Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry

By: Anita Balsingh 996220593 Professor: Paul Kingston

Anita Balsingh 996220593 Gender stereotypes in the Global South are dramatically being challenged and fought whether aggressively or passively. Women have long been oppressed by their male counterparts. These dynamics of oppression stem from the start of periods of colonization. Particularly for India, gendering was emphasized during the British rule but within the Indian culture and the Hinduism gender segregation and stereotypes strongly existed and were practiced. Nonetheless, not only restricted to India, women in general are and still continue to be seen in a home economics position. Their bodies are still observed and viewed as vessels for reproduction and pleasure to their male counterparts. However, there has been changing trends which begin with basic human rights and freedoms such as the ability to support ones self and an individual standard of living. These rights and wants and needs began to blossom with the turn of the 21st century and the ever so establishment of the melting pot. Our world is becoming more globalized. This being said, this process of globalization means that the societies and economies are becoming interconnected. Thus our once viewed global south is slowly becoming much more economically powerful and their debts are becoming profits and this education is becoming much more important. India, is one the fastest growing economies. Their population alone account for one sixths of the worlds population and has millions and millions of women and young girls who are becoming educated and entering the working world. This inevitably challenges the existing and preexisting pretenses on gender differences and oppression women in the global south face.

Reena Patel looks at the impacts of the increased women in the call center industries and its impacts on the society culturally, religiously as well as the gender

Anita Balsingh 996220593 differences it challenges, changes and emphasizes. In Patels book, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry; Patel seeks to examine the effects the women face by becoming part of the economy and she really analyzes whether this change in the working environment helps women to emancipate themselves from the regimes of surveillance they encounter and face on a daily basis. The question being raised from Reena Patels accounts is what exactly is meant by regimes of surveillance and how have these regimes been disrupted by introducing the call centers particularly to Mumbai, India. Furthering the analysis is questioning then if these regimes have indeed been disrupted why it has not paved the way to emancipate women in the call center industry.

The current regimes of surveillance in India are revolved around the patriarchal society created through the religion and through colonization of the British Imperial Rule prior to the Indian Independence. The men in the society control the society and economy; this is until the recent boom of the Indian women present in call center environments. The first regimes of surveillance are obtained through the Patels research on spatial and temporal mobility of women in Mumbai. These primarily deal with understanding and analyzing where and when women can go. Patel determines the historical constrictions and barriers placed on womens mobility and outlines that this has had detrimental impacts on todays outlooks of Women whom choose to work the night shift in call centers.

Within this regime of surveillance revolved around a womens mobility comes the inability to leave the confinements of the private sphere. Women historically in Mumbai as well as other parts of India have solely been viewed as the caregivers and home providers.

Anita Balsingh 996220593 It is the womens job to keep her husband happy and provide a nurturing environment to raise their children.

Other regimes of surveillance are the men in general and patriarchal society and outlook they create. Women and their safety are tested and challenged everyday while on their way to work. Even police officers challenge the women and where they are going. This dual dynamic challenges the interlocking effects of mobility and patriarchy.

Overall, regimes are surveillance serve as the dome in which women are judged and oppressed. There are multiple suppressors of women and what they do and the times they conduct their working life and they are constantly judged and watched. The ideas of modernity and work progression are inevitably linked to more levels of oppression and gender stereotyping because ultimately, the night shift aspect of this industry also means that patriarchy regimes of surveillance are recodified, because women must move about in ways that are deemed transgressive.1 These regimes are recodified because women themselves are changing the ideologies surrounded around mobility and movement. They are challenging the temporal and spatial mobility, however in response to women challenging their public mobility there is an equal amount of changing patriarchal oppression in regards to what the women are doing with the increased ability to move from point A to point B, In Indias patriarchal society, the emergence of call centers is nothing less than a social reform movement as far as economic, social and cultural empowerment of women is concerned.2
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Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 143 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 143

Anita Balsingh 996220593

Nonetheless what is strongly being noted by scholars and observed by Reena Patel is that although women are becoming more transgressive this recodifying of the regimes of surveillance is not revolutionizing gendered norms of mobility and spatial access, women in general continue to be held to stricter regimes of surveillance. 3 In other words, even though women are challenging the existing regimes of surveillance such as mobility their ability to push to be more mobile especially during the night time is in fact being answered by men with even more criticism. However, because women are yearning for the ability to move outside the household this transgression is powerful.

The regimes of surveillance today have been interrupted by the developing trend of call center work because it challenges the preconceived notions of women solely being confined to household or private sphere work. In doing so, the regimes themselves are much stricter and judgmental on women, working in call center gives the impression that their daughters are promiscuous...4 These judgments stem from prehistoric religious beliefs about the women and her body. In Hinduism the woman is considered a pure vessel in which her body belongs to her husband only and to flaunt or wear clothing that causes other men to stare is considered slutish. Therefore, the responsibility of a mans actions falls unto the woman as well. These notions and ideologies are still entrenched in the Indian culture. This is why women are faced with ideas associated around promiscuity when leaving to work at night.

