Women in the Global Information Technology Workforce: Customer Service Call Centers in India

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) jobs are the fastest growing forms of employment in the global economy. While the largest proportion of jobs are low status services, many scholars and policy makers argue this technology is the solution for global unemployment, especially for women. Many development projects sponsored by organizations like the United Nations and World Bank center around ICTs. Critics argue that these ICTs are responsible for the rise of new global sweatshops, which are dominated heavily by women in the South. This project seeks to assess the potential of such development projects, and whether these new technologies are empowering or disadvantageous for women in the global South. The research is based on case studies of call centers, which provide "customer service agents" for corporations in the North. By the year 2008, these call centers are projected to hire 18 million workers, most of them female. This relatively new workforce, emerging largely in the last five years, is almost completely unexplored academically. This project intends to fill this gap, focusing on India where the growth of the global IT workforce has been especially dramatic. Through on-site fieldwork in New Delhi, the investigator will study three call centers, including interviews with 300 workers, as well as industry, governmental, and non-governmental association leaders. The evidence will be used to adjudicate between competing perspectives on this phenomenon: a modernization paradigm that sees technology as gender neutral, or else beneficial for women; a critical or feminist paradigm that sees technology as disadvantageous for women; and an organizational paradigm that sees size and structure as mediating factors which vary outcomes in different corporate settings. In addition, this study assesses competing theories of global culture in ICTs, by asking whether the requirement for Indian workers to pose as Americans in calls to the U.S. results in assimilation or disjuncture in their sense of national and ethnic identity. Thus, this study advances scholarly literatures in many areas, including technology, gender, development, stratification, work, race and ethnicity, globalization, and business management. This project contributes to enhancing equity in use of information technology, especially for women in Southern countries like India. It informs organizational policy and practice involving technology. The broader impact includes training opportunities for students, expanding opportunities for women faculty in science, and improving the infrastructure of scholarly networks between the U.S. and India (through collaboration with a university in New Delhi). This project will also contribute to U.S. policy research on the gender digital divide within the information technology workforce, for government bodies like the National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development, as well to international policy for ICT development programs of the United Nations and World Bank.