Episode 014: Marie-Soleil Tremblay

Prof. Marie-Soleil Tremblay is a public sector accounting scholar who coaches media in Quebec on how to ask better questions about provincial budgets. Her work also looks at how diversity on boards of directors and audit committees makes them more effective. She says that simply forcing boards to include more women doesn’t fix the lack of diversity all by itself.

Transcript

Cameron Graham: My guest today is Marie-Soleil Tremblay, professeure titulaire at ÉNAP, the School of Public Administration in Quebec. One of the bright lights in the luminous collection of accounting scholars in the province. She studies auditing and governance, particularly in relation to the public sector. She is, in my experience, a wonderfully supportive colleague, insightful and encouraging in her comments on the work of other scholars. She's a prolific researcher herself and fully engaged in the discourse over public finance in Quebec. She spoke with me from Quebec City in June. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Marie-Soleil, welcome to the podcast.

Marie-Soleil Tremblay: Thank you for having me.

Cameron: I need you to educate me right off the start here because I'm not familiar with French academic ranks. What does "professeure titulaire" translate to in my world?

Marie-Soleil: In your world, it actually means full professor, which my university granted me in 2017.

Cameron: Lovely. I like that. I like the sound of that! Cool. Well, see, you learn something new every day. This podcast is about academic research and why it matters, so I'd like to talk to you about a couple of your papers. I picked them out and I told you which ones we're going to talk about. I don't know, when some people ask me about my papers, I have to try and remember what it was I wrote way back then. I hope you've had a chance to have a browse through them.

Marie-Soleil: I did.

Cameron: Good. This will give listeners a sense of what your accounting research looks like. You teach public sector accounting, but your research often addresses governance and auditing in publicly traded companies too, right?

Marie-Soleil: Exactly.

Cameron: Is there any connection between that work and the courses you teach or are they kind of separate spheres for you? I'm interested in how professors relate their research and their teaching today. Everybody's different, right?

Marie-Soleil: Like many things in my life, it's not a clear path. But there are many, many connections because as you know, Cam, accounting is everywhere. I did my PhD right after the Enron and WorldCom scandals. And audit committees are subgroups of boards, and a lot of the blame was put on the boards and specifically on the audit committees. There was a natural connection there, me being a former auditor interested in accounting and auditing, to corporate governance. And as far as the public sector goes, 30 years ago there used to be a very big distinction between the public and the private sector. I don't know if you know Christopher Hood and all these ideas around new public management that came forth in the '80s. Basically, in the past 30 years, the gray area between the public and the private just became bigger. And now even for my students, some of them will work parts of their lives in the private sector, then in the public sector. I think how we define the public sector today is actually very different from 30 years ago. And the accounting kind of followed and isn't very different from what we see in the private sector, so that's another thing. And also, for my teaching, probably 20 years ago students – my students are mostly managers in the public sector -- didn't really have much care for numbers and financial statements and budgets. They were just managing people and their focus was more there. Now because of different scandals, because of the fact that there's much more debt and less money to go around, managers outside of accounting are actually very interested in understanding, and being able to participate in, budgets and things that have to do with cost management and accountability. I think it's pretty much intertwined and it's everywhere.

Cameron: Yeah. Well, you see this kind of overlapping and intermixing with the private and the public sector. You get the blurring of the boundaries with things like public-private partnerships, with a lot of collaboration in the accounting that is used to enable those relationships. But then you've also got this whole ideological push, since Thatcher and Reagan, of trying to make the government run more like a company, with accountability.

Marie-Soleil: Exactly. We're now calling patients “customers.”

Cameron: Yes.

Marie-Soleil: Things like that, where it seems that for the past 30 years, we’ve wanted to become more business like. Everything we see in relation to setting targets in the private sector. A lot of it is mimicking what the private sector does. And sometimes – now it's coming back a little bit – but for a long time it was as if everybody was doing things great in the private sector. Therefore, the public sector should just do what they were doing. Now we've seen scandals in the private sector, and we've seen great examples of state-owned enterprises and different organizations in the public sector doing great things. I think that this has the tendency to maybe die down a little bit, but it's still very present. And accounting technologies and all the ideas surrounding auditing are still taking a lot of space up in both sectors, both private and public.

