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 on their mobility. “It's much harder to make an impact and get exposure to global leaders from a remote site,” explained an Indian focus group participant. “I'm not mobile in terms of working at different locations, and I know that's one of the things that has stopped me from getting promoted.”
DAILY DANGERS AND SAFETY CONCERNS
The first time Samara Braga was robbed, she was eight months pregnant and sitting in her car, parked in front of her office building in downtown São Paulo, Brazil. “A guy with a gun broke the window, shouting, ‘If you don't give me your watch, I'll kill you and your baby!’ It happened right in front of the bank building in broad daylight, with everyone watching.”
The second time, she was also in her car, on her way to work, and had stopped for a red light. A man bashed in the window and grabbed her bag. “You never expect this to happen at 11 o'clock on a rainy Monday morning.”
The third time, she was attacked as she walked out of the bank building at the end of the day. After she complained to the company president, a system of bodyguards for women was established. “Every one of us who had to leave the office after 7 p.m. had the right to a bodyguard to take you to the bus, train, or parking lot. The president was a clever guy. He knew the women were the ones working long hours because they were dedicated, so he said, ‘I have to make you feel comfortable. I'll give you all bodyguards.’ After that, I felt safe.”
The combination of workplace pushes covered so far—extreme jobs, bias and stereotyping, and travel limitations—are akin to those we have analyzed for women in the developed world, although they affect BRIC and UAE women in different forms and to a different degree. Our latest research, however, reveals a push factor entirely unique to emerging markets: personal safety.
Safety concerns in connection with work-related travel are a harsh reality that professional women in emerging markets grapple with daily. One-third or more of women feel unsafe while commuting to and from work, a number that rises to more than 50 percent in countries with vast economic disparities such as India and Brazil.
In India, where mass culture remains tradition bound and male dominated, the rising tide of independent-minded and financially self-sufficient women threatens deeply rooted social conventions, with unfortunately predictable repercussions: between 2003 and 2007, rape cases in India rose more than 30 percent, and kidnapping or abduction cases rose more than 50 percent.9 Most Indian professional women avoid public transportation and its gauntlet of verbal taunting, physical harassment, and other indignities. Many companies, especially IT firms, provide commuter vans to and from their campuses from train stations and other central points. Not surprisingly, telecommuting options, when offered, have a big uptake.
In Russia, hardest hit among the BRIC economies by the global financial downturn, crime is escalating, exacerbated by the fragility of a social safety net already shredded from the dissolution of the Soviet system. “Moscow is a very dangerous city,” says Karine Kocharyan. “There are a lot of people in need, and they're ready to do anything. That's part of the everyday environment in such megacities.”
São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, similarly, are notorious for the high incidence of crime, and almost every Brazilian woman in our study has had firsthand experience with these daily dangers. One focus
