Women in the Global Workforce
In today’s business world, women are a growing part of the domestic and global workforce. It is estimated that worldwide about 70% of all working-age women now work outside of the home. Despite this, discrimination in the workforce continues to be a problem for women worldwide.
Discrimination takes the form of job segregation, unequal pay, lack of training, lack of advancement, and exclusion from certain fields that are considered “masculine.” Working mothers are particularly disadvantaged since, due to lack of child care facilities, they are often forced to put their careers on hold or accept lower paying jobs.
Patriarchies and Their Impact on Businesswomen
Millions of women live in societies where centuries of social and religious laws, customs and traditions have created insurmountable barriers to education, jobs, and even healthcare, and have deprived women of their political and civil rights. It is important for the American woman traveling on business to understand not only her own situation, but also the situation of women in other cultures. It is often these cultural and traditional biases that American women will face when conducting business in foreign countries.
In order to understand women’s reception in business worldwide we need to understand how cultures view the women in their own society. Researchers Nancy Adler and Dafna Izraeli report in their 1994 review of 21 countries on four continents that, due to changing societal patterns, there have been significant increases in women in management in the world. The patterns they cite include favorable economic conditions, supportive government policies, changes in family roles, and emerging support systems. Despite these advances, these researchers also found that in most countries men continue to control the economic and political power and to dominate in professional management roles. Furthermore, they found that in all of the counties they studied women faced obstacles which included:
• Stereotypical perception of women’s abilities and qualifications
• Traditional attitudes toward women’s family roles
• Women’s minimal access to the social networks from which companies recruit managers and executives
• Broadly-based discrimination against women
These researchers report that explanations for these barriers to women’s progress worldwide have varied. They summarize four perspectives on why women are underrepresented in management worldwide:
1. Men’s characteristics and behaviors are viewed as the norm for effective managerial performance, and it is perceived that women do not display these characteristics, and thus have been excluded from managerial ranks.
2. Women’s own limitations inhibit her success in management by causing her to choose lower-ranked or career-limiting positions within the firm. Thus, firms offer men more opportunities to gain power, prestige and monetary rewards, leaving women underrepresented due to the uneven distribution of women and men in key roles.
3. Organizations have built-in assumptions about gender which explain why women are underrepresented and underutilized in management. This perspective suggests that gender discrimination is embedded in managers’ basic assumptions about society, the organization and how it should be run.
4. Men who, for reasons cited above, have been put into privileged positions within the firm do not want more competition than they already have. Men at each level of the hierarchy have the power to control the organization’s rules at that level, including its criteria for promotion and, thus, who enters and who does not.
But there is good news too. Despite these powerful and longstanding patterns and perspectives, these researchers (Adler and Izraeli) predict that global competition will drive out these archaic patterns of under representation, underutilization and skewed distributions of women in management, and, in fact, they believe that this change is starting to occur already.
Women’s Lack of Cross-Cultural Preparation
The lack of training for personnel on expatriate assignments has been highlighted by many researchers as a problem common to most firms who send personnel to other countries. Many of the difficulties encountered are due to employees’ ignorance of the foreign culture they are visiting. Cultural training for employees on shorter-term assignments is almost non-existent. Therefore employees are either sent to other countries without any formal preparation, or they train themselves by reading books available on the commercial market and, if time permits, take a language class at the local college or adult education center.
Women preparing for such assignments often face an even more precarious situation than their male colleagues because of the traditional gender barriers they may face in countries outside of the U.S. These businesswomen are frequently not aware of the discrimination they may face, and are often left to fend for themselves unless otherwise advised by a knowledgeable female colleague.