Cameron: Right. Our audience here is people who are generally interested in academic work, but they might not necessarily know specifics about the field that somebody is working in. First question, then, for me would be, why is studying a Board of Directors an accounting study. Isn’t that about the way an organization is organized? Shouldn’t it be an org studies paper, then? What's “accounting” about it?

Marie-Soleil: Well, I think it's the part about accountability. And accountability in a broad sense is just taking responsibility for one's actions. And I don't know if you've ever looked at a Provincial budget or at a Federal budget.

Cameron: [laughs] I thought you're about to ask me whether I've ever taken responsibility for my actions.

Marie-Soleil: [laughs] I know you do. But when you're in a democracy, budgets have to be presented in front of legislative assemblies. And when you have the accountability part – which is the financial statements that are audited – contrary to what you'll see in the private sector, there is actually a third column where you see the budget. And so the financial statements are actually the people who were elected being held accountable for the decisions they made in their budget, in front of the population. And the same thing goes – this is very public [in government], but in publicly traded companies this won't be visible – but the Board of Directors, that's exactly what they do. They adopt a budget and while they won't present it publicly when the financial statements come out, there is this accountability, both from management to the board, and from the board, which ultimately is responsible, to its shareholders.

Cameron: It's interesting the distinction you pointed out, in the focus that is placed on these numbers in the public versus the private sector. In the private sector, as you say, the focus is on the year-end actual numbers and you don't see much in public about the budget. And you're telling me that there is that focus on the budget at the board level, where they've got access to those confidential documents?

Marie-Soleil: Exactly. And legally, they are the ones who adopt the budget and then have to follow up on it. And that's the accountability part and that's where all of the accounting comes in, the interesting part.

Cameron: Maybe you're the person to answer a question for me that has always puzzled me, which is why in our political system there is so much intense focus placed on the government announcing its budget, and so little attention paid to whether it met the budget. We don't see the actuals appearing in the newspapers, we see the budget and that's where the focus is.

Marie-Soleil: And I'm always fascinated by that because you're right, I never get invited when the financial statements are deposited at the National Assembly. There is no show, there's nothing going on where we could actually see the differences and then focus. And you're right that I often do it during the budget and show the media that [the government] had budgeted $10 billion last year and they only spent $7.5, but their focus is going to be on next year. I think there's something maybe a little bit sexier about looking forward than looking backwards.

Cameron: Yeah. Well, it announces intentions, which don't necessarily have to be fulfilled. We've seen that in Ontario with the funding for the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. There's a budget line item there for monitoring large organizations to make sure they are compliant, and we've got a fellow here in Ontario, David Lepofsky, who is quite active in criticizing the government around its performance under this act. And he points out, time and time again, a year goes by and they didn't spend the money on monitoring compliance, even though it’s there in the budget. They can declare an intention and everybody says, "Well, that's great, good for you. That's a good policy." But following through is a very different thing. There's an accountability there to not just in making sure that you don't overspend, but making sure that you spend what you said, what you promised you were going to.

Marie-Soleil: Exactly. And then you get into the way programs are designed, and unfortunately sometimes the issue is with the actual design of the programs and then sometimes it's with the delivery. And I think that the control mechanism is focused on making sure you don't overspend. But there is certainly something to be done about making sure that your intentions actually translate into action.

Cameron: I asked you about the board of directors. tell me what an audit committee is.

Marie-Soleil: An audit committee is a subcommittee of the board. It's usually a minimum of three independent board members who have the ability to oversee the financial reporting and disclosure. Independence, the way we look at it, is making sure that the people who are on that committee don't have any personal interest in the company, that their focus is on the integrity and the efficiency.

Cameron: Right. For instance, the CEO or the CFO, they’re board members usually, or often, but they will not be allowed to be members of the audit committee.

