It has long been held that an accounting clerk is born to as either accounts payable or accounts receivable – and that they are destined to eventually become one or the other. That belief is rapidly going by the wayside, says accounting behaviorist Dr. Emily Patterson of the Falton Institute.
“How do you expect them to know when they’re five years old?” she asks. “Or even ten or twenty?” They need to choose for themselves, she says, and more of them are doing so . Last year, over 16,000 accounts receivable clerks transitioned to accounts payable; 14,000 transitioned from payable to receivable.
“You’re growing up and it’s receivables, no questions asked,” says Janet Reamer, who officially became a receivables clerk upon her graduation from Michigan State in 2012. “But even when I was four or five there was this voice telling me I should be paying…”
Not too many years ago, a civil engineer who dressed like a mechanical engineer would have been ostracized at the office – perhaps even asked to seek opportunities elsewhere.
Today, there’s a cautioned acceptance.
“Coming to work the first day I cross job-dressed wasn’t easy,” says civil engineer Jim McDermott. “Not only did I get the nasty looks, but I soon found myself eating lunch alone and ‘dis-invited’ from task forces.”
McDermott says his story is typical. He started to get “feelings” shortly after graduating from the University of Missouri. “To look at me I was civil,“ he says, “but I identified as mechanical.” For years he wore the requisite clothing – but in 2014, not ready to take the drastic step of actually becoming a mechanical engineer, he worked up the courage to dress like one.
Fortunately, his employer – Todson-Wood of Kansas City – addressed the issue quickly.
“We needed to be sensitive to his colleagues’ discomfort,” says HR Director Thomas Olin, “but we also had to convey that he had the right to dress as he chose.” There are an estimated 11.3 million occupational cross-dressers in US businesses, and Olin assumed McDermott’s case wouldn’t be the company’s last.
So Todson-Wood instituted a mandatory training program, where employees “role played” what it would be like to dress as another occupation.
“I didn’t actually put on the clothes but I pretended I was dressed like an accounts payable clerk,” says accounts receivable clerk Sheila Moore. “I realized it was no big deal.”
Across the country, other companies are taking similar steps. A recent survey by the Cornish Institute showed that 78 percent of cross-occupational dressers feel “generally accepted” today, up from just 59 percent in 2017.
As for McDermott, the lunch invitations soon started up again, and he was invited to join the company’s internal form-evaluation task force.
“Today,” he says, “people don’t know or care if I’m civil, mechanical…even electrical.”
