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Gender, Work and Organization. Vol. 19 No. 5 September 2012

doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2011.00583.x

Body Beautiful? Gender, Identity

and the Body in Professional
Services Firms gwao_583 489..507

Kathryn Haynes*

This article explores the professional identity formation of professionals

and its relationship with their embodied physical image, with a particular
focus on women in accounting and law. It examines the role of the profes-
sional services firm in defining a professional body image, socialization
processes that contribute to the definition of the professional body, the role
of the client in defining professionalism, the legitimation of certain types
of embodied identities and the importance of the body in defining gen-
dered perceptions of the self. The article draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of
capital to explore how physical capital is implicated in processes of social-
ization, subordination and control. By examining the development of pro-
fessional embodiment of women in accounting and law, and drawing on
interviews with contemporary practitioners, the article argues that notions
of physical capital remain highly gendered in professional services firms,
with implications for equality and diversity in the professions.

Keywords: body, professional services, identity, Bourdieu, physical capital

Introduction

T he two professions of accounting and law are the most established and
oldest of those encompassed in the professional services sector. Their
identification as a profession, with the attendant notions of public service,
client service, technical competence and professional characterization, make
them particularly relevant for study in the context of professional identity. The
nature of professional identity (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002), together with
career advancement for professional women in industrialized countries
(Davidson and Cooper, 1992), has long been recognized as problematic.

Address for correspondence: *Professor of Accounting, Newcastle University Business School,

Newcastle University, 5 Barrack Road, Newcastle, NE1 4SE, UK; e-mail: kathryn.haynes@
newcastle.ac.uk

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490 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Previous research has identified the professions of accounting and law as

historically gendered (Sommerlad and Sanderson, 1998) and has acknowl-
edged problems for women in progressing in these professions (Kumra and
Vinnicombe, 2008). However, although there have been studies on gender
and identity in each of the relevant disciplines of accounting and law, very
few studies have drawn insights from both these professions simultaneously.
More significantly, despite interest in the role of the physical body in
popular culture (Shilling, 1993), little is known about the combined relation-
ship of gender, identity and the body in professions and professional service
firms. Yet, the physical body is an important facet of professionalism because
it is symbolic of aspects of identity and the self, an embodied representation
of a perceived identity (Haynes, 2008). Attitudes towards the body may also
be gendered suggesting that ‘the ways in which women’s and men’s bodies
are perceived, categorized and valued are undoubtedly important in legiti-
mizing and reproducing social inequalities in the [accounting] profession’
(Haynes, 2008, p. 345).
This article examines how professional identity is embodied and gendered
in professional services firms. Drawing from an international study of profes-
sionals in accounting and law firms in both the UK and the USA, it explores
the perceptions, experiences and professional identities of women practitio-
ners; examines how the identity of the professional is inscribed on the physi-
cal body; and considers the role of the professional services firm in defining,
controlling and legitimizing professional body image. The article also evalu-
ates the way women manage or utilise their physical body and the interaction
of professional work with the body in a number of ways, including dress,
body image, weight and demeanour.
In addressing these issues, the article draws from the theories of Pierre
Bourdieu, whose concept of physical capital is useful in understanding pro-
cesses of domination and subordination. Although Bourdieu does not
provide a detailed account of gendered orientations to the body, I extend his
insights to encompass gender and a form of gendered physical capital. In
doing so, the article fulfils a need for further research into relationships
between the body and the self, the impact of embodied practices at work,
and cultural issues affecting the embodied identities and working lives of
women practitioners in accounting and law. It draws implications for the
legitimation of certain cultural elements of embodied identities, which may
have the effect of marginalizing groups or individuals who may not
conform to acceptable bodily norms in a profession. In particular, these
bodily norms include gender, which the article addresses in some detail,
but may also derive from other embodied identities, encompassing race,
class, disability, age, or sexuality.
The article is structured as follows. Firstly, it provides a review of the
nature of gendered identities in professional services firms and secondly, it
introduces the concepts of embodiment, physical and cultural capital with

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GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS 491

reference to Bourdieu. After a methodology section, it discusses how women

professionals experience various aspects of professional embodiment, includ-
ing professional appearance, professional demeanour, interaction with the
client relationship, embodied expectations and control. Finally, the article
discusses the nature of embodied gendered physical capital and its implica-
tions for professional services firms.

