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Ethel Watts: Paving the way for women in Chartered Accountancy

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Ethel Watts grew up in Bow, east London, before becoming the first woman to qualify as a Chartered Accountant by examination. Her story follows on from our piece on trailblazer Mary Harris Smith - the first female Chartered Accountant, who was admitted as a fellow to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) in 1920 after the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of the previous year. 

The ICAEW have been celebrating their centenary of female membership this year, from researching the early pioneers, to gathering a digital archive of women accountant’s stories which show changing attitudes from the 1940s to today.

ICAEW has kindly allowed us to reproduce excerpts from their booklet ‘100 years Celebrating women in Chartered Accountancy’, to tell the story of Ethel Watts’ life and work.

Born in 1895, Ethel Watts was the daughter of a police officer. Unlike many of the other early female members of the ICAEW, she does not appear to have had any family connections to accountancy firms. (The Accountant noted in 1930 that, of the four women admitted in that year, two bore ‘names well known in the accountancy profession’.) 

Watts attended Coburn School for Girls in Bow, London, before studying at Bedford College and then reading history at Royal Holloway College (both colleges of the University of London), where she was awarded a Class 2 BA Hons in 1916. After the First World War, and on the advice of Sir Harry Peat, she decided to train as a chartered accountant rather than as a lawyer, which she later said had been her first thought.

Watts served her articles with S. Williams of Manchester and Aberystwyth before joining W.B. Peat and Co. (Peat and Co was later to become global firm KPMG - the ‘P’ is for Peat.) She was issued a practising certificate in April 1925 and joined the practice of Miriam Homersham briefly (Homersham and Watts of Clement’s Lane, City of London), before setting up her own firm, E. Watts & Co.

Watts continued as a sole practitioner until her retirement in 1961. Even though she was married, she always practised under her maiden name. Keen to enable women to enter the profession, Watts took on other women as articled clerks, including Sarah Evans BSc, who was admitted to ICAEW in 1933.

Watts mainly provided tax advice, with her husband remarking in The Accountant (in an article entitled ‘I married an accountant – by a husband’), that she was always glued to the wireless when the Budget was broadcast. She did have audit clients, including a firm of hatters who felt a female auditor might be more understanding of their business problems than a man. Like Mary Harris Smith, Watts was also a treasurer for, and provided tax advice to, a number of women’s groups. Watts admitted that this was her deliberate policy as it was a useful way to gain clients. In her own records there is a letter from Harris Smith passing on the audit of the Soroptimist Club to Watts. They clearly knew each other, but given the few female members this is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, Watts stated that male support enabled her to get articles and train. Then, as now, gaining admission to ICAEW is not simply a case of passing examinations. A potential member also has to serve articles with an existing member. Before 1920 this could only be a man and, given the few women who did become members and partners before the 1980s, it continued to be almost always a man. 

Even if some men were prepared to grant articles to women, there were still quite a few obstacles to overcome. In 1935, for example, Watts wrote to the ICAEW president asking why women had to sit their examinations separately in the examination hall and not in alphabetical order among the men. She objected to this because the anonymity of the examination scripts would be compromised. The response was that the ‘fairer sex’ would distract the men. Like Harris Smith, Watts was adamant that women should be treated no differently from men: equality was the aim, not a preference.

“For the woman who is proposing to enter into articles it is essential that she should make certain that she is choosing a firm where she will be treated in every respect in the same way as if she was a man.”
— Ethel Watts, The Accountant (1945)

In 1945 Watts founded the Women Chartered Accountants’ Dining Society, ‘because in their professional life many … might be in isolated or lonely positions, as usually there was no other woman of comparable age or with similar interests in the immediate office circle’. In 1950, she was elected as the first female committee member of the London Society of Chartered Accountants. She recounted that the first dinner she was entitled to attend as a committee member was held at the Junior Carlton Club, which did not allow women to be admitted. As Watts wryly pointed out, she would have been allowed in if she was a waitress. She also told of the time she received an invitation to a student dinner as E. Watts Esq., with the request that she wear a dinner jacket. From 1953 until her death, Watts was on the executive committee of the Chartered Accountants’ Benevolent Association (CABA) and in 1962 represented ICAEW at the Eighth International Congress of Accountants in New York. 

Watts died suddenly in 1963. The many letters of condolence sent to the Fawcett Society (a leading feminist organisation of which she was chair) spoke of her ‘clear brain’ and ‘ability’, but also that she was charming, delightful, kind and elegant, as well as an avid reader and music lover with catholic tastes in both. The Fawcett Society was in no doubt, however, about her achievements as a pioneer. 

“There are uncountable hundreds of women in this country who do not know to what extent they owe their emancipation and their status to the undefeated persistence and application of women like Ethel Watts.”
— The Fawcett Society, Unpublished obituary of Ethel Watts Women’s Library (1963)

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Reproduced with the kind permission of ICAEW. © ICAEW 2019.

First published in 2019 in the publication ‘100 years Celebrating women in Chartered Accountancy’: https://www.icaew.com/-/media/corporate/files/about-icaew/100-years-of-women/100-years-booklet.ashx?la=en. No reproduction or redistribution allowed.

The ICAEW do not accept responsibility for any loss caused to any person who acts or refrains from acting in reliance on the material within the e-booklet.

Sources and further reading