GLOBAL HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Topic 1: Career management issues of female business expatriates. In an ever-expanding and quickly changing global market, for businesses to be competitive it is extremely important that they be positioned worldwide in order to step up, make contacts and find human talent. In response to that, the number of expatriates sent on global assignments is increasing steadily, and therefore finding the right people with adequate skills for global assignments is becoming one of the greatest international human resource concerns. Moreover, since sending employees abroad implies spending large amounts of money, for companies it’s imperative that such ‘investments’ bring the expected results; firms just can’t afford to gamble on the successful assignments of their expatriates. The most common reasons for expatriate manager assignments to fail have usually to do with lack of cultural fit, family or personal issues and not enough direction or goal setting. The fear of failure can explain why most international assignees are men. According to some recent surveys indeed the percentage of women on international assignments is lower than 20%, and even in the United States, where many believe the proportion of female executives to be significantly high, the situation is not different.
Misconceptions about the abilities of women to handle international assignments and/or their willingness to accept these assignments “are more often due to bias and stereotyping in the home country and company than to prejudicial treatment in the host country or foreign subsidiary”. In particular, it’s a common belief that women are not suitable to international engagements because foreign clients are not as comfortable doing business with women as they are with men, especially in countries that have a traditionally male-dominated culture, such as Asia and Middle-East.
Nevertheless, some research has found that women expatriate managers “face more problems from home country nationals within their own company than externally from local clients and colleagues”. Moreover, research has also shown that the majority of female expatriate managers have never turned down an offer of relocation and, in fact, most of them said that being a woman had a positive or neutral impact on their effectiveness abroad.
Other concerns about women engaging in overseas assignments have to do with “dual-career issues, physical safety, the hazards involved in travel in underdeveloped countries and, especially in the case of single women, isolation and loneliness”. So basically there are still several barriers to women receiving international assignments, and they have to do both with business reasons and adjustment problems.
Nevertheless in my opinion, and according to evidence provided by research as well, women are just as able to handle international assignments as men are, in fact female attributes may actually be even more suitable to international assignments than male counterparts’ personality traits in some cases. Indeed, precisely because of female skills such as attention to the personal side of business and their ability to build interpersonal relationships female expatriates can become successful and even have an advantage over male expatriates.
For instance, there’s an interesting testimony coming from an American expatriate in China that seems to support this alternative perspective. This woman stated:
“I feel more respected as a manager in China than I do in the United States. The Chinese value two qualities in their leaders: competence and ren (warmheartedness, benevolence, and readiness to care for others). If a leader is ren, he or she will receive subordinates’ loyalty in turn. Adopting ren behavior is more common by American female assignees than by American males”.
And this is just one of several evidence that women are very often quite successful and can perform well in global assignments.
Nowadays women are just as ambitious and career-oriented as men, and they are more than willing to take the opportunity of international work assignments. On the other hand, in such a competitive and changing global environment as the present one MNEs need to make the best use of their sources of advantage, and since female employees are potentially talented and precious as males, in my opinion there’s no reason to leave them out from international opportunities and commitments.

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[ 1 ]. International Human Resource Management (Policies and practices for MNEs). Briscoe, Shuler,Claus.
[ 2 ]. Nancy J. Adler, “Women Managers in a Global Economy,” HR Magazine 38, no. 9
[ 3 ]. Adler, "Women Managers in a Global Economy," 52
[ 4 ]. http://www.expatwomen.com/