Marie-Soleil: No. Anybody who works in the company is not considered independent. And I think that the interesting question … because this is something I've studied quite a bit, and I think that the idea of independence, it's not just about … because you can appear on paper to be independent. And when we look at scandals, many of the boards had audit committees who seemed to be independent. The true measure for me is -- because sometimes it will be just a question of you being very close to other board members regardless of the compensation you may or may not get -- but to me, it’s are you able to stand up to management or to auditors if you believe something fishy is going on? Do you have the courage to ask questions, hard questions that make some people feel uncomfortable? And ultimately, if there's something that is wrong or that you suspect is very wrong, are you willing to resign? To me, that's the true measure of independence. And that's something that you can't see on paper, it's something that you can probably test, and most often we see that somebody wasn't truly independent after something's gone wrong and they kind of went along or looked elsewhere.

Cameron: Yeah. Well, this is one of the one of the fundamental issues in auditing, this question of whether it's possible to structure things so that you prevent the possibility of accounting malfeasance, whether it's deliberate fraud or neglect or whatever, the idea that it can be prevented if we just get things right. The other school of thought being that we should have really severe punishments because it's going to happen and therefore we should punish it after it takes place. The idea of an audit committee has been around for a while, but it became mandatory at a certain point as a result of the kinds of scandals like WorldCom and, um, …

Marie-Soleil: Enron and WorldCom. And even where it's not mandatory, it's become best practice to have one. But at the other end of the spectrum is sometimes you'll have somebody who's very, very independent, but who won't be competent. It's just that they can't see that something's gone wrong. There's also this measure that we put in, besides independence, of financial expertise for at least one of the member and financial literacy for all members. And I think that it's kind of this balance, because regardless of all the punishment, I think a lot of times when we look at these cases, people weren't truly aware of the nature or the extent of what was going on. And I don't know if just fear would be the best way to go. I think that sometimes you do need to have some punishment, but I always think that if you can attempt to prevent, it's probably always a better thing. And as you've seen in my research, the legislature will put some regulation in to try to do that. It's more of a preventive measure, but after that it's enacted by humans.

Cameron: Well, what you're studying is the adoption of this prescription. Was it specifically about the requirement to have an audit committee? What was the prescription that you're looking at?

Marie-Soleil: It was the Canadian answer to the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. There were many things there that dealt with independence, competence, ….

Cameron: Sarbanes and Oxley were the senators in the U.S that put together this bill that was supposed to be this response to the Enron scandal and they were going to make sure that all auditing was going to be done correctly from now on, having all these strict measures. That takes place in the U.S around 2003?

Marie-Soleil: Between 2002 and 2005 because our Canadian bill was 2004.

Cameron: Okay. In 2004, then, Canada adopts somewhat similar kinds of regulations, and your study is about what is going on at the level of the boards of directors and the audit committees, how they take up these new regulations and how they respond to them, how they see themselves reacting to them, and that sort of thing.

Marie-Soleil: Yeah, that's exactly it.

Cameron: The title of your paper is “Governance prescriptions under trial.” And this notion of the word trial is quite particular for you. You're using it in the sense of this phrase “trials of strength” that comes from Bruno Latour, the French theorist. What does a trial of strength mean for Latour?

Marie-Soleil: For Latour, ideas travel in a certain way and can be re-embedded in certain places depending on how they are enacted by individuals. And it's not like there is this piece of legislation everybody looks at it and says, "Oh, perfect," and then you put into place. What we understand is you can adopt, you can reject, you can modify, you can partially, you can ignore. And ideas-

Cameron: You can act like you adopted it.

Marie-Soleil: You can act. You can partially comply. And there are many ways, many different ways in which ideas, and in this case a piece of legislation, can be enacted or not in a particular setting. And knowing that, I thought it's going to be interesting to understand in this setting, how is it that people make sense [of] and then react to the legislation.

Cameron: You're not talking about the word trial as a formal trial. You're talking about this informal interaction of people as they try to make sense of stuff and figure out how they're going to apply this requirement in their own setting. And it will end up looking similar to what's required, because if it's not similar it'll have to be corrected. But it may not be exactly the same in every organization, because everyone has to figure out how to do it. So it's very low-level, practical stuff you're talking about?

