Giving You the Lowdown on DEI

DEI initiatives have felt like a hot button topic over the recent years, and so I wanted to take an objective approach to see if the data collected with Big 4 Transparency supports the idea that these programs have been successful or not.

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Data on Gender Job Satisfaction

In a previous newsletter, we saw that there was a trend of steadily increasing job satisfaction across Audit, Tax & CAS service lines, so for the purposes of this newsletter we’ve focused in on that subsegment of the data. Consulting and Advisory service line results were much more volatile, and so we excluded them in an attempt to get a clearer picture.

The first thing I wanted to look at was if the improvements to job satisfaction were similar across genders - many firms have taken on initiatives around increasing female leadership as well as making working environments more hospitable for all.

We see that since 2023, job satisfaction has improved by more than twice as much for female survey respondents than for male respondents, and the gap between job satisfaction among genders has essentially closed.

This does also correspond to a trend of in-office work overtaking fully remote roles, and the data shows that men are significantly more satisfied in fully remote roles while female respondents actually preferred full in-office roles to remote positions, so it is possible that that could have contributed to the trends seen above as well

Data on Job Satisfaction by Ethnicity

The next set of data points I looked into was if job satisfaction among Caucasian respondents and respondents of Color had changed in drastically different ways. It turns out that both groups showed the exact same increase in job satisfaction between 2023 and 2025 to date, with People of Color slightly more satisfied in their jobs overall.

Conclusion

Based on the data collected on Big 4 Transparency, it does seem like some of the initiatives adopted by firms may have had some positive impacts, particularly in making the accounting industry more appealing to female accountants. I’m happy to see that overall the different groups all had somewhat similar levels of job satisfaction, although there is quite a bit of improvement still possible to make the industry better for all and see more average job satisfaction scores above 7 out of 10.

Last year, I recorded a podcast episode with Yuri Kapilovich who quickly became one of my favourite people in the accounting space. He’s always looking for ways to make the profession better for folks, and his most recent endeavour is launching a community for accounting professionals: Mentors Count.

This is not a sponsored post or anything I’m personally affiliated with, I just genuinely really like and appreciate what Yuri stands for, and I think this community could be a great fit for accountants working at firms looking for a supportive network of professionals. If that’s something you’re seeking, I’d encourage you to go check it out.