Abstract
The study explored barriers to career progression of Chinese self-initiated expatriate (SIE) women in the United Kingdom using semi-structured interviews with two matched samples of Chinese SIE and native Caucasian British women. Double jeopardy and ethnic prominence offered the theoretical backdrop. Common gender-related career hindering factors emerged in both groups. However, no barriers due to ethnicity per se emerged for the Chinese SIE women, whilst their narrations revealed that the Chinese stereotype had rather facilitated their careers in the host country. Furthermore, they did not view self-expatriation as a particularly challenging endeavor. None of the two interpretative frameworks deployed, double jeopardy and ethnic prominence, could account for the findings. The study implies that the effects of ethnicity on self-expatriation experiences and outcomes may be contingent on SIEs’ ethnic and cultural origins. In addition, the findings imply that women who self-expatriate to escape gendered opportunities in their home countries may face similar gender-related barriers in host countries.
Highlights
The notion of self-initiated expatriation was introduced to signify those individuals who engage in expatriation, which is planned and initially intended as temporary move of their main residence to another country, purely through their own initiative and resources (Suutari and Brewster, 2000; Inkson and Myers, 2003; Jokinen et al, 2008)
Perceptions of gender barriers were mostly related to direct discrimination in the workplace connected with stereotyping, including stereotyping about the type of work women can do and stereotyping about family-to-work interference
With respect to double jeopardy, Chinese women perceived some difficulties resulting from not being native British, and these were over and above the hardships caused by their gender
Summary
The notion of self-initiated expatriation was introduced to signify those individuals who engage in expatriation, which is planned and initially intended as temporary move of their main residence to another country, purely through their own initiative and resources (Suutari and Brewster, 2000; Inkson and Myers, 2003; Jokinen et al, 2008). Women are seriously disadvantaged in organizational expatriation, having around four times less chance than men to be sent abroad as organizational expatriates (e.g., Brookfield Global Relocation Services, 2015, 2017). This is alleged to be primarily due to gender-biased organizational decision-making that leads to discrimination against women in selection for organizational expatriation (Tharenou, 2010; Shortland and Perkins, 2019), organizational decision makers allegedly choose to overlook women as organizational expatriates (Shortland and Altman, 2011; Bohmer and Schinnenburg, 2016)
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