Marie-Soleil: Yeah. And basically, these trials, as you said, it's a social interaction. And it's something that can be done within the group, but also through one's interaction, one's thinking. Different ideas come into play depending on your experiences and then you have to make sense of these things. That ultimately has an impact on how the regulation will be enacted and how strong or not it will be, in the end, to prevent future problems.

Cameron: Right. Just in terms of your methodology here, you're not sitting in the field observing, you're talking to these people after the fact.

Marie-Soleil: Yeah.

Cameron: Okay, so it’s their reflections on what they were thinking and feeling, which is slightly different from being there live.

Marie-Soleil: Totally. I did some research with Henri Guénin and Bertrand Malsch on auditors in the field where we were physically there. In this case, it's actually quite hard to be in board meetings and even if you are, we know that a lot of what happens in boards isn't the actual representation that you see in the meeting. A lot of things happen beforehand there are …

Cameron: In the same way that the parliamentary debates are a bit of a performance and the real negotiating took place behind the scenes.

Marie-Soleil: Exactly. In this case, if I wanted the best understanding, interviews with these people were the way to go and were probably better than direct observations.

Cameron: I forgot to clarify for everybody, this paper is co-authored with Yves Gendron. He was your supervisor when you were doing your doctoral studies?

Marie-Soleil: Yes.

Cameron: Yves is a friend of both of ours and fabulous scholar in his own right, but he is well known as a supervisor of some very, very good PhD students who have graduated and gone on to great things, and you are one of them. This study that the two of you did actually started out as a larger study. You did about 60 interviews with people who were professional accountants and you were getting them to reflect on what had happened after Enron, right?

Marie-Soleil: Yeah.

Cameron: And then you identified 10 of those 60 for this particular paper that you've written here. I'm just interested in how, as a researcher, you may take maximum advantage of the work that you've done. Because these are board members. This is not an easy group to get time with. They're very high level people and if you forgot to ask them a certain question, it may be very difficult to get back in to ask them follow up question. You've got these 60 interviews that I think it's fair to say are a fairly valuable commodity now, academically speaking, and you want to make the most of them. How do you begin to look at a set of interviews like this and say, "This is interesting, I think that we could do another paper that just focuses on this part of the interviews"? Which is what you did for this paper. How do you as co-authors begin to look at this stuff and make sense that there might be multiple papers here?

Marie-Soleil: What we do in research is that we will go and interview these people -- and that being said, I've probably done close to 100 interviews with high-level board members and CEOs -- and in all these interviews, only once has somebody not agreed to talk to me. And I was actually surprised that they were so generous. But of course, you have an hour and you need to get the most out of that. And then what we do is we have the interviews transcribed, and we usually send them back to the people we interviewed, in case they want to change something. Which rarely happens. Most of the time they'll just be okay it.

Cameron: “I said what I meant and I meant what I said.”

Marie-Soleil: There you go. Exactly. But as researchers, according to our ethics committees, these are things that we often have to do. And then usually I'll let it rest a little bit. And sometimes we'll just look at it and all of a sudden -- in this case, I had read Latour and it gave me a different way to look at the data. I had read Latour before, but not because I was going to read the interviews again. But then you start to see something, to see another story. There are many, many different stories you can get from the same interview, depending on (a) the focus and (b) the theoretical lens you want to use to analyze your data. And I think that's the great thing about qualitative research, is that you can actually do that. You don't have to start off with a hypothesis you're going to test. There's this dance between you, the theory, and the data that allows you to have different papers come out.

Cameron: Yeah. What's interesting -- I just want to emphasize what you were saying there -- it's not that you have this body of data and you look at it with one theorist and you see one thing, and then you look at the same body of data with another theorist and you see something else. To me that's intuitive, that makes sense, that you could look at the same thing in different ways, in the same way that you could look at a diamond from the point of view of its subjective beauty as a piece of a ring, or from its industrial strength. It's the same piece of rock, but you look at it in different ways. This makes sense. I think what you were just telling me was that when you go back to the theorist and reread the theorist having exposed yourself to this new set of data, you see something, you learn something new from the theorist.

Marie-Soleil: I think there is this dance. The theorist will allow me to see the data in a different way and the data will help me understand the theory, for me, in a more concrete way. Some people have a very theoretical mind, whereas the way I'm wired is I need to ground a theory in data for it to make sense for me. That's my way of learning and I've come to realize that might be the case for a lot of my students, too.

