inclusion: Accommodating spouses/partners :
Obstacles to good practice

Tips and Tools

Domestic Partner Agreements IITA Community Resources Center IRRI Family Services Center G&D initiatives to support CGIAR spouses/partners Direct appointments Consultancies Fellowships Appointment to advertized vacancies Couple appointments A guide for spouses/partners: what to ask

1 Before making any recommendations about good practice in accommodating spouses/partners, or who should be responsible for it, we need to examine the current obstacles. Unless these obstacles are recognized it will be hard to exercise the innovation necessary to introduce a fresh approach to accommodating spouses/partners.

2 The obstacles listed in the “Diversity Alert” above constitute a filter – “the it-couldn’t-work-here-because…” filter. However if Centers recognize the extent to which the filter influences the options they’re offering spouses, or not, they can start to explore new options.

“Sink or swim” attitude
3 The first obstacle to accommodating spouses/partners is usually a “sink or swim” attitude toward spouses/partners on the part of:

• staff members, especially those who are indigenous to the duty station, and who are responsible for aspects of support for spouses/partners but may not appreciate the scope and scale of difficulties encountered by foreigners;
• national staff who often see spouses/partners of internationally recruited staff in a privileged position already (e.g. family income) and, consequently, not deserving of special effort or support;
• other spouses/partners who had to rely on their own resources to establish themselves see no reason to help newcomers avoid the same “rites of passage”.

In most cases, these obstacles apply to distant spouses as well as expatriate spouses.

INAdequacy of information
4 Centers typically provide induction and orientation information to newly appointed staff members, including information on employment conditions. However, their spouses/partners are often left out of these processes. The spouse/partner becomes dependent on the staff member:

• to pass on all relevant information as it is acquired (including oral information), and
• to think of the other issues about which their spouse/partner requires information, to acquire that information and pass it on.

This is probably a lot to expect of a newly-appointed staff member settling into a new job, a new organization and a new location.

LACK OF Empathy
5 In some cases, senior management may not empathize with the challenges faced by younger staff. Life for people whose children have grown and left home is quite different from those raising young families. Life is also different when the spouse/partner does not work and has time to support her/his partner, by comparison with a dual-career couple. Life can also be very lonely for a spouse/partner with no children (or no children at the duty station).

6 While some good policies exist across Centers, the quality of implementation may not match that of the intention. In some locations, spouses/partners rarely see pro-active behavior from those charged with implementing the policies.

STEREOTYPING
7 This often dovetails with “lack of empathy”. It is easy to make invalid assumptions about the lifestyles and personal and professional needs of spouses/partners, e.g. that they will be content to stay at home raising the family, unconcerned about sustaining their careers.

LACK OF Time
8 This obstacle also goes hand-in-hand with “lack of empathy”. Even if, for example, HR staff members want to provide the best possible support to spouses/partners, they may feel their first responsibility is to the needs of the staff members and may not have the time to devote to partners/spouses.

INADEQUATE Creativity
9 A creative approach is needed to overcome the inertia of well-established practices that are no longer satisfactory and to develop better practices.

10 Several Centers have been very creative in developing case-by-case solutions, often in a policy vacuum and without access to good examples. For example, the traditional approach to spouse/partner employment has been to concentrate on the appointees first, then to look at the spouses’/partners’ needs after they have moved to the duty station. However, we now know we should be looking at these two people as a couple, even during the recruitment phase, and exploring options for employing both. This means creating the mechanisms to support new initiatives to employ spouses/partners, such as an employment bank or seed funding to support project proposals from spouses/partners.

Diversity Alert
Renegotiate host-country agreements to meet today’s needs

Most host-country agreements reflect the outdated concept of sole breadwinner.

The time has come to renegotiate those agreements, particularly those aspects dealing with visas and work permits, so that they facilitate rather than obstruct the dual-career family. IRRI, for example, has already done so.

FEAR
11 It’s all very well to take a creative approach to developing new policies and practices, but what if it goes wrong? Fear of potential consequences can be an enormous obstacle. For example, looking for innovative policies to accommodate spouses/partners might lead to fear of equity issues, worries about whether spouses/partners are inadequately trained for certain activities, the risk of poor performance or that team dynamics will be undermined by spouses working together, or the consequences of couples splitting up.

12 These are legitimate fears. However, as the table below shows, it is not difficult to identify the risks that we fear, the underlying issues and the principal solutions to mitigate the risks. Consequently this obstacle – fear – proves to be quite manageable.

What are we afraid of?

CONCLUSION
13 Once we recognize the barriers to developing and sustaining good practice, it becomes feasible to overcome them. When this recognition is coupled with acceptance that Centers need to treat spouses/partners as being critically important, we are left with a powerful force for change.

© CGIAR Gender & Diversity Program 2006