Gender and accountancy: A response to Tinker and Neimark

Abstract

In raising the issue of gender and its relation to accounting, Tinker & Neimark ( 1986) have performed a useful service. Few would disagree with their assertion that the “big picture” of “specific historical crises and contradictions their emergence, displacement, transformation and re-emergence” (p. 72) should not be neglected in any attempt to explore the varying extent and form of women’s subordination. However, I wish to argue that their stress on the “big picture” leads them to questionable conclusions. I shall be suggesting further that the particular nature of women’s oppression, in contrast to capitalist oppression, makes it particularly inappropriate to give causal primacy to this “big picture” in attempts at explanation. Tinker & Neimark argue that women’s oppression in the context and period they discuss (the particular case is General Motors, the historical period 19 16 to the present day) may be explained as a consequence of two major forces. These are firstly, the use of women as both a “floating” and “stagnant” reserve army of labour, and secondly, the ideological importance of women in the construction of the “social consumption norm” which was developed, in part, to solve the crisis of excessive production in the boom years after the Second World War. Milkman’s (1983) historical and comparative study of the automobile and electrical industries is extensively utilized to demonstrate their case relating to the use ofwomen as a reserve army of labour. They accept her argument that, in the auto industry, women were only a “latent” reserve, sufficient males, both white and ethnic minority, being available for this purpose during the period under consideration. In common with other industries, however, female labour was extensively incorporated as a reserve army during the Second World War. Indeed, it is during this period that women appear, for the first time, in the General Motors annual reports. These are the major empirical source utilized by Tinker & Neimark, and they reveal that by 1943, 30.7% of GM’s hourly rate force were women, as compared to only 9.5% in 194 1. Annual reports are also extensively employed to make Tinker & Neimark’s case relating to the development of social consumption norms. These, they suggest, were actively created and encouraged by the auto industry in order to ameliorate the crisis of underconsumption from the 1950s onwards (Baran & Sweezy, 1966). Evidence from the Reports is graphically used to illustrate both the development of the norm itself increased product ranges, more emphasis on styling, yearly model changes with associated razzmatazz, etc. -as well as the emphasis within it on women both as wives and homemakers in the all-American nuclear family, together with their role as the objects of consumption and its display. Their evidence is certainly suggestive, and demonstrates that GM’s annual reports and presumably, annual reports in general will be a useful data source in any exploration of how ideological justifications for particular courses of action are constructed by the enterprise in question. One does not have to dismiss such Reports as “mere public relations fluff’ (p. 86) however, to be somewhat sceptical of Tinker & Neimark’s suggestion that such reports actually form a world-view rather than reflect it. The causal link is simply not demonstrated in their