Gender eclipsed? Racial hierarchies in transnational call center work.

• Author: Mirchandani, Kiran

FEMINIST ETHNOGRAPHIES ON THE NATURE OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM HAVE PROVIDED A wealth of knowledge on the gendered nature of transnational subcontracting and on the ways that women in the many parts of Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America have been constructed as the "ideal" workers within transnational factories producing garments, food products, shoes, electronics, and transcriptions at nominal cost in developing countries. This article explores a seemingly opposite trend at play in Indian call centers that provide voice-to-voice service to U.S. clients. Call center work is in many ways the epitome of what is commonly seen as "women's work." Providing good service on the telephone requires skills associated with hegemonic femininity, such as being nice, making customers feel comfortable, and dealing with irate customers (Hochschild, 1983; Steinberg and Figart, 1999; Leidner, 1999). Yet, interestingly enough, call center work in the newly emerging centers in New Delhi is not always segregated by gender. In fact, in the interviews I conducted, managers, trainers, and workers unanimously and emphatically construct their jobs in call centers as free of gender-bias and equally appropriate for male and female workers. (1) This article evaluates these discursive claims of occupational desegregation in transnational call center work in India. I argue that the gender segregation in segments of the outsourced call center industry in India is situated within the context of racial hierarchies between Indian workers and Western customers, which fundamentally structure transnational service work. Gender is "eclipsed" in the sense that it is hidden behind a profound, racialized gendering of jobs at a transnational level.

Segregation and Desegregation in Global Production

One hallmark of transnational subcontracted work has been the vast numbers of jobs specifically targeted for women workers. Since the 1970s, researchers have noted women's overrepresentation in export-processing industries (Salzinger, 2003: 12). As Basu and Grewal (2001: 943) summarize, "capitalism [has] depended on sexism in order to be global." Ong (1991: 287) notes that "if we look at the figures for all off-shore industries, women tend to comprise the lower-paid half of the total industrial work force in developing countries.... They are concentrated in a few industries: textiles, apparel, electronics, and footwear." Women's appropriateness for these jobs is often defined in ideological terms (such as natural dexterity or assumed nimbleness) and women workers earn 30 to 40% less than men do worldwide (Steans, 2003: 368). Salzinger traces the ways in which women have been constructed as the ideal workers in Mexican maquilas, whereby "'femininity' has become closely linked to productivity, and 'masculinity' to sloth and disruption" (2003: 10; Bergeron, 2001; Carty, 1997; Ong, 1991). As Steans (2003: 368) notes, "in Asia, in the 1980s, women made up 85 percent of workers in Export Production Zones. In other areas, the figure for women workers was typically around 75 percent."

More recently, feminists writing about transnational global regimes have noted the growing desegregation of traditionally feminized subcontracted jobs. Meera Nanda (2000: 26), for example, provides evidence of the rising defeminization of offshore work, arguing that "computer-aided manufacture and flexible production techniques are changing the skill requirements and gender composition of workers employed by the apparel and microelectronics industries." Nanda notes that women face the risk of being displaced from the export-oriented sector as men fill the more skilled and better jobs. Salzinger similarly documents the growing integration of men into the maquiladoras in a case study of a factory that employs an equal number of women and men. She notes that "the subjects who are enacted are not ungendered; they are implicitly masculinized" and all workers are assumed to be breadwinners automatically invested in autonomy and high productivity (Ibid.: 101-112). Gender is not enacted as a difference between women and men; rather "men become a new prototype.... Minor increases in shop-floor autonomy and pay made men seem a natural new workforce" (Ibid.: 122).

Analysis of gendered regimes across local and national contexts provides insight into the highly contextual and shifting nature of the constructions of gender norms. Poster (2001) compares three high-tech organizations--a U.S. company based in Silicon Valley, a U.S.-owned transnational based in India, and a locally owned Indian company--to analyze how and why workers come to believe that some jobs are more appropriate for women or men. Across contexts, Poster finds that executive jobs are favored for men, while administrative jobs are favored for women. Interestingly, certain other jobs (such as engineering) are seen to be more appropriate for men by workers in the U.S., but more appropriate for women in India. Poster argues that job titles are differently gendered across nations, but workers in India and the U.S. evoke different discourses to explain their views on the gendered nature of particular jobs. For example, U.S. workers more often cite "nimble fingers" discourses that stress that women and men have different skills that arise from biology or socialization. India-based workers more frequently cite discourses of "dangerous spaces," noting that certain work timings, environments, or processes are less appropriate for women given that jobs in transnational corporations require interactions with men who are foreigners. Poster's ethnography demonstrates the ways in which notions of masculinity and femininity are differently created across national contexts in relation to local labor markets. The analysis of call center workers below adds to the body of work that demonstrates how femininity and masculinity are enacted in local contexts and simultaneously situated within racialized transnational regimes. The call center workers I interviewed in India are employed in a demographically integrated occupation in that there is little difference between the nature of tasks and pay levels of male and female workers. As argued below, the gendered norms that emerge are significantly structured by the racialized relations between workers in India and the clients they serve in the U.S.

Methods

The primary purpose of this project was to explore the nature of gendered work within the context of global economic relations. As a newly emerging form of work, transnational call center work in India provides an ideal site to explore the issues raised above. I was interested in how call center workers in India serving international clients do telephone service work across national borders. My main focus is on female and male workers who work in customer service centers, where they make voice-to-voice contact with international clients calling 1-800 numbers. In recent years, India has installed reliable, high-capacity telephone lines in many of its major cities. As a result, over 500 foreign companies now outsource work to about 300 phone-based call centers in India. The sector has seen considerable growth; as Datta (2004) notes, "the Indian Call Center Industry has been growing at a mind-boggling growth rate of around 60% annually over the last 3 years. Employment in this sector has increased from 140,000 in March 2003 to 200,000 plus by 2004. In fact, it has been reported that the industry hired 200 persons every working day over the last one year." Examples of companies that use India-based call centers are British Airways, TechneCall, Dell Computers, Citibank, GE, HSBC, British Airways, Cap Gemini, Swiss Air, America On-Line, and American Express. Operators in these call centers handle customer calls made to toll free numbers in North America, Britain, Australia, and Western Europe (Migration News, May 2001). Taylor and Bain (2004) note that call centers are primarily located in Delhi and Mumbai, although other cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad are also seeing increases in call center activity. The main incentives for companies to locate centers in India are low wages relative to the West, and the large English-speaking labor pool. This article draws on interviews conducted in 2002 with a group of call center workers, managers, and trainers in New Delhi, India.

Interviews were conducted with 13 call center workers and six managers/trainers. All respondents were with organizations serving American clients. Interviews were in-depth, qualitative conversations and respondents...