Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets. Sylvia Ann Hewlett
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of Chinese managers felt a lack of confidence in their ability to be as convincing or have as much impact as their male colleagues.
Anjali Hazarika speaks for the majority of educated, ambitious BRIC and UAE women in our study when she describes her own experience in the push-me-pull-you quest to find a happy medium: “If I acted out of the stereotype, I was not a good woman, and if I colluded with the stereotype, I became invisible.” Between the constant challenging and critiquing, whether subtle or explicit, perceived or self-inflicted, women are trapped in a no-win situation.
Workplace biases across the BRIC countries and the UAE escalate with motherhood. Working mothers find their commitment and potential under constant scrutiny. In India, women told us of returning from maternity leave to less-challenging projects or roles, or being given a lower performance rating. A Brazilian woman recounted the case of a colleague who was fired upon returning from maternity leave when she was overheard mentioning that she planned to have another child. In the UAE, female candidates in job interviews may be asked questions that would be considered illegal in developed countries: are you single or married? Are you planning to have children? “I've heard some real horror stories about women who were asked to take a pregnancy test when they were applying for a job, and if they were pregnant, they would only get a temporary contract,” reports a woman in Dubai.
TRAVEL BARRIERS
Rana is a rising star in the fixed-income division of a multinational bank with offices located in the UAE. Her company regularly offers opportunities for professional development, but Rana had to decline an invitation to a recent training session in New York, because a single woman from the UAE can't board a plane or stay in a hotel unless a male relative is willing to tag along as her chaperone. Adding insult to injury, no video hookup was provided to allow Rana to participate from her home office.
There's an almost universal assumption that female professionals in emerging markets don't want to travel and are willing to curtail their prospects of advancement in order to stay home. However, more than 60 percent of the women in our sample express strong interest in an international assignment. Furthermore, when we asked married women whether their spouse would be willing to relocate, a majority said their spouses are open to such a move.
Although the BRIC and UAE women in our study are delighted that the economies they live and work in are becoming increasingly important to multinational organizations, they are keenly aware that professional advancement depends on gaining international experience. In China and India, in fact, nearly 80 percent of the women in our sample believe that international assignments are critical to their career progression, and there was no discernible difference in their preference for either short-term or long-term assignments.
However, the actual ability to land such assignments can be difficult for even the most highly credentialed women in emerging markets. Nationals of many developing countries are unable to travel outside their home countries without visas, especially to Europe or the United States, where post-9/11 visa applications require submitting reams of employment and personal documentation, paying hefty application fees, extended wait periods, and, even when the application is successful, limiting travel to specific durations. Sixty-two percent of respondents in India, 66 percent in China, and 54 percent in the UAE report difficulty in obtaining visas for international travel.
“We don't have the luxury of Western Europeans or Americans, who can get on a flight and go somewhere on short notice,” explains an Indian national working for a multinational consulting firm. For a recent two-day trip to Germany to see a client, she was required to present copies of her round-trip airline ticket, proof of hotel confirmation for her entire stay, personal bank statements for the past three months, a letter from her employer stating the reason for the trip, a letter of invitation from the client, and proof that her travel and accident insurance covered medical evacuation. (For a previous trip to the U.K., she had to be fingerprinted.) She also had to appear for a personal interview and pay a fee. In addition to being time-consuming, the experience was “extremely demeaning,” she says.
The issue of mobility becomes even more problematic when family is involved. “Mobility is a top obstacle for me, because I don't want to move to a city where my family can't relocate,” said one ambitious Chinese professional. A Russian HR manager at an investment bank concurred. “It's important for me to get international experience if I aspire to a senior management role. But my priorities have changed since I have a small child.” Even though her mother shares child care responsibilities, the manager acknowledged, “I am not so mobile now and really can't aspire to a senior management role at this point.”
Although the majority of women claim that their spouse would support an international assignment, the reality is that it's often difficult for a “trailing spouse” to find a comparable position. Yet leaving a spouse behind is risky. As every participant in a long-distance marriage knows, living in a different city from one's spouse is rough on a relationship. The hardships multiply when partners are commuting to a different country.
Soon after Lisandra Ambrozio was married, her previous employer invited her to transfer from Brazil to Florida. “It was a really tough decision,” she says. “My husband was not willing to quit his job in Brazil and go to Florida, but it was an amazing professional opportunity for me. We talked a lot about the situation.” The upshot was that Ambrozio moved to Florida and her husband stayed in Brazil. “We saw each other every couple of weeks. Either he came to Florida or I went to Brazil. But after one and a half years, when I returned to Brazil and we started to have a normal married life again, it was very difficult. He had structured his own life, he was doing his own MBA course, he had several professional appointments here. The lack of day-to-day contact for a couple is very hard.” Six months after returning to Brazil, Ambrozio and her husband divorced. She doesn't regret her decision to relocate but also acknowledges, “Maybe if I hadn't moved to the U.S., the story wouldn't have ended like this.”
Within many emerging market countries there is also strong social disapproval of women traveling alone, with nearly three-quarters of Chinese and Indian respondents and more than half of UAE respondents citing difficulties. “It's not so much about prohibitions but how you would be perceived if you're traveling on your own,” explains Vishakha Desai, president of the Asia Society. “I think about the people I know: my family wouldn't say, ‘You can't travel,’ but many of my relatives would have a problem if the wife is traveling because it would imply that she's not doing her duty as a mother and wife and daughter-in-law, she's too forward, and blah-blah-blah.” In India, the concept of family is not limited to the nucleus but extends to a wide constellation of relatives and in-laws—“and everyone knows everything,” says Desai. “That's a problem.”
This disapproval places industries and corporate functions requiring significant travel at a disadvantage in attracting and retaining talented women. The pharmaceutical sector in India, for instance, struggles to attract women into sales roles that involve frequent trips to semiurban and rural locations, where women are uncomfortable venturing alone. The same applies to the industrial and infrastructure sectors. As a result, women gravitate more toward sectors such as finance or media, which are based in urban, modern environs and require minimal travel.
The surprisingly high number of Chinese women in our study reporting social disapproval of solo travel—74 percent—is unexpected, given the egalitarian legacy of Communism. Our analysis suggests that concerns about travel are driven by the pressure on women to stay close to home and fulfill their familial responsibilities, whether as a daughter, wife, or mother. Day-to-day work may be compatible with these values, but travel away from home—and given the vast geographic scale of China, trips can last several days—is considerably more difficult to integrate.
Women, expatriates and locals alike, have worked around these restrictions by concentrating in careers whose responsibilities are, by and large, local, for example, medicine, law, hotel administration, advertising, public relations, marketing, nursing, and education. But conventional career models that demand employee mobility for career advancement and assume that all employees will have the ability to travel freely are a poor fit for the context of emerging markets. BRIC and UAE women are well aware of the professional price they have paid for the limitations