Cameron: Cool. You talked about getting the interviews transcribed: you now have these text documents that contain all the words. What do you do next as a researcher?

Marie-Soleil: It's called coding, is basically what we do. There's these themes that come. We started with the idea of “trials of strength” and tried to look: okay, there seems to be a kind of debate going on for people where they're partially complying, they're resisting in other ways. We just get themes that come and that are recurring. Here, we didn't have a great number of interviews, we didn't have 300 interviews, but we wanted to make sure we weren't telling just one person’s story. Whatever recurring themes come up, whether it was blaming individual actors for Enron and saying, "We have all this regulation for a few bad people this doesn't even concern us," or the fact that many of them are saying, “This is an overreaction to a problem.” We take these different categories and when you have very little data you can actually just use Excel. But if you have a lot of data, which was the case with this project, we'll use a coding software, where we just put it in and then you put your first-level coding, and sometimes then we have second-level coding.

Cameron: Which means what? What does second-level mean?

Marie-Soleil: Sometimes you have initial themes, big themes, and then you have sort of sub-themes. And it's just a way of classifying information, when you want to look at one of these things -- for example, superficial compliance, in the case of this paper. We found that as far as audit fees went, that was actually something that changed and you can actually see what everybody said about that in one place. And it helps you then to be able to write your paper and to get the quotes you need. Because as you know, I love to let the actors speak their own words. I try to give them that space in my papers, that I …

Cameron: To let what they say come through.

Marie-Soleil: Yes.

Cameron: And both of you as co-authors were looking at the data several times to try and see if you agreed on what was being said?

Marie-Soleil: Well, usually, we'll both do coding and then compare, just to make sure. And in some projects, if we don't agree, we'll even get a student or somebody else to look at it. But usually, it's not … yes, we're doing science, but it's not like we're in a laboratory … and there is, of course, some interpretation on our part.

Cameron: Yes, but you're also trying to achieve something that is not just purely subjective, but intersubjective between the two of you. It's like if you and I were sharing a glass of wine right now, and you smell it and taste it and say, "I think I taste plums in there." And you saying that, then I can say, "Oh, okay, I can see that, I can taste that too." But I didn't notice it the first time. It's not like it's purely made up, but it's the two of us exploring the glass of wine, trying to figure out what's going on in there. The two of you as researchers are working over this dataset, saying, “What do you see?” “Well, I see this." "Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way." Is that the kind of back and forth that you get?

Marie-Soleil: That's exactly it, and I think that's the great thing about being able to work especially with someone like Yves who just has an unbelievable mind. And this was actually the first paper I published in my academic career.

Cameron: I didn't know that. I just picked it because I thought was an interesting paper.

Marie-Soleil: That was my first paper. That was a great learning opportunity for me, too. And therefore, I think that he allowed me to see things in a light I might have not seen, and hopefully I got him to see things, too, to get this out.

Cameron: When I look at the different themes that you show emerging from the data in your paper, there's three things that stand out for me. One is an awful lot of blaming going on: “This is an overreaction! It was those individual auditors that were the problem! This is the corporate executives at fault! This is the regulators that didn't do their job!” and stuff like that. Just a lot of finger pointing, which is understandable when you're feeling defensive and your whole career is built upon this prestige that is being called into question, as a professional accountant. And then there's this one that really was surprising to me, about the sense of powerlessness of the audit committee. I thought these would be the most powerful people in the corporation. They're sitting on the audit committee and they're feeling powerless. What's going on there?

Marie-Soleil: Well, I think that you could see it with the fees. Used to be they thought that their job was to limit auditing fees. But that's actually …

Cameron: Keep it cheap. Yeah.

Marie-Soleil: You know? I have this one quote where somebody says, "We used to spend our time in the audit committees hammering the audit fees down. We never banged down the lawyer fees. We always took great delight in viewing the auditor as not a very important function. Now, its most important function for directors to make sure they're getting input in terms of the test function." They're the audit committee and they didn't see the audit as a very important function.

