We Call It Capacity: International Women's Nonlinear Careers Confuse the Systems That Require Them Most

Flor Bretón García was born in Venezuela and left her homeland at 22 — which means she's now lived outside her home country longer than she lived in it. Lawyer. Educator. Cross-cultural consultant. Mother of three adult TCKs. President of FIGT. And a woman who, after receiving her 598th job rejection, sat down on a Friday night and wrote an article that stopped LinkedIn in its tracks.

In this conversation, Flor and Doreen unpack what happens when globally complex women hit systems built for linear lives — and why that's not a talent problem. It's a design problem.

Flor opens with the moment she was quietly advised to take an accent-removal class, so as not to distract her students. It was the first time she felt the world asking her to become smaller — and she traces her journey from that moment of self-consciousness to her current view of her accent as an open door, an invitation for people to learn her story.

That story took a sharp turn on one particular Friday evening, when she sat down and really looked at those 598 rejection emails. What she noticed changed everything. Many had arrived within 30 minutes of her hitting "apply." Others cited a search for a better "cultural fit." No human being, she realized, was reading her resume at midnight on a Saturday. The systems were doing it for them — and those systems are built to reward one thing above all else: predictability. The very quality that globally complex women are not.

This is what Flor calls the great gap — the distance between what organizations say they want and how they actually hire. They talk about agility, resilience, adaptability, the ability to navigate ambiguity. But their applicant tracking systems, their recruiters, their hiring managers are all scanning for familiarity and linearity. A nonlinear resume looks like uncertainty. And uncertainty, to a system, looks like a no.

What makes this conversation so compelling is Flor's refusal to let that be the final word. She invites hiring managers to ask a different question entirely — not "why doesn't this resume fit our template?" but "what capabilities is this career showing me?" Because there is intention behind every pivot a global woman makes. The move that looks like confusion from the outside is almost always a decision made in the middle of uncertainty, following a vocation, pulling a common thread. For Flor, that thread runs through everything she's done as a lawyer, educator, and consultant: redesigning systems that truly honour humans with dignity.

She also gives us one of the episode's most memorable frameworks — the difference between a Forest Gump resume and a Michelangelo resume. Both are nonlinear. But one looks like things just happened to you, and the other reveals that everything was intentional, even when the path was uncertain. The difference, she says, is entirely in how you tell the story.

And telling the story, it turns out, is everything. Not listing countries. Not cataloguing credentials. But pulling the thread, naming the vocation, and being clear about what you want the listener to do with what you've shared. Flor's closing message is one worth sitting with: g

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You can map the move. You cannot map the metamorphosis. Nomadic Diaries explores the interior journey of expat life — the belonging, the identity shifts, the repatriation, and everything that travels with you that can't be packed in a suitcase. This episode may be part of our Re-Entry Series (30 episodes on coming home) or The Belonging Project (29 episodes on belonging across cultures). Browse the full catalog at nomadicdiariespodcast.com and please share or leave a review if this episode resonated.

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