The global issue of women's marginalisation in the accounting profession has received significant attention from researchers but tends to focus on women’s work in public accounting firms, rather than their leadership in professional associations, and has as yet failed to explore the African context. Additionally, it is often argued that when women are involved in leadership positions, they can transform inequality by highlighting and reversing practices that marginalise women, but whether this happens in practice is overlooked in the accounting literature. In this study we begin to address these gaps by using Huffman's (Huffman, 2016) conceptualisation of women leaders as agents of change or cogs in the machine to articulate the role and impact of a Nigerian female body of accountants on inequality in the Nigerian accounting profession. Our findings reveal a complex scenario showing that while women leaders may transform inequality positively, underlying sociocultural pressures have the potential to divert and subvert long run change. Thus, our findings suggest that either women leaders play a transitory role in transforming gender inequality in the accounting profession and society, or that their role becomes transitory if focus on the original emancipatory objectives is lost.

女性在会计职业中被边缘化的全球性问题受到了研究人员的极大关注，但往往关注女性在公共会计师事务所的工作，而不是她们在专业协会中的领导地位，并且尚未探索非洲的背景。此外，经常有人争辩说，当女性担任领导职务时，她们可以通过强调和扭转将女性边缘化的做法来改变不平等，但会计文献忽略了这种做法是否在实践中发生。在这项研究中，我们开始通过使用霍夫曼 (Huffman, 2016) 将女性领导者概念化为机器中的变革推动者或齿轮来解决这些差距，以阐明尼日利亚女性会计师团体对尼日利亚会计行业不平等的作用和影响. 我们的研究结果揭示了一个复杂的场景，表明虽然女性领导者可能会积极改变不平等，但潜在的社会文化压力有可能转移和颠覆长期变化。因此，我们的研究结果表明，女性领导者要么在改变会计行业和社会中的性别不平等方面发挥了短暂的作用，要么如果失去对最初的解放目标的关注，她们的作用就会变得短暂。