Gendered identities in professional services firms

Both accounting and law have previously been considered masculine territo-
ries from which women have been excluded through barriers to entry. His-
torically the opportunity for women to become accountants was problematic,
as they were seen by some as both physically and intellectually unfit for such
a role (Lehman, 1992). Women’s oppression in accountancy interacted with
the development of power and influence in the profession itself and the
constitution of its knowledge base in terms of gender (Kirkham, 1992). Until
the latter half of the 20th century the professional echelons of accounting were
a male preserve in the UK, as the masculine qualities required of accounting
professionals ‘contrasted markedly with the image of the weak, dependent,
emotional “married” woman of mid-Victorian Britain’ (Kirkham and Loft,
1993, p. 516). Similarly, in the legal profession women were historically sub-
jected to significant barriers to entry. In many western countries women’s
admission to law occurred at the turn of the 19th to 20th century or during the
first decades of the 20th century as the progress of professionalization grew
apace, but entry to the judiciary occurred much more slowly (Schultz, 2003).
For example, in England and Wales women struggled to achieve equality
with men and were often subordinated into the least prestigious sections of
the profession (Sommerlad and Sanderson, 1998) and in Canada monopolies
on legal services gave law societies significant power to exclude women from
the profession (Brockman, 2001). Despite professions such as accounting and
law appearing to have accepted the close tying of educational credentials to
meritocratic access as an ‘ideological necessity’, their role in supporting
access to status required restricted entry (Larson, 1977, p. 51). Hence, profes-
sional practices, such as restricting access to work experience requirements,
have contributed to historical and continued professional closure for those
seen as ‘other’, as a result of their gender, race, or class (Francis and
Sommerlad, 2009; Hammond, 2002; Sommerlad, 2007).
Recent decades have seen significant increases each year in the numbers
of women attracted to these professions and the professional service firms in
them. In the case of law, the percentage of female students enrolling with the
Law Society in the UK consistently reached around 62 per cent in the years
from 2001 to 2009 (Law Society, 2010), whereas in accounting, worldwide
numbers of female student members of the six major UK accounting bodies

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492 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

between 2002 to 2009 were consistent at 48 per cent (Professional Oversight

Board for Accountancy, 2010). However, women attempting to progress to
the higher echelons of professional services firms, particularly in the critical
promotion to partnership, may find their progress inhibited due to a number
of issues, including gender discrimination (Nicolson, 2005), the combination
of professional and family commitments (Johnson et al., 2008), stereotypical
assumptions about parenting (Hagan and Kay, 1995), the need to fit a pre-
vailing masculine model of performance or success (Jonnergård et al., 2010;
Kumra and Vinnicombe, 2008, 2010) and ‘marked segmentation between
largely feminine, community orientated and relatively underpaid special-
isms on the one side and male-dominated, corporate oriented and remu-
nerative practice areas on the other’ (Bolton and Muzio, 2007, p. 58). This
stratification of law into different types of firms, legal specialisms and orga-
nizations fractures women’s experiences of law (Sommerlad, 2003). The
hegemonic masculinity of mainstream laws is accentuated as a result of the
feminization of the profession occurring in niches of legal practice that are
‘naturalized’ as female and where women play a ‘maternal’ caring role
(Sommerlad, 2003). As a result, many women exit professional services firms
at an early stage (Accountancy, 2008) and those women who do stay in
practice often find there is a ceiling on their status and monetary compen-
sation (Hagan and Kay, 1995).
Professional identities may also be gendered due to stereotypes associated
with masculine and feminine social and cultural norms in professional ser-
vices firms. Organizational decision-makers in hiring decisions perceive can-
didates through the lens of gender stereotypes (Gorman, 2005) and as women
attempt to pass through organizational hierarchies in corporate law firms, the
traditional male domination of upper level positions intensify these decision-
maker biases (Gorman and Kmec, 2009). Moreover, women are subjected to
stricter performance standards than men when undertaking the same job
(Gorman and Kmec, 2007) and are likely to be rewarded less than their male
counterparts (Kay and Gorman, 2008). Hence, the professional and organiza-
tional discourses forming the socialization processes in accounting and law
exercise a significant degree of institutional power in the shaping of the
individual (Anderson-Gough et al., 1998; Sommerlad, 1998), which may have
significant gendered effects.
Professional identity formation in the physical form of the professional
has also been argued to be embodied as inherently masculine (Thornton,
2007). The norm of bodily presence is an integral dimension of the culture
of legal practice (Thornton and Bagust, 2007). Haynes’ (2008) study of
women accounting professionals demonstrated the significance of the
physical body in the formation of the personal and professional self, where
the body becomes a vehicle for displaying conformity, or indeed non-
conformity, to gendered social norms. For example, forms of organizational
and professional embodiment may clash with other forms of gendered

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GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS 493

embodied self, such as that experienced during pregnancy and in early

motherhood, affecting embodied practices, emotions and identities and
leading to disillusion and disengagement by women accountants, with
serious implications for the future of the profession (Haynes, 2008). It is to
the significance of the body in professional work which I now turn.

