CONFERENCE CORNER.

• Position: Conference news

From staff accountants to partners, the Women's Leadership Forum inspires and empowers women in accounting and finance and tackles issues such as communication styles, career development, negotiation and more. For a sneak peek at what you can expect this year, we talked with conference co-chairs Meredith Johnson, director at Burr Pilger Mayer, and Becky O'Malley, senior manager at BDO USA, LLP. The following are excerpts of the interview. For more on what they had to say, visit calcpa.org/hot-topics/wlfcochairs.

From your conference planning conversations, what is your sense of the satate of women in the profession?

O'Malley It's evolving and getting better, but we have long way to go in terms of firms being more proactive in promoting women initiatives. Just look at the statistics and compare women partners at firms with men, and there's still a pretty large gap.

Johnson There are more women in positions of leadership, but there's room to grow. As we see the shift to younger workers, the...