It also potentially discriminates against men who could and would want to do the job. If women are driven into these low-paid and stressful jobs, where they have little influence and low status, talent will be lost. Agents are at constant risk of angry outbursts from customers, sexual harassment and outright abuse. However, in the longer term, the over-recruitment of women to the industry could be detrimental to gender equality.Ĭall centre jobs are notorious worldwide for their high levels of turnover, absenteeism, employee burnout and emotional exhaustion. A blow to gender equalityĬall centres have opened up new opportunities for women in the UK and across the world. Service jobs require emotional labour, which women are believed to be particularly good at. And, of course, there are deep-rooted beliefs in society about the different strengths of each gender.
Call centre work is often amenable to flexible working, which makes it attractive to women of child-rearing age. Some women may choose themselves to work in call centres. Of course, greater female rule compliance is just one among several explanations for why women are disproportionately represented in call centre jobs. You do find that the men are more likely to be doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, whereas women stick to the procedure and the way it should be done. Managers (of both sexes) say things like: Interviews with call centre managers and recruiters suggest that female workers are preferred over males because they stick to the rules. It keeps them in highly regimented jobs with low prestige and little influence.
CALLCENTER GIRLS PROFESSIONAL
But while rule compliance is valued and rewarded in schools, by the time young women enter the professional arena it may start to work against them. Greater female rule keeping would explain both these phenomena. These differences then show up particularly clearly in highly regimented workplaces, where following instructions and meeting targets is how your performance is measured.
It is conceivable that these socialised differences carry over into the workplace. Girls outperform boys in school, but the trend reverses in the workplace. There is evidence from child development and schooling research that girls are rewarded for complying with the rules and sanctioned more severely than boys for breaking them – such as messing around or shouting out in class. Why would female agents comply more than their male colleagues with the linguistic prescriptions? In other words, the female call centre agents more often than their male colleagues acknowledged the customer’s problem, used their name, encouraged them to call back if necessary and finished with a personal touch, such as “have a good weekend” – just as they had been told to do by their managers. This was the case for both the Scottish and the Danish women. When I compared male and female call centre agents’ compliance with the language prescriptions, an interesting pattern emerged: it was invariably the female agents who complied more. Why call centre workers love to use your name – and why it's really annoying The purpose is to ensure that agents keep the call on track and also give the impression of a personalised service. Agents may be told to use the customer’s name, create small talk and interject with prescribed “listening sounds” such as “aha”, “OK” and “I see”.
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