Concepts of embodiment, physical and cultural capital

The concept of embodiment emphasizes the lived body of a subject who

knows the world through bodily perception. Thus, the body is a phenom-
enologically lived entity through which we experience our everyday lives,
as well as a socially constructed phenomenon influenced by social and cul-
tural forces. As Hall et al. (2007, p. 535) suggest: ‘Embodiment concerns
the body we are [my emphasis] and, as such, enables an understanding of
the dialectical processes of identification as they unfold in particular social
contexts’.
The constraints and context of professional services firms therefore
form an important part of understanding gendered embodiment, in which
Bourdieu’s (1977, 1984, 1986) theories of practice and capital provide some
useful theoretical explanation. Bourdieu is concerned with how various forms
of capital support symbolic power and dominance. He outlines a form of
cultural capital which is accumulated in part from educational credentials
and institutionalized in social systems and practices, supported by social
capital arising from powerful social networks (Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural
capital encapsulates cultivated dispositions that are internalized by the indi-
vidual through socialization processes that constitute schemes of meaning
and understanding so that all forms of cultural capital are said to be embod-
ied (Swartz, 1997). For Bourdieu, the body is a bearer of symbolic value and
a form of physical capital: a possessor of power, status, and distinctive sym-
bolic forms, which is integral to the accumulation of various resources linked
to the acquisition of status and distinction (Shilling, 1993).
Bourdieu (1984) suggests that any given embodied practice can only be
understood diacritically, that is, in relation to other practices in the same
context. His concept of habitus represents the socially constituted system
which inculcates a world based on, and reconciled to, these practices
(Bourdieu, 1977). The concept of field is the social arena in which struggles
for, or access to, resources occur, which is interdependent with the notion
of capital, as ‘capital does not exist and function except in relation to a field’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 101). Agents are positioned in fields
according to the overall volume and relative combinations of capital avail-
able to them, hence capital is a key constraint or stake in the development
and range of possible strategies and actions available to agents in the
struggle to gain ascendancy (Malsch et al., 2011). Habitus contributes to the

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494 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

reproduction of field as individuals are habituated towards interpretive

schemes interposed with power relations, such as in the social and cultural
context of the professions.
Furthermore, Bourdieu’s (1996) analysis of the state nobility, the dominant
social groups whose legitimacy is supported by their accredited education
qualifications, may be said to relate to professions such as accounting and law.
In these contexts the acquisition of knowledge and technical expertise is part
of what constitutes the ‘social magic’ of the state nobility (Bourdieu, 1996, p.
118), or the dominance of an elite. This is reminiscent of the recent so-called
Milburn Report on fair access to the professions in the UK that noted the
propensity of professional services firms to recruit from a narrowing range of
elite universities and ‘the frequent practice of professions recruiting from
existing cultural circles and thus exclud[ing] many potential candidates who
are regarded as being from “outside” the circle’ (Panel of Fair Access to the
Professions, 2009, p. 50). Moreover, the state nobility is imbued with ‘bodily
hexis, clothing, ways of speaking’ and a ‘distinguished’ appearance, demon-
strating its cultural and physical capital (Bourdieu, 1996, pp. 35 and 180).
These concepts will be analysed below, once the methodology to the study
has been outlined.

Methodology

The data in this article derive from a 2-year funded research project involving
professional services firms in the USA and the UK. These geographical areas
are where most of the largest and, therefore, arguably the most influential
professional services firms originate, although it is acknowledged that cul-
tural contexts may differ in and between these contexts and with other parts
of the world. The article draws from semi-structured interviews carried out
with 15 female practitioners in the USA and 15 in the UK. The interviewees
were initially sourced through personal contacts in the two professions and
through contacting professional women’s networking groups, followed by
snowballing techniques whereby additional interviewees were referred to me
through contacts, an invaluable source when the potential participants are
few in number or difficult to ascertain, or where some degree of trust is
required to initiate contact (Atkinson and Flint, 2001). In this case, the fact that
I am a former accountant enabled me to utilise personal contacts from aca-
demia, accounting and law, and develop some degree of trust with partici-
pants through a shared experience of the sector.
The interviews ranged in length from 1 to 3 hours and took place either in
the firm’s offices, in a public place or in the participant’s home. All were
recorded with the permission of the participant and were then transcribed. I
listened to the tapes while scrutinizing the transcript, the first time to correct
for any errors, and the second time to annotate them with significant

