Gendered Hierarchies in Transnational Call Centres in India

Abstract

Feminist ethnographies on the nature of global capitalism have provided a wealth of knowledge on the gendered nature of transnational subcontracting. Women in 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 chapter explores a seemingly opposite trend at play in Indian call centres which provide voice-to-voice service to American clients. Call centre 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 centre work in the newly emerging centres 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 centres as free of gender bias and equally appropriate for male and female workers. This chapter explores manifestations of gendered processes in transnational call centres in light of these claims of occupational desegregation.

Acknowledgements: This is a revised version of a paper originally published in Social Justice 32 (4): 105–119 (Mirchandani, K. Gender Eclipsed?: Racial Hierarchies in Transnational Call Centres). The project was funded by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.