “Glass Ceilings, Glass Cliffs or New Worlds?: Revisiting Gender and
Accounting” Accounting, Auditing, and Accountability Journal, Vol. 21, No. 4 (pp. 465 - 473).
Carnegie, G. and Walker, S. (2007) “Household accounting in Australia: Prescription and practice from the 1820s
to the 1960s” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 41-73.
Chwastiak, M. and Lehman, G. (2008), “Accounting for war”, Accounting Forum Vol. 32 No. 4, December 2008, pp.
313-326
Cooper, C. (2001) “From Women's Liberation to Feminism: Reflections in Accounting Academia” Accounting
Forum Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 214–245.
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Dambrin, C. and Lambert, C. (2008) “Mothering or Auditing? The Case of Two Big Four in France” Accounting,
Auditing, and Accountability Journal, Vol. 21, No. 4 (pp. 474 - 506).
Dambrin, C. and Lambert, C. (2012) “Who is she and who are we? A reflexive journey in research into the rarity of
women executives in accountancy” Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Vol. 23, Issue 1, p. 1-16.
Dillard, J. and Reynolds, M. (2008), “Green Owl and the Corn Maiden” Accounting, Auditing, and Accountability
Journal, Vol. 21, No. 4 (pp. 556 - 579).
Gallhofer, S. (1998) “The Silences of Mainstream feminist accounting research”, Critical Perspectives on
Accounting, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 355-375.
Haynes, K. (2008), “Moving the gender agenda or stirring chicken's entrails?: Where next for feminist
methodologies in accounting?”, Accounting, Auditing, and Accountability Journal, 21/ 4, 539 - 555.
Jeacle, I. (2006) “Face facts: accounting, feminism and the business of beauty” Critical Perspectives on Accounting,
Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 87-108.
Kirkham, L. and Loft, A. (2001) “The Lady and the Accounts: Missing from accounting History?” The Accounting
Historians Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 67-90.
Klein, N. (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism Henry Holt and Co., NY.
Komori, N. (2008) “Toward the feminization of accounting practice: Lessons from the experiences of Japanese
women in the accounting profession” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 21 No. 4, pp. 507-538.
Lehman, C. (2012) “We’ve come a long way! Maybe! Re-Imagining gender and accounting” Accounting, Auditing &
Accountability Journal, Vol. 25, No. 2, p. 256-294.
Merino, B., Mayper, A. and Tolleson, T. (2010), “Neoliberalism, deregulation and Sarbanes-Oxley: the
legitimation of a failed corporate governance model” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, Vol. 23, No.
6, pp. 774-792.
Miller, P. (1990) “On the Interrelations between Accounting and the State” Accounting, Organizations and Society,
Vol. 15: 315-38.
Miller, P. (2001) “Governing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter” Social Research, Vol. 68: 2, p. 379-396.
Miller, P. and Rose, N. (1990) “Governing economic life” Economy and Society, Vol. 19: 1- 31.
Nussbaum, M., (2000), Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
Oakes, L. and Young, J. (2008) "Accountability re-examined: evidence from Hull House", Accounting, Auditing &
Accountability Journal, Vol. 21 No. 6, pp. 765 – 790.
Power, M. (2009) “The risk management of nothing” Accounting, Organizations and Society, Vol. 34, No. 6-7, pp.
849-855.
Strier, R. (2010), “Women, Poverty, and the Microenterprise: Context and Discourse”, Gender, Work and
Organization, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 195 - 218.
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