International management and ethics are two topics which seem to come up quite often no matter what business course I’m in. One question posed a few days ago was: “If you wanted to expand operations into a country which told you that you could build and own the facility, but they didn’t want any women managers working there, would you go ahead with the plan? Is it ethical?”
My answer is that yes, I would go for it, so long as the project was profitable. The way I see it, ethics are relative. Of course there are things that are universally wrong (killing comes to mind…) but the way a society looks at women is particular to that society. Just because we Americans are very vocal about equality doesn’t mean the rest of the world is going to follow that model. If you want to do business in a country with very different social values than your own, you need to be willing to make compromises. If the country in question wanted to open up a firm in America but refused to hire women managers–as is their cultural norm–we would never accept it, so why do so many Americans think that we should get special treatment? What right do we have to impose our way of doing business? In my mind, no right at all.
