Gender Equality in International Business

In past experience, through travels outside of the country for business relations it was discovered very early on that most cultures will respect fairness and tolerance, but each to a different degree. American women in managerial positions have had to struggle to find ways to be effective in cultures where their authority and credibility are not traditionally the norm. Perhaps it was the value of fairness that clashed with tolerance or respect for diversity on this particular business trip to Japan over 10 years ago. However, even if there was an underlying agreement on such values, in this particular scenario these values were prioritized differently among the two different cultures and might have been expressed different for that reason.

The writer is a 21-year old single woman who had just shortly completed a Bachelors Degree in Business Marketing when she was approved to participate in an internship program for a year in Japan. The organization had recently opened a new pilot program for new graduate interns interested in assisting with marketing campaigns outside of the U.S. The CEO of the company felt there were real growth opportunities for the organization in that particular region so the program was launched fairly quickly. Before leaving to Japan she and various other coworkers made their mark in the organization proving that they could handle the job.

In addition, shortly thereafter, she and a small group of American business professionals left to Japan. The conflict between values became evident very early on when it was discovered that women in Japan were treated by locals as second-class citizens. The country values there were very different, and the women began almost immediately feeling alienated. The options ...

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...he decides to resolve the issue by facilitating her concerns upwards to a higher level. Later on that year adjustments were made to the pilot program stipulating that foreign business women would be dependent upon based on the degree to which a culture has been involved in the process of globalization, firstly as business people, secondly as representatives of their culture, and thirdly as women. This was very different from the previous patterns at the beginning of the program, where business women were seen firstly as representatives of their gender, secondly as representatives of their culture, and last if at all as business people. This ratification or change was of course not immediate since many countries were still new to globalization and multicultural business relations, but it gradually became a set of behaviors that at least acknowledged change over time.