Part 1 : Gender Issues in International Business

• Gopher://gopher.unicef.org/00/.cefdata/.pon94/chap7
• http://www.feminist.com/wagegap.htm
• http://www.feminist.com/followup.html
• http://www.catalystwomen.org

• Sex is the biological characteristic determined at conception. It is fixed throughout a person’s life.
• Gender refers to differences between men and women that are learned, i.e. not fixed but determined by social and cultural values. Gender differences between men and women vary across countries and cultures. Furthermore, gender differences can be changed by education, government policy, media images and opinion leaders; sex difference cannot be changed.

Women make up approximately 52% percent of the world’s population and are an important component in the workforce as well as purchasers of all types of goods and services. Understanding women’s role in society and their circumstances allows us to make better management and marketing decisions. In particular, putting gender issues on the agenda will:

1. bring in more talent – a key to long-term profitability
2. give firms a head start on recruiting and retaining a valuable source of labor
3. serve businesses’ increasingly female customers better, and
4. help companies avoid costly gender discrimination lawsuits.
• In the established industrial societies, the progress of recent years has still left most women a long way short of equality. Compared with men, they are:

 
1. underrepresented in the profession and in politics;
2. under-paid in the workforce; and
3. over-worked by the multiple responsibilities of their domestic, child care, and income earning roles.

• In the developing world, discrimination can take harsher forms, ranging form female genital mutilation to the lifelong discrimination in nutrition and health care.

• Of the 1.3 billion living in poverty, 70 percent are women. Female labor is some of the cheapest and most productive (e.g. in Asia, much of the exported economic boom has been attracted to women), however, they are badly paid, working conditions are not good and there are few, if any, benefits and rights. Women are also the first to be laid off. Furthermore, there is great difficulty getting access to training and capital or to credit (necessary for starting their own businesses).

The stereotype that men maintain the women and children has undergone a change WORLD WIDE

• Women’s participation in the workforce is on the rise.

• Many women contribute half or more than half of the household income
(59% of European female workers and 55% of US female workers contribute half or more than half of the household in come)
• Many women contribute the entire household income
• In Europe one in four women contribute the entire group income)
• In India, 60 million people live in homes maintained by women.

• World- wide women represent the main source of income for 30 percent of homes

• Women’s work is greater than thought
• Unpaid, unrecognized and undervalued women’s work is worth $11 trillion a year which, if recognized, would lead to women becoming he major or equal breadwinners in most societies.
• Women do 53% of the work and are only paid for one third. (this is because, in the developing world, women do most of the agricultural work yet the husband is the one who receives money for the labor)

BARRIERS TO GENDER EQUALITY IN BUSINESS:

• Education
• Types of jobs
• Insufficient quality of child care
• Dual roles of worker and homemaker
• Negative stereotypes of the dual roles
• Pregnancy dismissals
• Reluctance to hire women because of family responsibilities

The most powerful lever of change in gender conditioning is education. As women become more educated, they become trained for a greater number of jobs. Throughout this century, women have made great strides in education. In the U.S., for example, a greater proportion of women enter higher education than men. The trend towards educating women is found throughout the industrialized nations. Indeed, equality in literacy has been achieved in the industrialized nations.

In poorer, less developed nations, the outlook is not so good (read: gopher://gopher.unicef.org/00/.cefdata/.pon94/chap7) . Women make up 2/3's of illiterate adults in the developing world. When a family can afford to educate only one child, it is frequently the male child that is educated because he will look after the parents in their old age. For the same reason, male children take precedence over female children in matters of food and medicine.

Education is important for a variety of reasons not directly related to job acquisition. An educated woman, for example, almost always has more allure and status in the eyes of her husband, her family and her community if she is educated. She is likely to have more awareness, more opportunities, more choice and more confidence. Educated women are also less susceptible to bullying and intimidation. Education also makes gender conditioning of the next generation so that they are less likely to discriminate.

 

Gender Inequality in Literacy

sub-Saharan Africa	67%
Middle East and North Africa	67%
South Asia	54%
East Asia and Pacific	81%
Central American and Caribbean	93%
South America	97%
Industrialized Countries	100%

Types of Jobs

Occupational segregation by sex is extensive and pervasive and is one of the most important and enduring aspects of labor markets around the world. It is estimated that 80% of all jobs are gender stereotyped. (Read http://www.ilo.org/public/english/235press/pr/1997/35.htm)

Why job segregation an important issue?

