Calling on Femininity? Gender, Call Centers, and Restructuring in the Rural American West

Calling on Femininity?
Gender, Call Centers, and Restructuring
in the Rural American West

Anne Bonds1

Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA
Email: abonds@u.washington.edu





Abstract
This research explores the geographical processes (re)shaping the call center
industry in the rural American West. In light of growing public debate concerned
with globalization and the “outsourcing” of information service jobs from Western,
industrialized locations to ‘third world’ nations, I argue that it is also significant to
document the expansion of the call center industry within the rural western United
States. In this paper, I examine the economic shifts and cultural narratives
circumscribing call center growth in this region. First, I consider telephones as a
gendered technology. I link this analysis to the feminized construction of call
center work and the gendered practices and stereotypes that work to devalue
women’s labor in call centers while simultaneously constructing women as best
suited for this type of employment. I then unpack the ways in which call centers in
the rural American West are linked to the processes of rapid restructuring and
economic transition. Locating the processes of transnational capitalism and rural

1 © Anne Bonds, 2006

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restructuring within a feminist geographic perspective, I argue that the social
construction of call center work concentrates women in occupations that tend to be
clustered at the bottom of the occupational hierarchy in the “new information
economy”.

Introduction
In this unparalleled moment of global competition and technological
change, the emergence and continued development of computer and
telecommunications technologies has opened up – and indeed invited – the
possibility for dramatic changes in the location of economic activities.
Unquestionably, these innovations make it technologically possible to transfer a
vast amount of information at speeds and across distances previously
unimaginable. Together with the trends of deregulation in the telecommunications
industry and the decreasing costs of telephone-related activities, the global trade of
information services is rapidly growing. Within the US, these changes have
facilitated the repositioning of information processing and telecommunication
services, to decentralized and/or disparate locations both within the US and outside
of the US. Interest in the spatial dimensions of call centers has intensified in the
context of the increasingly mobile nature of work in the “new information
economy” (Richardson and Gillespie, 2003; Wheeler et al., 2000).
Call centers figure prominently within these discussions, particularly
because of the ever more decentralized, portable structure of the industry and
because of the interactive, even performative, nature of the work. Most markedly,
call centers are affiliated with the globalizing processes of offshoring, wherein
workers in low cost, low wage areas provide services and support for clients within
higher wage, industrialized regions (Larner, 2001; Wajcman, 1991). Yet, in spite of
the overwhelming focus on the offshoring and “outsourcing” of call center work, a
considerable proportion of this industry continues to be located in the ‘first world’
(Richardson and Belt, 2001; Richardson and Gillespie, 2003; Batt et al., 2004;
Wirtz, 2005) and is increasingly documented as a particularly low-wage, poorly
benefited employment sector (Batt et al., 2004; Larner, 2001; Belt et al., 2002).
In this paper, I explore the intersections between capitalist restructuring,
flexible and feminized call center work, and patterns of call center employment in
the rural American West. I emphasize rural areas in the American West in my
research on call centers for a number of reasons. First, this area is generally not at
the forefront of discussions concerned with changes in the telecommunications
industry. Rather, examinations linking telecommunications technologies and
economic restructuring markedly emphasize urban contexts (e.g. Wheeler et al.,
2000; Castells, 1989; Graham and Marvin, 2001). In fact, the decentralization of
information services and the active recruitment of call centers in nonmetropolitan

