Gender in International Business and Management
Summary
Despite more than fifty years of research into gender and the working world, the topic is still a relatively neglected area in cross-cultural management. The concept of gender is under-represented in mainstream management literature. When it does appear, it is frequently compartmentalised, such that it becomes difficult to see the connections between gender and wider issues in research and practice in cross-cultural management. Furthermore, the implicit gendering of concepts of management, with the concept of the "manager" being implicitly male unless stated otherwise, and of management research, frequently goes unaddressed.
Gender is also often presented as a “problem issue” in both the academic and popular literature, such that the difficulties of women in management are highlighted, obscuring the more nuanced role which gender can play. As Adler and Izraeli (1994) argued, gender is a flexible tool, and the idea that women “inherently” face obstacles in cross-cultural management while men “inherently” do not, does not necessarily fit the evidence (see also Taylor et al. 2004). Tung (2004) suggests women may even be better suited to certain cross-cultural management roles than men. These strengths must be acknowledged while not denying the very real challenges female international managers can encounter (Mayrhofer and Scullion 2002). Even the problematization of gender is rendered more difficult by the fact that prejudice is frequently unconscious, and thus difficult to address easily (e.g. Davison and Punnett 1995, Santacreu-Vasut et al. 2014).
In the cross-cultural management context, the issues are further complicated by the fact that constructions of gender vary across national, regional and local contexts (Parboteeah et al. 2008). Expatriates may find their personal conceptions of gender challenged and reshaped by their experiences; HR managers may find difficulties in harmonising practices across multinational enterprises in the face of legal systems which address gender-related discrimination, define families, and assess the legal status of female, gay and lesbian, and transgendered employees, in different ways (McPhail et al. 2014).
Beyond purely managerial and leadership roles, and because in many parts of the world it is exceedingly difficult for women to advance through existing corporate structures, women then become entrepreneurs. In fact, the World Bank Enterprise Surveys show larger percentages of firms with female participation in ownership—35% of firms worldwide—and smaller percentages of firms with women in top managerial positions—18% of firms worldwide (World Bank 2015). While new research on culture has shown how women form entrepreneurial perceptions and intentions (e.g. Shinnar, Giacomin & Janssen 2012) and how culture affects their business decisions (e.g. Bullough, Renko, & Abdelzaher In Press), limited work has been done on cross-cultural and managerial-level entrepreneurial activities.
With this special issue, we are seeking to develop the body of literature on the role of gender in managing across cultures, as well as the role of cross-cultural issues on women’s business decisions and leadership styles: how management work is gendered, how gender affects, and is negotiated within, cross-cultural interactions, and how gender inspires conflicts and creative synergies in an international business context.
CCM is working in cooperation with WAIB (http://kelley.iu.edu/waib/) and the AIB US Southeast (www.AIBSE.org) to produce this special issue
Topics
We are interested in any and all articles, so long as they address an issue relating to gender and cross-cultural management/management in the international context specifically.
Topics could include, but are not limited to:
• Cultural differences in gender roles/identities and the issues this raises for cross-cultural management/management in the international context
• Gender imbalances in international management and/or how to address these
• Gender and status, gender and leadership
• Gender and expatriate assignments
• Gender and international business law
• Sexual orientation, and transgender status, in cross-cultural management contexts
• Masculinity in management and the gendering of work roles
• Gender in conjunction with other identities
• Gender and economic development and/or gender in the BRIC or MENA countries
• Culture and women’s entrepreneurship
• Changing concepts of gender in management
• Meta-papers on the management studies literature and its relationship to gender
Gender is a complex and multi-faceted issue, and we are particularly interested in papers which address areas and concepts not usually found in the literature, or areas that are severely undeveloped or inaccurate in our current understanding.
Submission instructions
All manuscripts will undergo a double-blind review process. Submissions should be between 6,000-9,000 words, including references, figures and tables, and follow the manuscript requirement outlined on the journal’s website:http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=ccm#10. The submission deadline is February 29, 2016. Please direct queries to: Professor Susan Forquer Gupta, e-mail:sgupta@monmouth.edu
Please note that we anticipate changing the title for the journal for the 2016 volume. More information will be shared through the usual channels when available.
References
Adler, Nancy and Izraeli, Dafna (1994) Competitive Frontiers: Women Managers in a Global Economy, Oxford: Blackwell
Bullough, A., Renko, M., & Abdelzaher, D. (In Press). “Women’s Entrepreneurship: Operating Within the Context of Institutional and In-Group Collectivism.” Journal of Management available Online First.
Davison, Edwin D. and Punnett, Betty Jane (1995) “International Assignments: is there a Role for Gender and Race in Decisions?” International Journal of Human Resource Management 6 (2), 412-441
Mayrhofer, Wolfgang and Scullion, Hugh (2002) “Female expatriates in international business: empirical evidence from the German clothing industry,” International Journal of Human Resource Management 13 (5), 815-836
McFail, Ruth, McNulty, Yvonne and Hutchings, Kate (2014) “Lesbian and gay expatriation: opportunities, barriers and challenges for global mobility” International Journal of Human Resource Management, published online 8 August 2014, doi: 10.1080/09585192.2014.941903
Parboteeah, K. Prateen, Hoegl, Martin, and Cullen, John B. (2008) “Managers' gender role attitudes: a country institutional profile approach.” Journal of International Business Studies 39, 795–813
Shinnar, R. S., Giacomin, O., & Janssen, F. (2012) “Entrepreneurial Perceptions and Intentions: The Role of Gender and Culture.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 36(3): 465-493
Taylor, Sully, Napier, Nancy K. and Blair, Anne (2004) “Women Expatriates Working in Germany: Factors of Success,” in N. Boyacigiller and T. Kiyak (eds.) Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Academy of International Business, East Lansing MI: Academy of International Business, p. 186
Tung, Rosalie L. (2004) "Female expatriates: the model global manager?" Organizational Dynamics, 33 (3), 243–253
Santacreu-Vasut, Estefania, Shenkar, Oded and Shoham, Amir (2014) “Linguistic gender marking and its international business ramifications,” Journal of International Business Studies 45, 1170–1178
World Bank (2015) World Bank Group Enterprise Surveys Data on Gender. (Date Accessed: January 19, 2015):http://www.enterprisesurveys.org/data/exploretopics/gender
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