Cameron: That's shocking.

Marie-Soleil: And then another one said, "Look, if this company goes tits up we're not going to get a medal for trying to save $250,000 on audit fees." I think that in that sense I think that is something that kind of changed, where they got some sort of power, where they realized, “Okay, we didn't think it was really, really important.”

Cameron: But now it is. It almost becomes … auditing has become like conspicuous consumption. You drive the gold Porsche around town to show everybody how wealthy you are. The corporation can point to how expensive their audit was as a way of signaling to everybody how seriously they take accountability in their organization. It's almost like it's become “the more you spend, the better.”

Marie-Soleil: They're still accountants, though. I'm not sure that they would go to the more you spent? But it definitely went from being something where audit committee members saw a big chunk of their job as to hammering down audit fees. And now I think they feel uncomfortable with anybody who would say we're trying to go for the cheaper audit, because then they realize that there's this risk that they may no longer be willing to take, and that they see.

Cameron: What are the implications of this paper then for audit research? Because what you're basically showing is that so much of the actual sense-making of the auditor and the audit committee is very informal. It's just behind-the-scenes stuff. If audit research is looking at the public-facing side of auditing, it's going to miss a lot of the stories. Did this paper lead you in a new direction in your research? Do you think it's changed some of the work of other scholars in this field? How has it rolled out after your paper?

Marie-Soleil: Well, it's actually made me very optimistic about qualitative research, because as an accountant, people in North America, most people who do accounting research, do quantitative research. And with Yves, there's a small group of people who've been doing qualitative research for a while. I remember the first time I went to present something in the U.S, I was actually told that my research wasn't research. And six years later, the American Accounting Association actually gave me a prize for best paper. I went back to tell them thank you, because six years ago, you said that what I was doing wasn't research and now you've just given me a Best Paper award.

Cameron: [laughs]

Marie-Soleil: Same type of research. But I think it means that even for quantitative people -- we all have interest in looking at quantitative work to see general data, to see how things can be simplified -- but I think now there's this interest [in qualitative research] because we understand a lot of things happen behind the scenes and they can't be seen. I think now there's actually interest. I would never get asked to go speak to U.S students, but now at least once a year, there's a university professor from the U.S who says, "Can you come and present your research? Maybe I can't supervise qualitative research, but I at least want my students to know about qualitative research and accounting." I'm happy. I'm optimistic. I think this was a good time to step in and it feels the right thing to do, because I think that accountants and legislators have to understand that when you put in accounting rules or when you pass a bill, there is this interpretation. And often, I don't think they realize it. I think our research allows them to understand the complexity of human action.

Cameron: Well, speaking of complexity of human action, let's turn to your second paper, which is about the gender composition of corporate boards of directors. This paper is also co authored with Yves Gendron and Jean Bedard, and also Bertrand Malsch was on the paper. He’s at Queens [University in Kingston, Ontario], I believe?

Marie-Soleil: He’s at Queens, yes. We were PhD students together.

Cameron: Both of you with Yves?

Marie-Soleil: Yes.

Cameron: Lucky you two. This paper looks at the results of a Quebec regulation that insisted that more women be put on corporate boards in Quebec. I know that the standard argument for putting women on boards has been that diverse groups make better decisions. You think that this is not the whole story.

Marie-Soleil: Well, as I said, I think it's often much more complex. In this case, the legislative answer was to just say, "Well, we're going to force state owned enterprises" -- and we're talking about 24 state owned enterprises, it's a small number – “we're just going to say, within five years at least 40% of your board needs to be women.” As if that would just take care of the issue.

Cameron: Did it take care of the problem of lack of representation of women? Did they actually achieve the targets?

Marie-Soleil: Of course, just like Norway who had done it before. As far as the picture. If you were to take a picture many years ago, before that, you'd have maybe one woman on the board. Now, you do have the picture, but do you have the diversity in discussion and in thought that you wanted? That's a whole other question. And again, to dig deeper and understand, you have to go and talk to these people and understand what the different dynamics are about.