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communities have accelerated the movement of telecommunications industry to
more suburban and rural contexts in the United States. This shift was set in motion
by the cost-saving logics of capitalist restructuring and was further facilitated by
the 1996 Telecommunications Act which guaranteed rural and low-income areas of
the United States with affordable access to telecommunications and internet
services (Stenberg et al., 1998; McMahon and Salant, 1999). Proponents of this act
anticipated benefits in rural economies resulting from job creation and the
development of new technological services in rural communities (Stenberg et al.,
1998).
Second, within literature documenting the decentralization of services, rural
communities are commonly perceived merely as extensions to or recipients of
economic change, rather than as active participants (Glasmeier and Howland,
1995). In contrast, rural telecommunications research identifies the important role
of economic development agencies and policy makers in recruiting firms and
making technological and infrastructural investments (Wollford and Hollifield,
1997; Richardson and Belt, 2001). Because it is harder to attract both industries and
telecom service providers to rural areas, which are generally not regarded as
profitable investments, rural communities have become more “proactive” and
compete for telecommunications investment (McMahon and Salant, 1999). Call
centers, “back office” establishments, and other similar operations have been
widely advocated by rural economic development planners as good firms to target
(Stenberg et al., 1998). These firms are seen as a strategy to attract new jobs and
kinds of employment that develop and enhance the skill base in rural and poor
communities (Gurtstein, 2003; Richardson and Gillespie, 2003).
Finally, rural communities tend to be disproportionately impacted by the
dynamics of neoliberal globalization and restructuring (McGranahan, 2003). Rural
regions have undergone significant industry and population shifts, particularly
stemming from the transition of rural economies from agricultural and resource-
dependent activities to the dominance of the service sector. Indeed, service sector
employment accounts for the majority of job growth within rural areas.
Furthermore, the prominence of service industries within nonmetropolitan
communities, indicative of the growing number of rural economies dependent on
low-wage, low-skilled employment, is increasingly linked to a deepening economic
hardship (Faulk and Lobao, 2003). In spite of the questionable future of call centers
and the generally low-wages and limited opportunities they provide to
economically vulnerable areas, rural communities are recruiting this industry
(Wolford and Hollifield, 1997).
This paper builds on the growing body of literature on call centers in order
to develop a deeper understanding of the specific social and economic context of
call centers in the rural American West. I utilize occupational data and industry
statistics to identify call center trends in the American West. In addition, I draw

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from recent academic literature detailing the spatial, economic, and social themes
of the telecommunications industry as well as studies examining the social and
economic effects of telecommunications investment in rural communities. I
contrast this body of literature with popular media sources, principally newspapers
and magazines, in order to contextualize debates about “offshoring” and call center
employment patterns. In line with feminist insights to research methodology, I am
interested in these popular media texts and discourses as “cultural artifacts”
indicative and productive of particular economic dynamics, social organization,
technology, and cultural patterns (Reinharz, 1992, 147; Rose, 2001). Through a
review of newspapers, magazines, and websites concerned with call centers and
telecommunications between the years of 1990 and 2000, I argue that discussions
concerned with call center employment have overwhelmingly emphasized the
dynamics of technological innovation and “outsourcing”, and that this emphasis
has worked to obscure both the gendered nature of this work and the rural spaces in
which much of it takes place.
Building from this finely-grained review of call center literature and an
examination of recent industry data, I begin by locating the gendered construction
of the telephone and telecommunications work within feminist discussions about
gender and technology. I then explore the rapid growth in call centers and the
particularly feminized nature of the industry’s expansion. Finally, I outline the
patterns of call center growth in the rural American West, focusing specifically on
the economic dynamics linked to this industry’s development. Through these
threads of analysis, the paper examines the processes producing call center growth
in the American West and the ways in which the industry is particularly reliant on a
gendered labor force. I argue that in spite of the industry’s dependence on women’s
labor, the majority of literature concerned with call centers in the American West
fails to address the “feminization” of rural information services.

Gender, Technology, and Telephones
Feminists theorizing technology have long argued that technology is not
neutral, but rather is powerfully embedded in range of social, economic, and
political contexts (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999; Haraway, 1990; Wajman,
1991). These interventions highlight technology’s complex and contingent social
effects and the ways in which technological developments work to extend and
reinforce existing power relations and social divisions. In fact, much research on
the gendered construction of technology argues that it necessitates particular
patterns of social difference to function (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999). In this
sense, technologies work to open certain possibilities for some and foreclose
options for others according to status and location within specifically gendered
social hierarchies. Feminist work in this vein has increasingly emphasized the role