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GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS 495

examples of emotion, changes of tone and emphasis. Further interpretive

narrative analysis took place in subsequent readings by drawing out any
references or inferences to the body or embodiment.
All the participants in the study were drawn from large professional ser-
vices firms: the lawyers from international corporate law firms; about half of
the accountants from Big 4 firms and the remainder from large second-tier
firms, located either in west coast states of the USA or in sizable cities in the
UK. Participants ranged in their experience from second-year associate
lawyers and accountants with 3 year’s post-qualification experience to equity
partners with up to 25 years’ experience. All the participants were white,
except two in the USA who originated from Asian backgrounds. As might be
expected from professionally qualified practitioners, all the participants had
high educational qualifications.
However, it is important to stress that the participants were not intended to
form a large representative sample of practitioners from professional services
firms in accounting and law, or to provide a geographical comparison. Both
professions encompass a wide range of organizational sites, and while in this
case the participants were drawn from large firms, the research was designed
to explore and interpret the experiences of professionals rather than sample a
specific population. The in-depth interviews intended to ascertain how they
perceived the importance or otherwise of the physical presentation of the self,
the body and its interaction with their identity as lawyer or accountant and to
examine the circumstances and effects of the presentation of their professional
physical body. Due to the nature of the two professions of accounting and law
and their requisite professional identity, participants may have had embodied
experiences that were potentially or to some extent similar, but how they dealt
with them and felt about them may be different. While the sample of partici-
pants is not intended to be generalizable, the analysis provides some insight
into the relationship that professionals in large professional services firms have
with their bodies and the interaction of professional work and identity with the
body, which allows for the drawing of some implications for the embodiment
of the professions. I now turn to the analysis of the interviews.

‘What is professional?’ A professional appearance

The participants in the study expressed awareness that the nature of profes-
sionalism incorporates aspects of presentation, embodied in the form of
required attire or dress:
We won’t let our junior associates, you know, go to Court without a jacket.
They know they have to have a jacket at the office, even if it is a simple 2
second, you know, put an uncontested motion on the record in front of the
Judge. (Partner A, law firm)

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496 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

It is common for professional services firms to inculcate and reinforce pro-

fessional identity and the required embodied behaviour and appearance
through socialization mechanisms such as in-house courses and training
programmes:
The whole group of first level people will go up to our headquarters and
there will be two or three days’ training. Now 90 per cent of it will be
technical, you know: how to audit, how to do that, but they often throw in
something light, like business etiquette or how to present yourself, and
appropriate dress and appropriate behaviour and how to eat properly.
(Partner A, accounting firm)
In addition, individual practitioners learn acceptable appropriate behaviour
and appearance by mimicking the behaviour of others:
You got it just from being in the office environment, a lot of it, you just saw
people. (Audit manager A)
Cultural codes in firms are disseminated through informal discourse and
networks of common understanding that act to reinforce informal rules and
norms:
People were pulled up about things ... for example they would never say
‘boys can’t wear ear rings’, but if one of the lads went in with an ear ring
he’d be told and everybody would know about it and it was like, ‘Oh well,
you don’t do that type of thing’. (Audit manager, B)
The exact nature of required professional self–presentation, through dress
and appearance, however, is difficult to define and is not always explicit. For
women, in particular, this form of professional embodied identity may be
difficult to negotiate because the informal rules governing women’s attire and
appearance are not as explicit or traditional as the archetypal professional
male suit:
We have had a series of ongoing discussions in the firm where we have
some younger female associates who, you know ... some of them either
dress too casually and some of them dress too trendily so in both cases it is
not quite professional enough, but then it sparked this whole conversation
of what is professional? (Partnership-track lawyer)
Women have to present themselves in a way that exudes their status and
ability as professionals, and adds credibility to their competence:
I certainly find that with women they have got to understand the conse-
quences of the way that they are dressing and if they dress in a way that is
not traditionally professional, or too casual, or too sort of trendy that veers
away from the business look, I think it affects their credibility. (Partner B,
law firm)

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Moreover, non-conformity or some kind of faux pas in terms of appearance

can affect acceptability as a bona fide professional, as this comment from a
partner describing a recruitment situation demonstrates:
The two men were dressed in suits and the two women had a kind of a pant
suit and a skirt type suit on but then one of them had gigantic shoes on and
it was kind of like, ‘Okay, you were almost there honey, I almost would
have taken you seriously’.... I never saw her again. (Partner A, law firm)
To some degree this struggle to be taken seriously may relate to youthfulness
and inexperience, hence applying to both men and women, but what the
quotes show is that being taken seriously for women is interrelated with their
display of professional embodiment.