Cameron: This paper, the title of it is “Gender on board: deconstructing the ‘legitimate’ female director.” I take it, right from the title, that you're saying that even though in these 24 state-owned companies you now have roughly gender parity on the board, that doesn't necessarily mean that you've got the representation of this diverse set of views that these women might be bringing. Is this because they've been carefully selected to conform to a particular point of view, or what? What's the underlying problem here?

Marie-Soleil: I think that what my research showed in this case was that mostly, we said, "Okay, well, if we're going to have women, we might as well go get people with different competencies that we don't have on board.” For example, we had state insurance companies who didn't have an actuary. A lot of state-owned enterprises didn't have an accountant. We weren't getting somebody because they were a woman, we were “Okay, we need accountant and make sure that that person is a woman.” It very quickly was transformed into how can we get more diverse competencies. Which is a good thing, because if you have people from different backgrounds, diversity, whether it's based on sex or based on different experiences, will be a good thing. I'm sure of that. But it was a little bit more complex, and the fact that it was through legislature actually brought on this dynamic where people had very strong reactions on both sides. Because a lot of the men who were there thought they’re going to bring in … a 72-year-old guy said, “My wife doesn't deserve to be on the board and because of this legislation she will be.” He thought his wife who had no experience in business would end up [on the board]. So he associated incompetence with women on boards. One of the good things that comes from legislation is we were able to demonstrate that there were very competent women who could serve on boards, and it's just that you had to broaden your horizons and look in places you probably hadn't thought of looking before. But on the other side, there was also a lot of stereotyping going on, where some people, many people, sort of characterized “Women are more like this ….” In one quote: “Women are rigorous. They ask questions. They don't just come and sit waiting to see if maybe they have an opinion after hearing what others have to say. Women have made up their minds and they say what they think.” So there was just this “women are different.”

Marie-Soleil: And then I had this guy tell me, “Typical guy like me, you present me with the solution, I'm 64, I've got experience. The shot is going to go off quick, pow! Men are hunters by nature, we shoot quickly, not always on target, but fast. Guys instinctively trust themselves more, ask less questions. They're less analytical. Their schemes are better built.” So there was this …

Cameron: That's a very interesting quotation.

Marie-Soleil: [laughs] But that's a great thing of qualitative research. When you get people to confide in you, you can actually get a little insight into their minds and their thinking and the way they make sense of things. And these are highly intelligent people, but who have contradictory (sometimes) ways of seeing things. This paper was so interesting on so many levels and it’s still kind of evolving. Because at first, I was thinking legislation is a good thing. Now we're seeing that there are different options, and maybe better options, than going through legislation to get that diversity. Not on the basis of “companies are going to make more profits,” but on the basis that companies will better reflect society and be more equal.

Cameron: Right. But that requires challenging the whole premise of a company, which often gets boiled down to “make a profit.”

Marie-Soleil: Exactly. But I think that if you don't have anyone on the board who has experience of a different kind and the ability to ask different questions and look at things in a different way, then of course, boards are never going to participate. I'm not saying that board members can do this alone, but if you want social change, I think that boards have to be asking themselves some of these questions.

Cameron: One last thing about this paper that I found quite interesting was that you found two contradictory discourses in all these interviews. One is that, “We need more women on boards because they're different than men and they'll bring a new perspective.” And at the same time, you had possibly the same people saying that, "Women can do this job because they're just as competent as men." In other words, they're not different than men. The first argument you're saying, we need them because they're different. The second argument you're saying, they should be here because they're not different. This is very strange way to make sense of things, when you have these contradictory things going on. And you get to explore that as a researcher who's paying attention to these little nuances.

Marie-Soleil: Yes, and again, when you read the paper you see that there's these two levels. There's a first level and then the second level where we use Bourdieu and we look at symbolic violence, where what we're saying is that actually this can be detrimental. The stereotyping, this focus, can actually do the opposite of what the legislator wanted to do in this case.

Cameron: Because it ends up lumping women into some sort of a category rather than treating them as people.

