Men Are From Marrakech . . .

You’re a woman working alongside several other female employees for a major corporation in the U.S. You’ve just gotten a new boss from the firm’s British headquarters; he at least seems polite, if a little standoffish.

All goes well until the day, shortly after his arrival, that he walks out of his office and asks rather loudly, “How are the biddies doing today?”

So much for British reserve. This incident happened within the last two years at SmithKline Beecham, a pharmaceuticals maker that employs 56,000 people worldwide. It illustrates how cultural differences--even between two seemingly similar cultures like those of the U.S. and Britain--can be a potential minefield in the office.

In this case, there were no serious repercussions. SKB’s vice president and director of employee relations, Bill Mossett, quickly informed the supervisor that “biddies” was not acceptable parlance in the U.S.; neither were the terms “girls” or “chippies,” which he had also heard British managers use. The female employees accepted the cowed supervisor’s apology.

Gender conflicts overlaying cross-cultural ones are a growing issue. As business becomes more global, women are rapidly joining the growing number of U.S. executives doing business overseas. A 1995 study found that the number of women working for U.S. companies had more than doubled since 1990; by 2000, it’s estimated that women will make up 20% of all U.S. executives working overseas.

Such apparently minor transgressions as calling women biddies can lead to simmering employee dissatisfaction and even lawsuits. Mossett says he was surprised to be on the receiving end of a British female employee’s complaint when he sent her flowers at the office for doing a good job. “That was the wrong thing to do. It’s considered too personal there,” he explains.

SKB tries to avoid similar slip-ups through a training program, though so far fewer than 1% of the company’s employees have participated, says Mossett. Other major firms have management sensitivity programs in place, but often do not make them available to the majority of employees.

The availability of such training seems to be lagging business realities by a few years. “Not so long ago, companies would hesitate to send women overseas. It’s only been within the last five years that that’s really changed,” says Kathleen Reardon, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Reardon wrote the 1995 book “They Don’t Get It, Do They?” about communication between women and men in the workplace.

Reardon says that because their international opportunities are so recent, women are often loath to complain about inappropriate comments or behavior from men.

“Once women accept a situation [overseas], they feel obligated to work it out. They don’t want to bring a problem back to the home office--that would just seem to be validation that women can’t travel,” Reardon says.

The first line of defense urged by Reardon and others who have dealt with global businesswomen is clear, direct communication. Women must always present themselves professionally, be introduced with respect by male colleagues and be conscious of verbal and nonverbal cues that may strike some men as an invitation. For example, a woman should never give a man an article of clothing, such as a belt or handkerchief, as a business gift.

When ground rules are clear and business runs smoothly, Reardon says, many male executives wonder why they were ever reluctant to send women on international assignments. “Men say that putting a woman on a negotiating team actually enhances the whole character of the meeting; they say it raises it to a higher plane,” she says.

That statement may sound somewhat sexist to women who lived through the men-and-women-are-totally-equal drive in the 1970s and ‘80s. But just as women have stopped trying to dress like men in the office--in severe suits and tailored shirts--there seems to be a post-feminist move in women’s thought about workplace achievement. It recognizes that men and women can achieve equally when given equal opportunity, but that their roads to success will often be different.

When it comes to male-female interaction at work, many women recognize that men will naturally react to them as women. The trick is managing that response and not letting gender negatively affect one’s business objectives.

If--in a worst-case scenario--a gender conflict overseas does come to litigation, handling it can be even tricker than in the United States, where sexual harassment cases are often difficult to win. Under U.S. law, American-controlled companies doing business overseas are held to the same standards regarding sexual harassment as in the U.S. The definition of “American-controlled,” however, can be open to interpretation.

All employees, whatever their nationality, are (at least in theory) held to the same standards regarding harassment. Representatives of U.S. corporations interviewed last year by Personnel Journal, an industry publication, said legal action was threatened against such employees only as a last resort. Most human resources managers said they first made clear to such employees that their behavior was not appropriate by American standards.

Most foreign countries have no sexual harassment laws at all. According to a 1992 article in the International Labour Review, only nine of 23 industrialized nations (including the U.S.) had statutes that specifically defined or mentioned the term “sexual harassment.”

Of course, it’s not only between U.S. and foreign cultures that such issues arise. In the U.S., legal experts who deal with sexual harassment cases say they see many situations that stem at least in part from cultural differences among Americans of different backgrounds.

Says Reardon: “In the U.S., we tend to think we’re so advanced, but we’re not. We’re just really becoming sensitized to the fact that women in a business setting aren’t just there to take notes.”