Irish Chartered Accountant Elected President of European Accounting Association
Author:
Cian Molloy
The director of the UCD Quinn School of Business, Dr Aileen Pierce, has been elected the first female president of the European Accounting Association (EAA). She talks to CIAN MOLLOY about her new role.
Aileen Pierce will be well known to many Accountancy Ireland readers. Anyone who was a BComm student at UCD in the last 30 years probably had her as an accountancy lecturer. Although she hasn’t taught in the last two years, her current role as Director of the UCD Quinn School of Business is akin to being Dean for undergraduate students so she is still involved directly in the formation of Ireland’s future accountancy professionals.
The big difference between accountancy students today and accountancy students 30 years or more ago, she says, is the level of confidence apparent in the new generation.
“It’s the result of a whole load of things – economic prosperity, the education system, societal values, etc. – but they are so confident in themselves and in their abilities. There was a time when they would not be so confident about their future but that is no longer the case. One aspect that hasn’t changed, however, is that you can still see an ‘accountancy type’ among the students. Those who go into accountancy tend to have very strong attention to detail and are good at focusing on precise questions. We still have to work hard with these students to broaden their horizons, encouraging them to be critical and developing their communication skills so that they can use words, not just numbers, when answering questions.”
Alongside her day job at UCD, Aileen has enjoyed a long involvement with the profession. In the past, she was a regular presenter of Continuing Professional Development courses for both the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI) and the Institute of Certified Publi Accountants (ICPAI) and she served as a member of ICAI’s Accounting Standards Technical Committee, a role she was sorry to have to relinquish: “It wasn’t as though I didn’t enjoy it but it was very demanding and I couldn’t give it the commitment necessary because of my other activities.”
She is currently a member of ICAI’s Publishing Committee and also serves on the audit committee of An Garda Síochána. In short she is a busy woman with a reputation for being a hard worker. Her new role as President of the EAA puts Aileen at the head of an organisation with about 1,800 members in 60 countries. Her term of office commences in 2009 and will last for two years.
“The service responsibilities of the role involve a full day to two full days a week.”
The EAA was established to link together the Europe-wide community of accounting scholars and researchers and provides a platform for the wider dissemination of European accounting research as well as fostering quality and improving research. It is the world’s second largest networking organisation for academics specialising in accounting studies – the biggest being the American Accounting Association (AAA). The most obvious difference between the two associations is that the AAA has a predominantly monolingual English-speaking membership, while the EAA has a polylingual membership from more than 60 different countries.
Another difference, not immediately mentioned by Aileen, is that the AAA benefits from a culture where volunteerism is relatively strong.
“In the United States they seem to be much better at putting their hands up and offering their services when work needs to be done,” says Aileen ruefully.
“The EAA depends on voluntary effort,” she says. “We don’t have fulltime executive staff. Our secretariat is provided by the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, on a pro-rata basis, from the EIASM’s offices in Brussels.”
Aileen envies the AAA the support and involvement it gets from the profession. “In America the link between the academics involved in accounting and the wider profession is much closer than in Ireland or the UK. Here, the gap between academia and the profession is growing. In UK and Irish third-level institutions the academic research and publication requirements are very demanding and involve skills that are quite different from those that accountants value or are trained to do – and this is affecting a cross-over of ideas between business and academic researchers.
“The EAA is great for meeting people of different cultures, but that also poses challenges for the organisation. As President, I want to continue to grow our membership in Eastern Europe and to help support academic research there. In some countries there isn’t the same tradition of academics regularly publishing research and opening their work up to peer review, yet universities worldwide are demanding high quality research activity across all disciplines for career progression.
“Academics are expected to publish work regularly. It is important that your published work appears in journals that are subject to academic peer review. From that process, you gain feedback, revise, re-submit, and, if you are lucky, the work is published in a respected journal within two years.” Academic journals are entirely different to the professional titles like Accountancy Ireland whose focus is on communicating in a readable, informative style with a very diverse readership that embraces those at the earliest stages of their career right through to those who have retired.
“A feature in Accountancy Ireland magazine is very nice personally but it doesn’t get you any rings on the board from the academic world’s point of view: if you want to be taken seriously as an academic, you need to publish your work in peer-reviewed academic journals,” Aileen explains. That said, as President of the EAA, Aileen would like to find a way of bridging the gap between the academic world and the profession.
“Some of the messages and ideas coming forward from academic research deserve a wider audience,” she says. “This is something we should be doing more of, but academics do not see it as a priority at the moment.” Aileen is modest about her achievement in being elected President of the EAA:
“It used to be an automatic election for a person who had previously organised one of the association’s annual conferences, which take place in a different country each year. That changed two years ago.”
Nevertheless, the fact that the EAA annual conference in Dublin in 2006 was an outstanding success is testament to her organisational abilities. The conference involved some 1,200 delegates, 27 parallel sessions and 12 large-scale symposia. It was a major logistics operation that took nearly three years
to organise.
As well as being the EAA’s first Irish President, Aileen will also be the first woman to hold the office. She acknowledges that it is ‘surprising’
that the EAA has not had a female president before.
“I think it’s a result of having a maledominated culture in European academic institutions rather than having a male-dominated culture in the accounting profession! In fact, I would say that women were very much involved in organising annual conferences, but that the kudos would have gone to a male professor who was the senior professor in the host university!
“I am not one for talk of ‘glassceilings’, I was never stopped from going where I wanted to go because I was a woman. If I didn’t get a post it was because I didn’t have the skill-sets or I hadn’t played the politics, but it wasn’t because I was a woman.” UCD has played a major role in Aileen’s life both professionally and personally. Her husband Bernard Pierce was a UCD classmate and they both trained at Stokes Kennedy Crowley. He too has become an accounting academic and is Dean of the DCU Business School.
Born and raised in Dublin and educated by the Presentation Sisters in Terenure, Aileen’s favourite form of relaxation is walking in the great outdoors. She takes a keen interest in all sports, with her passion being Kilkenny hurling. “My love of hurling and of Kilkenny comes from my mother,” she says. Her husband, Bernard, is a Wexford man so it is perhaps not surprising that they picked Waterford as the location for their holiday home. As she faces into a very busy two-year period as President of the EAA, we wish Aileen every success for her term of office.
Cian Molloy is a freelance business journalist.