Marie-Soleil: Exactly. As individuals. I've been reading about something called the 30% Club. There's this fantastic woman called Helena Morrissey, who wrote a book called A Good Time to be a Girl. And she's not a fan of legislative quotas and what she wants, what she's trying to do -- and Canada does have a 30% Club -- what she's been doing is actually getting the powerful men on board so that they actually want to transform their organizations. And we know that having just one woman is not going to do anything. You actually need 30% for women to be themselves. If you have less than that, then women will necessarily just adopt the … comportement is the word in French.

Cameron: Masculine behaviours.

Marie-Soleil: Yes. They'll adopt the group behaviour. This 30% is actually really important so that people can actually be themselves. This was the first part of my research, this paper, but I think this is something that's evolving and that I'll be looking at in years to come.

Cameron: Good. Before we wrap up, I want to talk to you about your work in the media, because you do get called upon when there's a budget in Quebec. At least I know that. You may have other media appearances. But tell me what it's like. What goes on around a budget? What's your role? How do you interact with the budget, with the legislative apparatus? How do you interact with the media?

Marie-Soleil: Well, I started doing this because I get a lot of calls from the media. And I think I probably said yes, once, because I wanted my kids to think I was doing something great or that my job wasn't so boring.

Cameron: [laughs] Maman is on TV!

Marie-Soleil: [laughs] Yeah. And once I did that, then you kind of get into this loop. And I'll tell you, 90% of the calls I don't call back, because I could be doing this full time. I think journalists want to better understand, but with the budget, this is like Christmas for me. I've been doing this for eight, I think eight years. And basically, the media ask me to be there and I'll just look at all the information. So we're in a reclus. The way it works is we're there at nine in the morning. We leave our cells, we can't access the outside world. They give us all the information.

Cameron: In English that would be a lockdown [or lockup].

Marie-Soleil: Exactly. A lockdown. We call it reclus. And then the Minister of Finance comes in, and different ministers will be there, and I'll help them focus on what is most important. And I'll also, before they ask questions, I'll help them understand better. Sometimes, some governments sometimes want to make things look a little bit more impressive than they actually are. So I use a lot of my technical skills. I was an auditor for 10 years, a Chartered Professional Accountant.

Cameron: You know where to look.

Marie-Soleil: I'll use those skills, and I actually have access to all the people in the Finance Department, at the Treasury, and all these people just answer every question I have. They're very transparent. I just find it always unbelievable. It's a wonderful day. And then when the Minister starts his speech, then we start doing a live show, and we help people better understand the budget. Again, in this case, I take something really complex and I try to make it as simple as I can, and I just think it's absolutely fascinating to ...

Cameron: You're in there behind the scenes, before the budget is released to the public, coaching the media on what kinds of questions to ask. That's fantastic.

Marie-Soleil: And where the news could go. And I also have this historical perspective. But I'm also very often -- every year I go there, they're really happy that I was there -- but I'm also quite impressed with the work that they do, because the next day they're on a completely different topic doing something. Whereas to me, this is something that's my every-day. And I'm always fascinated by how quickly they can get some information. And I think it's a great collaboration. It's always fun to work with them. And I did it before I was tenured. Maybe that's …

Cameron: That sounds foolish, you should be concentrating on publishing papers!

Marie-Soleil: I should have, but it's just one day, right? But at the same time, I think that the great thing is that you can actually say what you mean and mean what you say. And I think that's part of our role as academics, to make the public understand certain things, help journalists, and participate in different debates. And that's my little way of doing it.

Cameron: Lovely. That's a good place to wrap up, right there. Marie-Soleil, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. It's a delight to see you as always. I look forward to seeing you at the next conference, whenever our paths cross. And good luck with your work.

Marie-Soleil: Thank you, Cameron. It was lovely to see you and spend a little bit of time with you again.

Cameron: Okay. Bye bye.

Marie-Soleil: Bye bye.

Links

Faculty page for Marie-Soleil Tremblay at ÉNAP

The 30% Club

Helena Morrisey’s A Good Time to Be a Girl

Tremblay & Gendron (2011): Governance prescriptions under trial

Tremblay, Gendron & Malsch (2016): Gender on board

Credits

Host: Cameron Graham
Producer: Bertland Imai
Photos: Effet A, Université du Québec
Music: Musicbed
Recorded: June 27, 2019
Location: York University and ÉNAP