Married, mom and manager – how can this be combined with an international career?

Female expatriates: towards a more inclusive view

“…While the female expatriate literature has tended to be dominated by surveybased research it does also include a growing number of papers utilising qualitative research methods. This research has included in-depth interview-based studies of the narrative type (Fischlmayr and Kollinger, 2010;Fischlmayr and Puchmüller, 2016) as well as structured and semi-structured interviews conducted face-to-face, by telephone and more recently by skype (Adler, 1987;Caligiuri et al, 1999;Hutchings et al, 2013;Janssens et al, 2006;Linehan and Scullion, 2008;Linehan et al, 2001;Mathur-Helm, 2002;McPhail et al, 2016;Napier and Taylor, 2002;Roos, 2013;Stalker and Mavin, 2011;Vance and McNulty, 2014). Other studies have used a case study/vignette style (McNulty, 2015), analysis of oral histories (Fisher et al, 2015), context cards and rankings (Harris, 2001), and documentary analysis (Harris and Brewster, 1999).…”

“…In her subsequent landmark research Adler (1984a;1984b) studied perceptions of why women may be underrepresented amongst international managers. She investigated three possible barriers including: (1) foreigner prejudice (or perceptions that women would experience prejudice in foreign locations); (2) organizational resistance to selecting women as international managers; and, 3 Stalker and Mavin, 2011; Tharenou, 2009) as well as women who work internationally on short-term, project-based and frequent flyer assignments (Fischlmayr and Puchmüller, 2016;Hutchings et al, 2012;Mäkelä et al, 2015). The research has also developed to consider not just women who have management and executive roles, but also women who have sojourned overseas for lower level positions.…”

“…Some studies (Cole and McNulty, 2011;Fischlmayr and Puchmüller, 2016;Mathur-Helm, 2002;Napier and Taylor, 2002;Paik and Vance, 2002;Salamin and Davoine, 2015) included African, Asian and South American expatriates in their sample, but issues regarding non-Western female expatriates remain under-researched -at least compared to studies on Westerners.…”

“…Though much of the research about female expatriates has examined organizationally-assigned expatriates, within recent years this literature has expanded beyond examinations of just long-term organizational postings to also investigate women who self-initiate (Tharenou, 2009), and women who either self-initiate or accept organizational positions which involve undertaking international travel or components of international work within domestic jobs (Fischlmayr and Puchmüller, 2016;Hutchings et al, 2012;Tharenou, 2006). Further, recently consideration has been given to specific groups of non-traditional female expatriates such as lesbian expatriates (Gedro, 2010;McPhail, McNulty and Hutchings, 2016) and single parent expatriates (McNulty, 2015).…”

Flexible global working arrangements: An integrative review and future research agenda

“…Specifically, we found that in 63 out of the 83 empirical articles (76%), the unit of analysis was an individual, namely the traveller, commuter, assignee, or their spouse. Out of those studies, few had a balanced gender ratio while only two focused exclusively on women ( Fischlmayr & Puchmüller, 2016 ; Miralles-Vazquez & McGaughey, 2015 ). One article focuses its analysis on a team level ( McKenna, Ducharme, & Budworth, 2009 ) and 8 articles (10%) on a firm level of which only one had multi-source data that included flexible global workers, line managers, and HR ( Suutari et al, 2013 ).…”