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Industry: Accounting and Financial Services
I started my tax and accounting career in 1996, at a Big4 Public Accounting Firm. Accounting is an interesting beast, because as everybody enters, you are in a bullpen with a large pool of people that are all equally the same when you start. You're compared to your peers and you’re competing with your peers, right from day one. And, you must remember back in the mid ‘90s, we were all lucky to have jobs, right? It was right after the recession. So, everybody, including me, were putting in 150% just so that you could keep your job.
I got married in 1999. And then we started thinking about children. You know what my first thought was, right? The government had just increased the maternity leave from six months to a year. I was thinking, “If I have a child right now, I'm going to fall off this potential partner track, because I'm going to be away from work for a year.”
Weekend Babies
In the early 2000s, my role models were female partners that would have their scheduled c- section on Friday, have their baby, and come back to work on Monday. I'm not joking. They would have a nanny lined up. So, these were our mentors and our role models as partners. That's what they had to do to survive in this workplace.
I.D.E.A.L. Workplace Fact: 17% of employees in the financial services industry said their company offers mother’s rooms; 14% said their company offers onsite daycare. (Source: I.D.E.A.L. Workplace Study, 2021)
My daughter was born in May 2003. And right up until the last day of work, nine months’ pregnant, I was wheeling large files to work every day and working till 11 or 12 o'clock at night. I kept saying to myself, “I have to finish all of my client work before I step out the door.” I did finish it all on April 30, which was the personal tax deadline.
That was the culture. And that was an expectation I guess I put on myself to meet those high standards. And as women, we're not the type to just leave things unfinished. I think we all have that type of personality, where we want to wrap things up with a pretty bow and make sure that we've closed the loop so we can move to the next stage or the next phase of our project or life.
But I had a lot of time to think over maternity leave.
I really changed my attitude and wanted to put myself as a priority that year. I was one of the first people to ask HR about work-life balance and reducing my work week to three days a week.
Even though they promoted flex work arrangements and it was a benefit they offered, HR was quite perplexed on how they could make this work for me. My actual workload didn’t change so I was still finding myself working everyday. I stopped the flex work plan because I said, “You know what, I don't want to be working five days and being paid for three days.”
The I.D.E.A.L. Rebel Moment
Yes, I was probably one of the first to go through and ‘test’ this flex work arrangement. I don't see myself as a trailblazer because I did not accomplish what I was looking to accomplish. I ended up going back up to a five-day work week because I wasn't getting the answers that I was looking for. I thought to myself, you know what, “If we can't make this work for me, at least I'm asking more questions and I'm starting to get HR thinking about it so that hopefully the women that are coming behind me will have an opportunity or a chance to make this work for them.”
A couple of years later, I went on my second maternity leave. But this time, I was a little smarter. I took the full year off. And during that year, I did even more thinking. “Is this really what I want to do with my life? I know what I'm going back to, I know what's going to be required of me.” I know that I used to come home feeling so depleted of energy.
I did return to full-time work. Every night, I was always the last mom to pick up my kids from daycare. As I pulled in, I would see my two little ones waiting in the daycare window. My 2-year-old daughter was half consoling her one-year-old brother. Oh, it was so heartbreaking.
Then I typed up my resignation letter.
Sacrifice=Success
Just typing it felt like a weight was being lifted off my shoulders. “This is the sacrifice I'm going to have to make in my career so that I'm there more for the kids. I don't want them growing up waiting in a daycare window for me. It's just not what I could do.” The decision came easy for me because I had a support system at home.
When I submitted my resignation, I couldn't fathom how they were surprised or shocked. I had spent nearly half the year asking again about a better flex work arrangement. Resigning was the best decision for my family and for me.
I consulted on a freelance basis for a while, which kept my skills sharp and gave me time to enjoy my babies. It also allowed me to meet and build a different kind of network.
This led me to starting a specialty tax business with a small team. We built it up to about 350 clients and were close to $5 million in revenue. We got an offer to sell in 2013. We sold the business and the owners walked away with a piece of the pie, which was a really great, great experience. It taught me a lot about sales and business development. As an entrepreneur, I was professionally fulfilled and had family time.
Not long after that, a Mid-Size Public Accounting Firm offered me a leadership role in the Toronto practice. And I'm here now. Yes, I was the first female partner in our specialty niche service line.
Female Email Power
When I was promoted to partner, the news spread across the local offices fast! I kid you not, I must have received tons of emails from females in the firm saying that “It's so nice to see a hard-working woman promoted.” Someone bundled those emails and sent them to the partner who nominated me for my promotion. He was in shock. He shared the emails with his manager, who was a National Tax leader at the time.
Obviously, that year, my face was on various local marketing paraphernalia. I was a completely different hire. Female, ethnic, mother, started and sold a business. It's like all the boxes were getting ticked from the HR perspective that supporting women in careers is something they could promote within the Firm.
In the early partnership years, I had to look few tables over before I saw another female sitting at another table. You didn't see a lot of diversity, either.
Then the firm introduced a diversity and inclusion committee. Oh, it felt so great to be in that room, it felt so great! They put a lot of effort and thought into it, which was really nice to see. And they saw that it was an important thing for us to recognize and an important thing for us to discuss.
I thought, ‘Finally, the firm is putting themselves out there and actually talking about this and doing something about this.’
We're not yet where we should be, but we want to get there. It's still a work in progress. But I am happy to see that the firm takes it seriously. And to me, that is everything.
-Story as told by Neha Tiku, I.D.E.A.L. Rebel
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