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FT CAREERS ASIA: Women executives poised to enter the male-strom
By WILLIAM BARNES, Financial Times
Published: Oct 26, 2006
Significant numbers of female executives are finally being assigned to Asia, as determined women break into its male-dominated, expatriate world.
Companies operating in the Asia-Pacific region said they assigned 16 times more women expatriates to the region this year than they did in 2001, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting.
"About time too," says Yvonne Sonsino, principal at Mercer. "Historically, it's been a very, very difficult move for women to make. There are a lot of very ambitious ladies putting themselves forward now."
The women sweeping into the expatriate world are not skirted versions of the traditional male expat, usually portrayed as a hard-charging leader with a trailing wife who diverts herself with a worthy round of tea parties and charity work.
The new female foreign manager is young and single. "They are in their 30s and unencumbered - a great time to make a career leap," says Ms Sonsino.
These women are able to focus on their career in a way that some men might envy and they may also bring skills to the job that the traditional expat would not, or could not, display.
"Women are better at languages than men. Research has shown they also tend to be better at soft-skills like communicating, developing relationships and adapting," says associate professor Alicia Leung, who studies business culture at the Hong Kong Baptist University. In a region where business relations are often built on trust, women may be better than men at nurturing useful friendships.
"Some male expatriates have lived for 20 years in Hong Kong without learning to speak a single sentence of Cantonese," says Ms Leung. "I don't think the new breed of female executive will be so arrogant."
Even so, much of Asia remains a patchwork of determinedly patriarchal societies. The occasional female nabob aside, the average Asian business leader is still male.
"Our office happens to be full of female executives because they are so diligent," says Bangkok-based Anthony Ainsworth of recruitment company Richard Glynn. "But are women replacing men at the top [in Asia]? No, certainly not around here. It's still problematic in a lot of Asian cultures to have a woman in charge.
He adds: "Don't forget that a lot of Asian companies are still family owned, where the men rise higher than the women." Mercer's findings were culled from surveys of more than 100 multinationals with a total of 17,000 expatriates.
Although 55 per cent of the companies believed that increasing numbers of women would be assigned to "foreign" countries over the next five years, no one is pretending that every Asian country has developed Scandinavian-like equality.
"They are usually treated as westerners or foreigners first," says Professor Jan Selmer of Denmark's Aarhus School of Business. "Their gender is overlooked. In fact they are treated differently from local women."
Difficulties may fade if the number of women on foreign assignments continues to climb, and there is still plenty of room for reinforcements.
Awkwardly, it remains true that when the female side of a "power couple" gets an interesting foreign posting it can cause a crisis - the trailing husband remains relatively rare.
Multinationals told Mercer that female executives were much more likely than men to be unmarried and, if they happened to be married, much more likely to leave their partner at home.
"Nearly all companies are atrocious at helping in any way the husband of a female expatriate. The norm is virtually zero backing for the marriage," says Professor Selmer.
"Even if the male companion is happy to take his chances abroad, his own society may disapprove of the idea of a man following his wife in this way."
Professor Selmer was himself once a "trailing husband" when his wife, a Filipina, got a job in a Hong Kong university 20 years ago. The British Embassy gave him an "expatriate spouse" form that required him to fill in the "Name of Wife" space. "It just shows how times have changed," he comments.
It is not hard to understand why women managers want to work abroad when it is now increasingly unlikely that an ambitious executive can rise through a major corporation without having one or more meaty foreign assignments on their resumé. But why are multinationals showing a greater readiness to send their female employees round the globe? "Obviously, companies have realised that in this competitive age, they are wasting half their talent by not sending women on international assignments," says Ms Sonsino.
"But it may be more than that. In this globalised world the old fashioned out-and-back expatriate is being replaced by the truly international manager, who is comfortable in multiple cultures. The newer female executives may be at least as good as their male counterparts in dealing with this world," she says.
One self-styled expatriate in Bangkok sprang to the defence of the men who used to run global business: "Most emerging economies were damn difficult a generation ago - idiosyncratic, corrupt and unpredictable.
"I'm not sure that subtle female skills would have worked so well in the past."
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd |
