Abstract

Gender and family structure are important variables in the growth and promotion of auditors in public audit firms to be partners and managing partners. Therefore, this study examines the effect of gender and family structure on the career progression of individuals in public audit firms in Nigeria. To achieve this objective, relevant primary and secondary data were used. The primary data was collected from a well structured questionnaire administered to one hundred and twenty three respondents with an average reliability of 0.83 and the secondary data from published scholarly articles. The data collected from the questionnaires were analyzed using regression, t-test, granger causality test and diagnostic test. The statistical analysis reveals the linkage between gender and technical competence of auditors in public audit firms; family structure and productivity of auditors in public audit firms; family structure and dedication to duty of auditors in public audit firms and the difference between male and female on the career progression in public audit practice. On the basis of the empirical result, the study concludes that gender of an individual does not affect the technical competence of auditors, but rather what is important is the level of education and experience of the auditor; family structure affects the productivity of auditors. This is particularly in respect to women that are married; family structure affects the dedication of auditors in public audit firms and there are differences between the growth and promotion of male or female in public audit firms. On the basis of the conclusion, useful recommendations were presented to improve the role of gender and family structure on career progression in public audit firms.

Keywords:

Auditors, career progression, competence, family structure, gender, Nigeria,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.