‘Professional demeanour’ and the client relationship

Relationships with clients have been identified as an important influence on

service provision (Oerton, 2004), particularly in what McDowell (2009) terms
interactive service work where both the consumer and the provider of the
service are present and the service generally ends at the time of the exchange.
In professional services, the relationship with the client is likely to be of a
longer term nature and more relational than in low-skilled service work,
allowing the client to act as a regulating force in defining service provision
(Anderson-Gough et al., 2000; Kornberger et al., 2010). The role of the client in
professional services firms is therefore central to defining the nature of pro-
fessionalism and how this is embodied. The expectations of the client impact
on the requirement of a professional image:
There is a reputation issue and an image issue, and everyone is so freaked
out about what is the client going to think? If I question someone’s cred-
ibility because of their appearance or anything like that then you know the
client is going to question it even more. (Partner B, accounting firm)
Professional presentation is related to the credibility of a professional in the
eyes of the client, as this senior manager involved in recruitment explained:
How they present themselves, their dress, demeanour and so on, is in the
mix as well because we have to consider, you know, you are going to be
going out to a client, would you be presentable to a client? So if they do not
carry themselves very well or they are not very dressed up, ... it’s kind of
like, ‘OK, do they not understand’ or, you know, ‘Do they not care?’ (Senior
manager A, accounting)
Here the service ethic from a professional to their client is related to embodied
conduct, or ‘carrying oneself’, as if the degree of expertise and professional-
ism is encapsulated in the physical body. However, the exact nature of

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498 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

professional embodiment and professionalism is elusive and ephemeral,

relating to self-presentation and demeanour:
The other thing that we certainly look at is professional presence. Is this
person someone we feel comfortable we could send him [sic] out to the
client and they would be able to articulate things clearly, present them-
selves in a professional way, you know, show that sort of professional
demeanour. (Senior manager B, accounting)
Professional embodiment therefore involves meeting the expectations of
clients and fellow professionals by looking the part to maintain credibility,
and conducting oneself with gravitas and appropriate body language.

Women negotiating ‘professional demeanour’

For women professionals, however, not only do they have to negotiate their
attire and dress, but also how they perform this elusive ‘professional
demeanour’, which encapsulates speech and manner. While promotion com-
mittees and recruiters are looking for ‘speaking with some kind of impact’,
women’s experiences of speaking authoritatively are met negatively as over-
bearing. In this quote, the participant recalls a promotion committee discuss-
ing a female candidate for promotion to partner status:
We disagreed with the hiring partner on a candidate ... his reaction ... to the
way that she was speaking, because she does have this very authoritative
manner of speaking, is that she was strident and he couldn’t get past that
and listen to what she was saying because she was so strident and he felt
attacked. (Associate lawyer A)
Women found that to assert their authority in professional services firms in
the traditionally male-dominated environments of the law and accounting
professions, they had to tread ‘a very fine line between assertive and shrill
and you can’t go over the shrill line’ (Partner C, law firm). They were aware
of the need to be assertive but not to be perceived as overly aggressive even
though the nature of the job requires a degree of physical presence, perfor-
mativity and authority. For the lawyers, particularly when advocating
in court, the role is ‘performative in the sense that the essence or identity
that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and
sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’ (Butler,
1990, p. 185). Nevertheless, acceptable performativity is gendered as
masculine:
Some people talked to me about my manner of speaking: ‘Maybe you need
to tone it down a little bit you know’ — it is ridiculous because I had to do
it to kind of give me authority in Court, to have authority to be among the

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GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS 499

men, and then I did it and the men are like, ‘We’re feeling defensive and
scared’. (Associate lawyer C)
Society’s cultural expectations are that women embody softer, feminine
attributes, whereas in law, the nature of the work sometimes involves pow-
erful advocacy which requires more assertive behaviour. Women who
are deemed to be acting contrary to femininity and embodying the more
masculine attributes required by the law profession are subject to negative
characterizations:
If a man had made the same arguments, in the same manner, in the same
way as a woman, you know they were just protecting their clients’ interests
or whatever, but if a woman does it, she is a bitch. That is one of the things
for women, at least in litigation, it is more of a problem for women to be
taking strong positions and arguing forcefully and striking that balance. If
you do it too much you are a bitch, that is how you would be characterized
and you know, with some people, if you do it at all you are a bitch. (Partner
A, law firm)
The elusive and ephemeral professional demeanour that encapsulates body
language, manner and speech may have differential sets of performative
criteria for men and women, so that what is regarded as professional for a
man may be regarded as too masculine for a woman.