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Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 143 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 116

Anita Balsingh 996220593 However, we cannot overlook the positivity and changes the call center work has challenged and succeeded with. Call centers provide a stable income and in most cases provides a very high paying salary. The average income is approximately Rs. 10000 per month. This is in contrast to other starting salaries in different fields with starting salaries of only one fifth of that.5 The equivalency to an American would be offering a high school graduate or even a drop out a starting salary of anywhere between $40 000 to $60 000 a year providing they work the night shift.6 This is important because it turns out that men are more likely to drop out of school to pursue call center employment, whereas women are more likely to stay with their education.7 The significance of this is challenging the gender notions of men are smarter or are supposed to have higher levels of education. For Shilpa a 38 year old employee with an engineering degree her husband only has his diploma and although it was a little of an uphill battle in regards to his ego being hit that his wife has more education and thus earns more money than he does, he is now proud of her and talks highly of her, she has found that her husband is now very proud of her and with money a constrained relationship became good.8

Furthering the development of income difference between men and women and how their significant others perceive them. Earning a higher income and having more education has transgressed and progressed the gender differences within the household itself, Poonam a 32 year old Indian women accepted a job in Bangalore and left her child and husband to her in laws for approximately twenty one months while she took the IT job.

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Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 34 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 34 7 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 34 8 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 113

Anita Balsingh 996220593 What made it easier is her husband supported her decision.9 This indeed challenged the notion of mobility. Nonetheless, Poonam was faced with criticism for her decision, but she did it for herself and her family.

Overall, although call centers in India influenced a more negative change in thought in regimes of surveillance it also challenged many of the preconceived notions of these same regimes of surveillance such as earning an income, having achieved a higher education than her male counterpart and really progressing the roles of men and women within a family setting.

Even though women have been able to make progress in challenging the regimes of surveillance in the existing society and culture it does not emancipate women in the call center industries. Firstly, women are viewed as too independent and as used and therefore it affects the inclination of a man to want to marry a woman who has worked in a call center because she was exposed to the night air, interviewees revealed that some men dont want to marry a woman who works in a call center. The night shift requirement and social camaraderie associated with the call center environment are viewed with suspicion and degrade the respectability of women in social spaces outside the call center.10 Furthermore, these women cannot be emancipated because it is difficult for men to comprehend and accept that women are able to support themselves and even their families.11 These are long entrenched genderologies where the man is the breadwinner.

Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 115 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 133 11 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 133
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Anita Balsingh 996220593 Women working the in call center making their own money as to become independent from a man proves as a source of anxiety in a relationship between the man and woman.12 Furthermore, the call center work which is rich with women has therefore been deemed such an occupation hit by feminization of labor. Women do call center work because Unpaid labor in the household transforms into low pay when women step out. Nurturing becomes a code word for the belief that it is more acceptable for women than for their male counterparts to tolerate difficult working conditions with less reward. This idea applies not only to service jobs but to manufacturing as well. From describing women as workers with nimble fingers to defining them as disposable and replaceable in the realm of global manufacturing, women are marked as marked as a secondary necessity in the paid labor force and are subsequently made the target of exploitation13 This role has transcended into a role which is not important, and where the worker and work they do are easily replaceable. Women become a commodity and simply a number whereby they cannot choose the fate of their own lives but where these multinational corporations dictate what and where they do their job. Ultimately, this is viewed by the general patriarchal society as subordination, thus tightly woven with the ideologies associated with womanly characteristics.

Multinational corporations have also added to the difficulty of women being able to emancipate themselves because of the connotation and understanding associated with these jobs, Call center operations moved to India because the country provided a cheap Englishspeaking labor force. Indeed, the global demand for twenty four hour workers also emerged
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Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 133 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 31

Anita Balsingh 996220593 as transnational corporations took advantage of different time zones to access more and more laborers. Barbara Adams refers to this process as colonization of time, a term that describes how the western clock is commoditized, set as the standard and exported throughout the world. Temporal imperialism and temporal entrapment have also been used to define the shifting relationship between the timescales of the global north and global south14 Therefore, if the West or these multinational corporations are essentially taking advantage of the cheap labor and abuse of time, these characteristics can only be associated with women. This is because a man would find it much more difficult to subdue to the strict orders of an oppressor and woman in theory are used to the oppression and abuse of power. The job itself has become devalued and has been coined a pink collar job.15 In conclusion, Reena Patel presents the reader with pressing issues that remain in India Call Centers and the oppression women face with the changing effects of the regimes of surveillance present. The colonization of time and abuse of restricting the temporal mobility of women are still pressing issues within the regimes of surveillance themselves. Nonetheless, these regimes have been challenged and changed and altered. Women on an individual basis are seeing a change in the respect level from their significant other and even family members. However the societal impact is very stringent and has created even more negative connotations and obstacles as to constrain the women to the home. As much progress as the women in the call centers have observed they are seeing no emancipation or lifting of the gendering stereotypes associated with mobility freedom and simple values and rights.

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Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 28 Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women in Indias Call Center Industry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. P 31