Explaining Uneven and Reversible Gender Equality Outcomes: A Relational Open-Systems Perspective on Gender Diversity and Inclusion in Multinational Corporations

Multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly adopt common gender diversity and inclusion (GDI) policies, yet gender equality outcomes continue to diverge across subsidiaries and may stall or reverse as institutional and political conditions change. Existing human resource management (HRM) research offers important accounts of policy design, transfer, performance rationales, and individual experience, but provides less integrated explanation of how cross-border institutional pressures are translated into organizational rules that allocate opportunity, recognition, mobility, protection, and status. We develop a relational open-systems perspective on GDI in MNCs. Open systems theory provides the architecture for conceptualizing GDI as embedded, interdependent, and feedback-driven, while relational inequality theory specifies how categorization, social closure, and relational claims-making shape resource allocation within that system. Intersectionality operates as a cross-cutting logic that conditions actors' positions, power, and claim legitimacy across institutional and organizational settings. The resulting framework explains how formally similar GDI arrangements can generate substantive inclusion, selective advancement, symbolic maintenance, persistent exclusion, or retrenchment across subsidiaries. The paper contributes by linking the evolution and adaptation of multinational HRM systems to the concrete organizational relations through which differentiated gender equality outcomes are produced and revised over time.