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

信息和通信技术(ICT)工作是全球经济中增长最快的就业形式。虽然最大比例的工作是低地位服务，但许多学者和政策制定者认为，这种技术是全球失业的解决方案，尤其是对女性来说。许多由联合国和世界银行等组织赞助的发展项目都以信息和通信技术为中心。批评人士认为，这些信息通信技术促成了新的全球血汗工厂的崛起，这些工厂主要由韩国女性主导。该项目旨在评估此类发展项目的潜力，以及这些新技术对全球南方妇女的赋权或不利。这项研究是基于呼叫中心的案例研究，呼叫中心为北方的公司提供“客户服务代理”。到2008年，这些呼叫中心预计将雇用1800万名员工，其中大部分是女性。这些相对较新的劳动力主要是在过去五年中出现的，在学术上几乎完全没有人探索过。该项目打算填补这一空白，将重点放在印度，在那里，全球IT劳动力的增长尤其戏剧性。通过在新德里的实地考察，调查员将研究三个呼叫中心，包括对300名工人以及行业、政府和非政府协会领导人的采访。这些证据将被用来判断关于这一现象的相互竞争的观点：一种认为技术是中性的或有利于女性的现代化范式；一种认为技术对女性不利的批判性或女权主义范式；以及一种将规模和结构视为中介因素的组织范式，这些因素在不同的公司环境中产生不同的结果。此外，这项研究通过询问印度工人在致电美国时必须伪装成美国人的要求，是否会导致他们的国家和种族认同感被同化或脱节，从而评估了信息和通信技术中相互竞争的全球文化理论。因此，这项研究在许多领域推动了学术文献的发展，包括技术、性别、发展、分层、工作、种族和民族、全球化和企业管理。该项目有助于加强信息技术的公平使用，特别是对印度等南方国家的妇女而言。它为涉及技术的组织政策和实践提供信息。更广泛的影响包括为学生提供培训机会，扩大女性理科教师的机会，以及改善美国和印度之间的学术网络基础设施(通过与新德里的一所大学合作)。该项目还将为美国关于信息技术劳动力中性别数字鸿沟的政策研究、为国家信息技术研究和开发协调办公室等政府机构以及联合国和世界银行的信息和通信技术发展计划的国际政策做出贡献。

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.