Gendered embodied expectations and control

The women in the study were conscious of how they utilised, maintained or
developed their bodies in order to fit more successfully into the masculine
culture of professional services firms. Sometimes this involved the use of
natural attributes which enabled them to fit more easily into the symbolic
order of professionalism:
You may have noticed I am extraordinarily tall and I think it has actually
served me very well in law and in a male dominated profession because I
think that I do get accorded a lot more credibility because of that ... people
think that I am older or more experienced or more confident or sure of
myself or whatever.... I think that does work to your advantage in law.
(Associate lawyer A)
At other times they were conscious of compensating for their apparent lack of
fit and professional demeanour by altering their self-presentation through the
management of their body. This includes simply out-dressing others, using
clothes as a cloak of professionalism:
I sort of think that if you go to a meeting and you are the only women in the
room you better be the best dressed one there, and if you go to a meeting

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500 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

with clients and you are the accountant you better be dressed one notch
above the client. (Senior Manager D, accounting)

Some aspects of physical appearance, such as size, race, age or physical

disability, cannot be disguised. Individuals may feel marginalized on a
number of fronts due to their physical appearance, which cause them, as in
the case of the lawyer being described here, to feel the need to compensate, by
wearing ‘these fantastic suits and dresses and, you know, high heels and
things to overcome her petite size and the fact that she looks so young’ in
order to adopt some of the characteristics of professionalism.
While obesity and size are issues for both men and women in modern
capitalist societies, the need to control body weight is an issue that pervades
popular culture in terms of women’s embodiment. Being overweight sug-
gests an apparent lack control of one’s body, which this participant, aware of
her own large size, was conscious of:

I think there is still the misconception as far as body image goes that if you
are fat it is your fault, you are fat because you choose to eat too much ... so
I have always been aware of it. (Partner A, law firm)

Control of the body and its outward display, through being physically fit,
healthy and an appropriate weight, can be said to be indicative of being in
control of one’s rationality and corporeal presence, central to the embodiment
of the professional in accounting and law:

They want you to appear fit and healthy and you know you cannot be
overweight, they encourage you to be healthy ... they do encourage that.
(Associate lawyer B)

Those who do not conform to this norm struggle to attain the professional
demeanour and professional embodiment so prized in professional services
firms:

A colleague, she looks young, and she is also very heavy, and ... I have seen
her struggle throughout her career with being taken seriously, and unfor-
tunately I think some of it has to do with her weight, and ... she had all her
own issues about it already and then I think on top of it she was being
judged for it, which is unfortunate, but I think law firms in a lot of ways are
kind of shallow. (Associate lawyer A)

Even those who have ostensibly achieved success by achieving partnership

status may have done so at a personal cost of significant strain on the body:

The worst part is the stress, I mean I don’t look like that anymore, in terms
of the photograph they took after I [was made partner], you know, so on the
whole, you lose some part of yourself. (Partner D, law firm)

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This comment from a partner was striking in its veracity as I had visited her
web pages to glean some background information prior to our meeting and
almost did not recognize the woman I met from the photograph on the
website. Long hours, associated tiredness, a sedentary working life and an
inability to plan weekend physical activities with friends due to work com-
mitments had led to her sense of physical deterioration.

