Corporate Transfers Let More Women See the World on the Company’s Nickel

One of the troubles with travel is that no one pays you to do it--unless you get transferred by your employer to some exotic locale. These days, with corporations doing more and more business abroad, it isn’t uncommon for people to uproot themselves when the right opportunity comes along. Those willing to take a temporary assignment abroad are often rewarded with increased responsibility and accelerated promotion, not to mention the chance to see the world and get to know another culture in a deeper way than the average tourist does.

Chicagoan Anne Martino, an account executive with the advertising firm Foote Cone & Belding, is a case in point. Currently she’s on temporary assignment in Shanghai, where restaurants feature such delicacies as fish eyes and duck tongue. As a prominent member of the rather small American expatriate community there, she was asked to breakfast with President Clinton during his recent state visit. But the infrastructure presents challenges, she says. “For 40 people in my office, we only have four phone lines and no voicemail.”

Vanessa Flores, posted to Guam two years ago by Union Bank of California, is having such a good time scuba diving in the balmy waters that surround the 200-square-mile tropical paradise in the western Pacific that she recently exercised her option to stay another year. She also loves her fellow workers (a cultural stew from all over Asia and the Pacific), though “the downside is the distance from my family in L.A., whom I miss dearly.” But she communicates with them by e-mail and convinced her parents to come out last year for a little R&R; in Bali, a trip they’d never have taken if it weren’t for her.

Unfortunately, some women never get the chance for a transfer. As one executive who handles employee relocation for a large corporation told me, women are considered unlikely to accept, or difficult to move due to the complicated ties that bind them to home. In the past, expatriate women largely have followed their spouses on international assignments, where they tended house and children during the time the family was abroad, partly out of necessity and partly because trailing spouses find it difficult to get jobs and work permits abroad.

Now 10% of transferees are women, according to the Employee Relocation Council (an association of professional relocation companies and organizations). Increasingly, the married women among them are followed by their husbands--which would put the shoe on the other foot were it not for the fact that corporations and relocation support agencies are generally far more helpful in finding employment opportunities abroad for trailing husbands than wives.

Beverly Roman, author of “The Insiders’ Guide to Relocation” (The Insiders’ Guides, Inc., $14.95), says that when one spouse is relocated, the other has four options: Approach the employer about what the company can do for him or her; look for a new job; move with the spouse but take a sabbatical from work; or stay put and not go along, which can, of course, be tough on a relationship.

Due to transfers, Christine St. Clare, currently a partner at KPMG in Atlanta, has spent more than seven years seeing her husband, who works in Orange County, on weekends. This has made them both focus on what being together really means (a benefit to any marriage). But while Karen Canning reports that the year and a half she spent in Moscow as an insurance underwriter enhanced her career, she also says that part of the reason she came home was to retool a languishing romance.

Then, too, Russia wasn’t exactly a safe place to be. One morning Canning found a man with a gun standing over a dead body in the lobby of her very nice Moscow apartment building, which is why she sees security as an important issue to consider before taking a foreign posting. Women--in particular, single women--feel especially vulnerable when far away from home, which can result in fear, inhibition and loneliness. Diane Price, who manages international human resources for Samson Companies, an oil and gas firm that routinely posts employees in remote places, believes that men can more easily cope with this kind of alienation. “They can go to a gym, restaurant or bar alone, without sending entirely the wrong message,” she says.

Generally your corporation will help you out when you get transferred. But here are a few tips to ease the way:

* E-mail is a great way to stay connected with home.

* Take advantage of your foreign posting by traveling, even if it’s just for a weekend.

* “Pay attention to your need for a support network,” says Nancy J. Piet-Pelon, co-author of “Women’s Guide to Overseas Living” (Intercultural Press, Inc., $15.95). Churches, American women’s clubs and the international running group called the Hash House Harriers can help.

* And when the going gets tough, remember that--as a wise woman once told me--it’s very classy to be able to adapt. That’s why I envy Anne Martino, fish eyes and all.

Information on women’s clubs abroad is available from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1734 N St., N.W., Washington, DC 20036-2990; telephone (202) 347-3168, Internet https://www.gfwc.org, e-mail gfwc@gfwc.org.

Worldwide Hash House Harriers can be reached on the Internet at https://www.gthhh.com.

For publications on relocating, contact BR Anchor Publishing, 2044 Montrose Lane, Wilmington, NC 28405; tel. (910) 256-9598, Internet https://www.branchor.com, e-mail branchor@aol.com; or Living Abroad Publishing Inc., 32 Nassau St., Princeton, NJ 08542; tel. (609) 924-9302, Internet https://www.livingabroad.com, e-mail info@livingabroad.com.