1. it has an important negative effect on how men see women as well as how women see themselves by reinforcing and perpetuating gender stereotypes. This, in turn, negatively affects women’s status and empowerment and consequently many social variables such as mortality and morbidity, poverty and income inequality.
2. it has a negative effect on the labor market efficiency and labor market functioning. When most women are effectively excluded from most occupations, human resources are wasted and income levels are reduces
3. it is a major labor market rigidity, reducing labor market’s ability to respond to change.
4. It negatively affects the education and training of future generations
5. It keeps many women out of wage employment altogether and affect fertility rates
6. It is a major determinant of wage differentials
7. Low pay and incomes contribute to poverty and inequality in society

• There is a conflict of interests – businesses wanting the cheapest labor and women wanting to be paid more

• Many gender differences in pay are attributed ‘to traditional job relationships rather than to relative job worth’

• the increasing number of women in the European workforce have been relegated to lower paying and less prestigious occupations. Women tend to work in unprotected industries such as out work and work at home

• Home-based workers – no estimates but in China it is 40 million and in India 30 million

• In US, 36% of women will work part-time at some point in their careers

• In the U.S., it is in the legal and medical fields women have made progress but not business where corporations are large, authoritarian organizations that can mask pay inequities in a welter of different job titles.

Wage differentials between male and female workers exist in all industrialized nations, but the size of the wage differentials varies according to country. More recently, countries and companies have been looking at gender equality in employment by examining comparable worth. When comparable worth principles are violated, there is said to be de facto discrimination.

3 checkpoints:

1. large segregated workforce
2. gross disparities in wage levels of unskilled (particularly entry level)
3. many females there are below the lowest paid male

Insufficient quality of child-care (to be discussed in later chapters)

Dual roles—

• mothers are in the workplace at a growing rate, from more than 3/5 with children under 3 to nearly 4/5 with children ages 6-17.

• Of all women in the labor force, 40% are mothers of children under 18.; 76% of all single mothers are in the labor force

• In the US, 85% of executive mothers employ domestic help and 44% use child care service to balance career and personal lives

Read "Working Parents Get Good Marks From Children" Post and Courier, Sept. 6, 1999.

Pregnancy Dismissals

In the U.S. (and other countries) it is illegal to discriminate based on pregnancy issues.

All of the industrial nations except Australia and the USA now provide paid and job protected maternity leave for employed women. The actual rate of pay varies between 50 and 100% of salary. In some countries, paternity leave is also provided for.

In some nations, the idea of maternity leave alone appears to be becoming outdated. The emphasis is switching, especially in the Nordic countries, to the idea of parental leave, ranging from 6 months to 3 years at varying rates of pay. The nations listed with a asterisk below guarantee this additional leave, paid and job protected, to enable parents to spend more time with their children during the early years.

The U.S. has recently enacted a bill giving women the right to 12 weeks unpaid but job protected maternity leave.

Out and out gender discrimination does occur. Despite a number of structural differences, only 12-22% of wage differentials can be explained by differences between jobs.
 

WHAT CAN A COMPANY DO?
 

• Set up a mentoring program – pair senior men with up and coming females. Females gain exposure to decision making and males get the opportunity to work outside the all male cliques,
• Have Succession planning – map out a career path for female employees
• Conduct Diversity training

SEXUAL HARASSMENT
 

Sexual harassment is not simply basing employment on an individual’s acceptance or rejection of sexual advances. Another form of sexual harassment is the creation of an intimidating, hostile, or offensive work environment. In the U.S., an employer can be charged with sexual harassment as a result of the actions of employees, vendors and even customers.

Sexual harassment has become a major concern to employers world-wide as they have become aware of its financial, environmental and morale costs in the workplace.

Because sexual harassment involves actions and behavior it is often defined culturally i.e. what is considered sexual harassment and what is condoned vary from country to country. In the U.S., and in most of the developed nations, sexual harassment complaints are on the rise and they are being taken seriously. This is not true for all countries. In Moscow, for example, many employers require secretaries to be attractive, under 25 and to sleep with their bosses. Indeed, in Russia, 71% of the unemployed are women. If a women wants a job, she must be young and pretty and she is expected to use her allure to win contract for her boss.

When working in foreign countries, American women often face sexual harassment by being subjected to innuendo and sexual remarks from foreigners. Foreign men are also more likely to comment about the physical attributes of women. Such behavior is not tolerated in the U.S. but it might be in foreign cultures.

• Reasons for Sexual Harassment:

1. Obtain sexual favors
2. Obtain power
3. Decrease the power of the victim (embarrass or intimidate the victim)
4. Personal crisis in the life of the harasser (aging, divorce, monetary problems)
5. Sexual attraction gone wrong
6. Misunderstanding of roles

• Types of Power that can affect sexual harassment are:

 
1. Achieved power – power someone earns
2. Ascribed power – that which is given to someone and cannot be taken away
3. Situational power- that which depends on the situation in which one is


The most common and easiest to identify is achieved power abuses. In this situation, it is the supervisor who might use their power to sexually harass someone. Women rarely use achieved power to sexually harass male employees. While men use achieved power to receive sex, women can use sex to obtain achieved power. Both behaviors are inappropriate.

