Membership Equality Monitoring Survey FAQ

The survey can be accessed by following this link:

• Access the survey

To ensure responses only relate to ICAEW members, you will need to login using your ICAEW membership number and password. Forgotten your login details? Reset your password.

The information you provide is confidential. It will be stored securely and handled in line with our privacy policy and used only in aggregate for anonymous statistical and reporting purposes.

ICAEW wants to make chartered accountancy more inclusive and to increase the diversity of our profession and membership. We do this by helping to build a profession that is open to all and ensuring that everyone feels empowered to study to become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant.

While we have come a long way, and made great progress in many areas, there is much more to be done. To help us make further positive changes, we need your help.

ICAEW is now collecting wider equality monitoring data from our UK membership to better understand the profile of our members and gain better insights into who they are.

This will help us to enhance the breadth and quality of data on ICAEW’s membership with regards to diversity and establish some benchmarks against which to measure future success.

In addition, our regulators and stakeholders are increasingly requesting diversity information about our staff, members, students and member firms for reporting purposes.

We are starting with our members in the UK and hope to extend to all members over time.

We already request and collect this information from our students as part of the registration process.

Information is collected from ICAEW members whose main address is in the UK. The survey questions are derived from the question set that is used to monitor our student diversity as part of our work with Access Accountancy.

To ensure responses only relate to ICAEW members, the survey requires you to login using your ICAEW membership number and password.

The survey questionnaire has been developed by ICAEW and all data is managed by ICAEW.

We will review the response rate and consider future surveys.

Your responses will be used in aggregate for statistical purposes.

We will use this information, where appropriate, to enable ICAEW to meet its diversity reporting obligations where required to by our regulators, and to enable ICAEW to monitor its own performance against our diversity goals.

The metric ‘prefer not to say’ is an important one.

It may be a statement of how members feel about being ‘themselves’ within ICAEW. It may reflect the culture of ICAEW/the profession in terms of how members feel they can interact with others. Large ‘prefer not to answer’ percentages may suggest that all may not be quite right and some further investigation may be required.

You will be able to access and update your responses by following the survey link and logging in using your ICAEW username (member number) and password. The most recently completed survey responses will be used when compiling statistics.

Forgotten your login details? Reset your password.

No. We will not contact you about your responses.

If you are having difficulty in completing your responses, you can seek support from our technical advisory team. The team will however be unable to access your responses.

If you wish to provide us with additional information or feedback which you think would support our efforts to increase diversity among our membership and across the profession, please contact us.

We hope to share aggregated statistical data in the future as part of our ongoing work on diversity and inclusion. Your responses are important – they will allow us to better understand the profile of our membership and determine our priorities for the future Plus this hard data (as opposed to anecdotal evidence) will make it easier for ICAEW and the profession to report to regulators and stakeholders.

ICAEW is a co-founder of the Access Accountancy initiative, a collaboration of employers and professional bodies founded in 2014 to improve access to the accountancy profession in the UK.

We have used questions developed as part of our work with Access Accountancy and already ask all our students these questions.

By asking the same questions, based on a limited number of characteristics, we can ensure that we have comparable information for statistical purposes. This does not imply any hierarchy of importance between the different protected characteristics included in the Equality Act 2010. Other areas may be added in the future.

Unfortunately, we cannot use the data from your employer. As a professional body, it is our responsibility to collect data from our members, many of whom remain with ICAEW for life, no matter how many times they move employer. Employer data can often also include individuals who are not ICAEW members or are not in the accountancy profession.

Firms accredited for probate legal services by ICAEW are required to collect, report and publish diversity data about their employees. This is a regulatory requirement. You can find out more about this work on our website.

ICAEW has a number of initiatives in place to make chartered accountancy more inclusive and to increase the diversity of our profession and membership. 

• Check out our Diversity and Inclusion hub
• Join the ICAEW Diversity Community for free

Find out more about the ICAEW diversity strategy including our Access Accountancy, Back to the Workplace programme and non-graduate routes into the accountancy profession.

If you have any questions about the collection of diversity data, please contact us.

Find out more about the ICAEW diversity strategy including our Access Accountancy, Back to the Workplace programme and non-graduate routes into the accountancy profession.

We work closely with the Chartered Accountants’ Benevolent Association (CABA), the registered charity which supports ICAEW Chartered
Accountants and their dependents. ICAEW members have free access to CABA for life, which comes with confidential mental health and financial support.

Diversity law and regulations – An overview of the law concerning diversity and discrimination in the UK, with the latest case summaries and useful guidance.

Promoting diversity – What can you do to create a diverse workforce? Our collection of best practice guides will show you how to promote and protect diversity.