You are providing some great responses to our opening questions! However, we are

Question

You are providing some great responses to our opening questions! However, we are also going to take a closer look at some specific concepts of international law. Here’s a hypothetical to help us do so:

You are a female executive with an American company (ABC Company). You are on a contract negotiation team. Your company doesn’t yet have any facilities/offices in Japan but wish to open some there soon. Your company has a policy of excluding women from negotiating contracts in certain countries due to those countries' cultural practices. This policy of excluding female executives has recently been the subject of articles in several major newspapers and is causing quite a stir. The National Organization for Women (NOW) would like the company to take the position that its standards in the United States apply to all its operations. NOW maintains that without such a stance, true change will never happen.

What should your company do? Is this policy ethical? Is it legal?

Explanation / Answer

When it comes to operating in foreign countries it make business sense to deal with the people in their own way. Consider the same scenario except that instead of no women executives, if the case is of no English only Japanese language in business transactions, probably there won’t be much of a discussion about it being ethical or legal. If it was language issue, US businesses would just start learning Japanese or hire local people to do the business. Now going back to the case of no women executives, it is essentially the same scenario and has the same solution as in case of language. Operate as per Japanese cultural practices.

Sticking to the policy that the same standards in the US are applicable in operations everywhere else may not be a legal issue, but it may be considered as just a business issue. The company may just lose some business due to the cultural insensitivity it presents to Japanese by sticking to its guns. Morally also, it is not OK to exclude women executives who can do their jobs just as effectively as their male counterparts, but then again, it may be considered ethically wrong in Japan. What’s morally/ethically right in one place may be immoral/unethical in another place. Another example is that there are some tribes in world that allow for siblings to get married, but is widely considered immoral in most other parts of the world.

Legally there may not be an issue to the company as they are not doing any crime by just sending women to negotiation table. But the Japanese may feel not as positive about the company as it may present as if the company does not respect their culture.

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