What is most often discussed under the heading 'gender and accounting' are the problems of women working as professional accountants. Interest in this topic has grown with the rapid growth of numbers of women entering the accountancy profession since the early 1970s. In the USA, women have made up half the entrants to the profession since the mid-1980s and the debate has moved from being about the lack of qualified women to their problems with lack of promotion and other aspects of discrimination. Elsewhere the numbers of women entering the profession are growing, albeit more slowly.

Interest from an academic viewpoint in research in gender in accounting has grown since the mid-1980s from an initial focus on discrimination to a wider perspective on gender and accountancy. Inspired by feminist writers who argue that the roles 'male' and 'female' are socially constructed, not biologically determined, researchers have discussed how the masculine attributes associated with being an accountant lead to problems for women. Accountancy as a profession is gendered masculine and this has consequences for both the men and the women who work in it. Going further, some feminists consider that accounting techniques embody a fundamentally masculine rationalist and exploitative approach to the world and that accounting is deeply implicated in the creation of the current environmental crisis.

The broad topics which arise from consideration of gender and accounting will be defined here under three headings: first, women in the accountancy profession; second, gender and accountants; and third, accounting as gendered practice.