” WOMEN ASSIGNEES CAN BECOME DISILLUSIONED IN THE ORGANISATIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED FOR THEIR INTERNATIONAL CAREERS, PARTICULARLY AS THEY MOVE TOWARDS MORE SENIOR LEVELS.“
EQUALITY EXPECTATIONS Research shows that expectations of equality in achieving professional goals affect assignees’ job satisfaction, commitment and turnover. Women face a number of challenges within their international careers. These include unfair treatment and/or bias in selection, reduced access to aspects of on-assignment support, and greater challenges on repatriation. Despite these hurdles, research indicates that women
are as successful, if not more so, than men on international assignments. This means that we would expect to see a higher percentage of women undertaking global roles and conducting these at senior levels. Yet horizontal and vertical segregation persists. This raises concern as to whether women can trust their organisations to support their international careers.
WHY EQUALITY & DIVERSITY POLICIES FALL SHORT Organisations’ equality and diversity policies may not fully achieve stated objectives for a number of reasons. Responsibility for managing international assignments is often spread amongst a range managerial levels and functional areas across the globe. This can mean that there is a lack of specific accountability for policy implementation. When appointment and deployment processes are
spread across a number of international locations and subsidiaries, there can also be contractual difficulties in applying equality and diversity policies. Not all countries across the world place as much emphasis on equality and diversity as Western sending locations. Added to this, haphazard and opaque approaches to selection and deployment when this is conducted at a local level can undermine good intentions at the headquarters to implement equality/diversity policy.
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WOMEN’S CHANGING EQUALITY PERCEPTIONS Research shows that women begin their careers with trust in equality and diversity policy. They believe that it will support their entry into international roles and their progression within them. This is despite the fact that they can see the evidence before them of fewer senior women holding international positions. As their careers progress and they move into junior and
middle management positions, women usually have first- hand experience of some – or indeed many – of the issues that detrimentally affect their career progression (such as gendered selection and career management processes). The lack of gender diversity in senior roles and of female role models at this level in the hierarchy, can lead to concern over equality/diversity policy implementation. Women assignees can become disillusioned in the
organisational support provided for their international careers, particularly as they move towards more senior levels. Indeed, those who do reach the most senior international assignment grades can feel that their organisations’ equality and diversity policies are just rhetoric and their sentiments are divorced from their own workplace experiences. Often there are very few other women in the
most senior grades. This results in a more masculine environment in which women have to forge their way. Being part of a tiny minority can lead to senior women assignees losing trust in their employers. When this happens it is likely that these women will leave their organisations and seek careers elsewhere. When women lose trust in equality/diversity policy
implementation and this results in turnover, this reduces women’s share of senior international assignment roles still further. In turn, this undermines organisational efforts to increase expatriate gender diversity. True equity then appears even more remote as an organisational strategic goal.
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