Discussion: gendered physical capital

The preceding sections have identified that concepts of professionalism in

accounting and law are ephemeral, encapsulating dress and self-presentation,
speech and manner, which might be termed professional demeanour, and
which relate directly to the body. This relates to Bourdieu’s (1984) argument
that the body has become commodified in modern societies and is central to
the acquisition of status and distinction. The body is a bearer of symbolic
power, through its form of physical capital, and in its ‘embodied states, as
modes of speech, accent, style, beauty and so forth’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 243).
There is also an interrelationship between the development of the body and
the habitus, such that the context in which the commodification of embodi-
ment takes place will clearly influence the outcome. Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus suggests that understanding the socially constituted system of a
profession such as accounting and law is central to understanding the culture
and socialization of professional embodiment. Habitus encapsulates
the general dispositions, inclinations, attitudes, and value of any particular
field that are embodied in the field’s inhabitants and are durably incorpo-
rated in their bodies ... in short, habitus is the logic or code for the social
behaviour of a field. (Macintosh, 2009, p. 3, cited in Malsch et al., 2011)
As Bourdieu (1977, p. 94) puts it, values are ‘given body’ and culture is ‘made
body’ within a field. Moreover, institutions seek to produce
a new man [sic] through the process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’
... set[ting] such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress,
bearing, physical and verbal manners ... treating the body as a memory, they
entrust to it in abbreviated and practical form the fundamental principles
of the arbitrary content of the culture. (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 94, italics in
original).
Hence, while organizations as a context have long been termed masculine
enterprises (Acker, 1990; Kanter, 1977) in which the woman’s body is expe-
rienced as marginal (Brewis and Sinclair, 2000; Gatrell, 2011a, 2011b;
Trethewey, 1999), professional embodiment, in the context of professional
services firms in accounting and law, has a particular form of commodifica-
tion and physical capital arising from the very nature of these professions.

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502 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

Though not homogenous, accounting and law firms, as professional services

organizations, are dominated by the concept of the client and the client
interest, with a long history of male domination and masculine cultures.
Despite there being no intention to compare firms geographically in this
study, participants from both the UK and the USA faced similar embodied
norms, suggesting that, despite the potential for national differences, profes-
sional norms may override cultural differences in terms of doing gendered
identity. The socialization processes of mimicking behaviour, approbation or
disapprobation in professional services firms in accounting and law form
what Bourdieu refers to as a ‘structural apprenticeship, which leads to the
embodying of the structures of the world, that is, appropriating by the world
of a body thus enabled to appropriate the world’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 89). In
other words,
there is a dialectical relationship between the body and the context in
which it operates, each informing the other, such that the rules, hierarchies
and metaphysical commitments of professional culture are inscribed on the
body, and the body reflects this back. (Haynes, 2008, p. 343)
The concept of physical capital is persuasive in understanding how embodied
forms acquire status and distinction. Where Bourdieu’s work is less compre-
hensive is in applying this to gendered constructs,1 particularly outside the
domestic context. Where a culture has been historically highly masculine, as
in accounting and law, the socialized embodied forms become synonymous
with masculine attributes that even Bourdieu recognizes as ‘typically mascu-
line and bourgeois virtues ... character, manliness, leadership’ (Bourdieu,
1996, p. 118). Of course, men are also subject to this embodied characteriza-
tion and socialization. I have shown in this study, however, how women find
it difficult to identify and negotiate the ephemeral nature of professional
demeanour, dress appearance, and self-presentation and I argue that this is
because the pervasive culture and embodied identity of professional services
firms in accounting and law remains inherently masculine. Through a process
of commodification and socialization, women feel compelled to compensate
for a lack of ‘natural’ masculine characteristics but are equally criticized for
asserting themselves too much. Moreover, their bodies are subjected to a
controlling masculine rationality in maintaining their embodied characteris-
tics in relation to voice, weight and self-presentation such that, as Grosz (1994,
p. 13) points out:
A convenient self-justification for women’s secondary social position ... [is
to] contain them within bodies that are represented, even constructed, as
frail, imperfect, unruly, and unreliable, subject to various intrusions that are
not under conscious control.
These symbolic distinctions associating social attributes with gendered
bodies become crucial in constructing and legitimating hierarchical and
inegalitarian evaluations of worth in professional services firms.

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GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS 503