Ascribed power is an attributed characteristic to which someone has no control such as gender and ethnicity. Almost all research shows that men are given more power than women simply because of their gender. This natural type of power allows subordinate men to harass female bosses. Likewise, white people are given more power than minorities. In these situations, the harassed individual’s complaint is usually viewed with skepticism because the victim had the formal power to stop the harassment. Moreover, victims tend not to report the harassment because their accusation will be challenged or the victim fears that the harasser will be unduly disciplined.

Situational power occurs in one situation but not another. Numbers and territory are primary sources of situational power in the workplace. Abuse of this power is usually motivated by the person wanting to retain a homogenous work setting—wanting the ‘outsider to leave’. It takes the form of focusing on the person’s gender to define him/her as different, not competent or not to be taken seriously. It is not unusual to find a number of employees joining in to harass the outsider. It is most frequently found in nontraditional setting: construction, fire fighting, police work, upper management, nursing, teaching, clerical work, etc. This type of harassment is considered hostile environment.
 

First, if a supervisor’s harassment results in the victim suffering a tangible adverse employment action such as discharge, demotion, or undesirable reassignment, the employer is liable for damages to the victim.

Second, even if the victim has not suffered a job loss, the employer is still generally liable for the harassment because the company and the supervisor are in a position of power.

Third, the company may head off liability or significant damages by proving its innocence. The employer must show that it:
 
1. took "reasonable care to prevent harassing behavior";
2. responded promptly to any hints of sexual harassment trouble; and
3. it has in place an effective complaint procedure published to all employees, and that the victim reasonably failed to complain about the harassment or follow the company’s complaint procedure.

• See Women-Friendly Workplace Campaign Employer’s Pledge at : http://www.now.org/issues/wfw/empledge.html
• Also see Employment Best Practices at : http://www.epexperts.com/news/special%20columns.htm)
• Have a policy prohibiting sexual harassment
• Publicize the policy to all employees
• Conspicuously post the policy
• Provide the policy to all employees
• Encourage employees to report perceived harassment affecting themselves and their co-workers
• Respond promptly to all complaints of alleged harassment
• Take prompt corrective action when needed.
• If a person is sexually harassed by someone outside the firm by an associate of the firm e.g. a firm’s customer. A business must also take appropriate, corrective action. This might involve calling the other company and reporting the harassment; denying access to the company by the offender outsiders or supervising meetings between the harasser and employee.

Part 2 : Women and International Business

According to recent research by KPMG Peat Marwick, most multinational companies feel it is increasingly important to send people on international assignments but the availability of people who are will to accept global assignment is not growing at the same rapid rate.

As already demonstrated, there can be great differences in gender equality especially in the role women take, the value placed on women and the amount of respect shown to women. Research, however, has shown that women can work successfully in cultures where the status of women is considerably lower than in their own.

Myths (source Adler 1993)

• Women do not want to be international managers – not true

1. Ask women (women need to be more vocal in their requests for international assignments)
2. Offer flexible benefits packages - especially with regard to working spouses and education of children
3. Give women the opportunity to succeed by supporting them

• Companies refuse to send women abroad - true

• Foreigners are prejudiced against women expatriate managers – not true

• Title VII prohibits discrimination despite local customs or traditions. Even if a host country prefers not to conduct business with women, US women cannot be unfairly denied access to jobs, training, promotions, etc. in foreign countries. Only in countries where it is illegal for women to do a particular job can male be a BFOQ.

• Indeed, women may have advantages that men do not. Women:

• have visibility- being remembered, memorability and curiosity,
• are usually better at interpersonal relationships
• have the ability to adapt because they are used to discrimination. Women have long experienced exclusion from traditional corporate networks

• women are willing to share power and information more
• women often feel more comfortable with ambiguity

Source Taylor and Napier 1996

1. do not reject female candidates because of preconceived ideas about the impossibility of success
2. train women how to respond appropriately to unwelcome advances or comments to preserve both the ‘face’ of the host national an the woman’s sense of professional self.
3. require active, overt support from their male expatriate colleagues in establishing their professional credibility with coworkers and client
4. give women a clear title and job description to combat ambiguity about a woman’s stature

1. make it clear you are a foreigner since many cultures don’t recognize local career-minded women (evidence shows that White women face toughest times in Australia, Germany and UK because they are physically similar to local women)
2. emphasize that you are the company’s representative and make use of your rank (have business cards with rank and perhaps bring organizational charts to show your position in the company hierarchy or have a third party e.g. US commercial attaché, US Bank introduce you)
3. get support from colleagues
4. to avoid sexual harassment avoid bars, suggest restaurants, share lunch not dinner
5. remember, you are there to do business, not change a culture!