Males and Females
The scores registered by first year male students appear to be close to those of their
counterparts in the same year with an average of 7.26 for males and 7.65 for females. Both
groups scored above 8 on 5 statements. The statement “I would enjoy being an accountant”
received the highest score of 9.12 from female students as compared to 8.74 from their
counterparts. Also female students gave a score of 8.56 to the statement “The accounting
profession is well-respected” as compared to 7.81 assigned by first year males to the same
statement. This could be argued to support the findings of Kumar (2010) which revealed that
females in Botswana are passionate about the accounting profession. No significant difference in
attitudes was noted in either individual item’s score or in average score between first year female
and male students. The Independent sample T test for the average mean scores was t= -0.11073,
P =0.474. Therefore, the hypothesis that there is no significant difference in attitudes towards
accounting as a career between first year male and female accounting students is not rejected.
These findings concur with findings of McDowall and Jackling (2010) and McMurtrie (2010)
who did not detect a significant difference between males’ and females’ attitude towards the
profession.
Attitudes towards accounting profession of fourth year male and female students were
closer than the first years’ expectations with an overall average score of 7.21 and 7.16 for males
and females respectively. In most statements the scores were virtually the same except in
“Accounting is a lot of fixed rules; it doesn’t involve conceptual skills or judgment” where the
females gave a score of 5.4 and males 7.0. Also a notable difference was found on the statement
“Accountants find little satisfaction in their work” where female students assigned a score of
5.95and the male student a score of 7.2. Both statements being reverse-keyed, the results suggest
that fourth year male students were less inclined to label accounting negatively than their
counterparts. Again the test of equality of average means between fourth year male and female
students did not reveal a significant difference between them with T value of -0.3651 and p-value
of 0.6228. The third hypothesis is not rejected.
As reflected in Table 3, on the overall, first year female students had a more positive
attitude towards accounting than the rest of the groups with average attitude score of 7.65.