Where is the bridge? Representations of gender gaps in annual reports

This paper aims to investigate female senior management progress by evaluating how gender issues are accounted for in Annual Reports (ARs) of public listed companies. ARs are key documents through which companies communicate their performance, priorities and views about themselves and the business world. They are therefore a vehicle to stimulate changes in women’s roles in business, and include different forms of languaging, such as pictures, graphs, accounts, and narrative texts, which are typically assumed to reinforce the same message. Our method of analysis emphasises instead how different forms of languaging say things differently and say different things. As these forms interplay, they may undermine and constrain one another in what reports communicate (Bassnett et al. 2018). This approach contributes to understanding about progression towards gender equality communication and provide new insights about communicative forms employed to report this progression. These insights provide accountants and businesses with knowledge to enhance their roles as change agents in promoting gender equality within corporations, and more widely promote sustainable development goals (SDG)s as part of non-financial reporting and accountability.