International mobility policies and practices: are there gender differences in importance ratings?

Personal Characteristics of Female vs Male Business Expatriates

Although there has been a rapidly increasing literature on women in international assignments, very little is known about their specific personal characteristics. To rectify this shortcoming, a large-scale mail survey to female and male business expatriates in Hong Kong made a direct comparison of their personal characteristics. Results showed that the women were younger than the men. Controlling for inter-group age differences, despite the fact that there were no gender differences in corporate tenure and expatriate experiences, the female expatriates were found to occupy lower hierarchical positions than their male counterparts. Women on foreign assignment were also less frequently married than their male colleagues. Implications for assigning organizations and future research are discussed.

Women and international assignments

Purpose

– Research on female expatriates has been substantially growing over the last decades and particularly in more recent years. Complementing previous thematic analyses of the literature, the purpose of this paper is to apply textual statistics and correspondence analysis to reveal the existing semantic structure of the field of research on female expatriates.

Design/methodology/approach

– Using correspondence analysis, the authors explored textual data from the abstracts of 151 identified journal articles published in English since 1975. The authors obtained a graphical representation showing the various developmental stages of research on female expatriates.

Findings

– The authors found that research follows a home-host country orientation and advances from an organizational focus toward individual-level studies. The authors identified various directions for future research and especially a strong need for more multilevel approaches to study men’s and women’s expatriate experiences and trajectories in various contexts.

Research limitations/implications

– Only articles with abstracts entered the analysis, which in turn was dependent on the content and quality of these abstracts. This limitation has been addressed by thoroughly reading each article considered.

Originality/value

– This review adopts an original method in research on (female) expatriates and more broadly management research. It enabled the authors to map out the development of key research themes over time. Based on this analysis, gaps in current research could be identified and clear directions for future research were formulated.