Bourdieu (1977, p. 184) argues that it is the degree of objectification asso-

ciated with physical capital, by which he means the interactions between
people and institutionalized hierarchical mechanisms, that is the basis of
modes of domination. To relate this idea to professional services firms, we
could say that the symbolic value of (masculine) professional embodiment is
embedded in the culture of the profession to such a degree that it is regarded
as natural and rewards those who more closely relate to its forms, thus
reinforcing the culture and reproducing the inegalitarian forms of worth in a
type of vicious circle. This is what Bourdieu characterizes as symbolic vio-
lence, which develops not only when subordinate agents internalize the dis-
courses of dominant agents as natural, but also when dominant agents come
to perceive their own domination as natural (Neu et al., 2003). Moreover, state
nobility confers what Bourdieu (1996, p. 104) calls a ‘dialectic of consecration
and recognition’ which enables elite institutions ‘to attract individuals who
most closely conform to its explicit and implicit demands and who are the
least likely to alter it’. This is what enables professional services firms to
reproduce themselves in their own image, recruiting from a relatively narrow
pool of institutions, and makes it very difficult and slow to change the culture
of embodied identities.
While much of the performance of gender in organizations may appear
routinized, the practice of ‘doing gender’ may at the same time involve
individuals in attempting to resist the production or reproduction of gen-
dered identities (Pullen and Knights, 2007), an issue which Bourdieu fails to
address in detail. Nor does he give any degree of attention to the phenom-
enological nature of the body, the ‘lived’ body, with all its frailties. However,
as Ross-Smith and Huppatz (2010) point out, Bourdieu’s concepts of capital
transcend dichotomies of dominance and subordination to facilitate under-
standing of the complex nature of gender power, and the way it is contested,
in organizations. In such a way, the women in this study, rather than naively
accepting the professional embodied identities imposed in their profession,
showed a clear reflexive awareness of the ‘illusio’ (belief in the game)
(Bourdieu, 1984, p. 54), playing the game in order to succeed, which meant
that they sometimes had to endorse the very masculine norms and values that
they might otherwise wish to reject. They consciously utilised and worked
their bodies to support their credibility and authority, through dress, voice
and self-presentation, yet were aware of the sacrifice they had made of
their bodies, working through tiredness and pain, in order to develop and
maintain their professional identities.

Conclusion

The professions have come under scrutiny in relation to opportunities for

entry and career development for professionals for many decades. While

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504 GENDER, WORK AND ORGANIZATION

barriers to entry have largely been overcome for women in accounting and
law, progression through the hierarchy remains problematic and women are
not being retained in professional services firms in the numbers that might be
expected (Law Society, 2010; Professional Oversight Board for Accountancy,
2010), an issue which has concerned governments and the professions alike
(Panel of Fair Access to the Professions, 2009).
Drawing from interviews with women professionals in accounting and law
firms, this article has examined an aspect of working life which remains
problematic — the relationship between the body and identity in professional
services firms. I suggest that concepts of professional identity and gendered
embodiment are closely interlinked. The physical body is an important facet
of professionalism because it is symbolic of aspects of identity and the self, an
embodied representation of a perceived identity. The findings suggest that, in
terms of gender, the historical challenges of gendered body image and fitness
to practice remain an issue in contemporary firms. Bourdieu’s theories of
capital, particularly physical capital, are used to argue that professional
embodiment remains resolutely masculine.
While women are conscious of managing their embodied identities in this
context and may use some degree of agency to resist these cultural norms,
they are still subjected to marginalization as certain forms of physical capital
are associated with legitimate professional identity. Moreover, physical
capital and a particular masculine form of professional embodiment become
associated with hierarchical and inegalitarian notions of worth. Women have
to tread a fine line between hiding negatively constructed aspects of feminin-
ity while displaying positively construed masculine forms of embodiment in
order to be taken seriously. These issues may have severe implications for the
women themselves as they subsume facets of their identity and sacrifice
aspects of their bodies. They also have potentially serious implications for the
professions. While the women in this study have all remained in the profes-
sion and some have achieved partnership status, the findings might help to
explain if and how women continue to feel marginalized in accounting and
law.
Future research might usefully research the impact of such gendered
embodiment on women who have left professional services firms to pursue
other options. It might also consider the impact on men of embodied identi-
ties in the professional context. Importantly, the concept of professional
embodied identity might be applied to other groups known to be marginal-
ized in the professions on grounds of race, disability, and social background,
which remain tangible issues in allowing equality of opportunity in profes-
sions (Panel of Fair Access to the Professions, 2009). If only certain forms of
embodied identities are regarded as legitimate, there are serious implications
for cultural, social and physical capital and for the careers and identities of
individuals, if they are to secure equal access to status, career progression and
affirmation.

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GENDER, IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICE FIRMS 505

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by an Advanced Institute of Management Fellow-

ship, RES-331-27-0022A, funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council, to whom grateful thanks are extended. The author would also like to
thank the Center for Professional Integrity and Accountability at Portland
State University, USA, and Jesse and Nancy Dillard, for their hospitality and
support in undertaking the USA interviews. Thanks also to Alan Murray for
support, to the three anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and to
all the women who took part in the study.

Note
1. For more detail on Bourdieu and gender see Masculine Domination (Bourdieu,
2001).

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