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of information technology in shaping new subjectivities and constructions of
identity (Boyer, 2004; Kwan, 2002; England, 1993; Haraway, 1990).
Indeed, telephones themselves are identified as important mechanisms for
the gendered shaping of technology (Rakow, 1992). That is, notions about women
and the telephone are part of the discursive production and constitution of
femininity. For instance, gendered representations of women’s use of the telephone
often promote and maintain assumptions about women as “chatty” and on the
phone too much (Rakow, 1992). As Rakow (1992, 2) points out, the figure of the
gossiping woman monopolizing the phone line is “a stock image in American
Satire”. Additionally, gendered ideologies about telephone usage mark (some)
women as the possessors of proper telephone manners and etiquette.2 Notions about
women’s telephone conduct and their communication abilities are rooted in broader
assumptions underlying appropriate femininity and politeness. Such representations
codify and reduce women’s (over)use of the telephone to fundamental differences
in skills and personality between women and men, rather than as socially
constructed enactments of gender differences.
The currently gendered landscape of call center employment can be traced
to the emergence of telephone switchboard operators, often referred to as “hello
girls” (Frahm, 2004). Because of their patience and ability to communicate, young
women were alleged to naturally possess the necessary skills for switchboard
operation. Reminiscent of the “hello girls”, women continue to be recruited for call
center jobs because of gendered notions of skill. Therefore, use of the telephone
and telecommunications work by women reflects wider beliefs based on
essentialized notions about femininity and women’s ‘natural’ tendencies and
abilities. The overrepresentation of women within call centers is founded upon
gendered meanings and practices that locate them in a particular configuration of
social and economic power relations. As such, call centers are sites where
meanings and practices about gender are actively expressed, reinforced, and
contested.
The expansion of feminist research into the geographies of employment has
importantly documented the construction and (re)production of work and gender
divisions of labor. This work has been key in interrogating waged labor as a
socially and spatially constructed activity in the capitalist, public sphere of
production and reproductive work as occurring in the private, feminized household
sphere (Nagar et al., 2002). Feminists argue that theses constructions of gender,
space, and employment are intimately connected to the continued devaluation of
particular forms of work in both the formal and informal spheres. The discursive

2 Of course, notions about gender and etiquette are also inscribed by ideologies of race,
class, ethnicity, and sexuality.

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construction of ‘women’s work’ as caring and reproductive serves both to devalue
women’s paid work while simultaneously constructing women as better suited for
certain types of jobs. As one of the fastest growing sectors in the global economy,
the role of women’s labor in the growth of the telecommunications industry signals
both the extension of a feminized market and the “deskilling” of information and
data processing.
However, the construction and reliance on women as a flexible and
deskilled source of labor is not a new dynamic arising from the expansion of
telecommunications and information technologies within the “new information
economy”. Women’s incorporation into waged labor and their role in the expansion
of export-led industrialization and economic development is widely documented in
feminist literature (e.g. Pearson, 1998; Freeman, 2000). This form of production
signaled a shift in the traditional division of labor wherein high-value manufactured
goods were produced in industrialized nations and supplied by the raw materials of
nations in the global ‘south’. Feminists recognized women’s labor as a key
component of this new international division of labor and understood that the
construction of women as flexible is fundamental to this transition. This global
“feminization of labor” became emblemized by the dramatic increase in women’s
flexible, deregulated employment and by the expansion of part-time, causal, and
seasonal employment practices (Pearson, 1998; Freeman, 2000; Nagar et al., 2002).
Call centers represent an important extension of the feminization of production in
the “new information economy”, particularly as economic restructuring has
facilitated the rapid growth of a highly polarized and segmented service sector.
Although the “new economy” is frequently distinguished by technological
innovation and its highly skilled “knowledge workers” (e.g. Wheeler el al., 2000),
it has also given rise to the proliferation of low-skill, low-pay employment and
greater labor market segmentation and polarization in services (Gurstein, 2003).
Call centers are thus particularly useful sites for feminist geographic
research concerned with the gendering of workers and workplaces not only because
women comprise the majority of the global workforce (Elmouldden, 2004; Belt et
al., 2000; 2002), but also because of the industry’s ability to link people and
cultures across socially and geographically disparate contexts. Feminist
geography’s attention to spatiality and scale draws attention to the correspondence
of place with material economic processes and the role of spatial structure in
shaping patterns of economic change and restructuring. In this sense, call center
research is therefore patently connected to scholarship in feminist geography that
examines the gendering of particular kinds of work and notions of skill (e.g.
Freeman, 2000; England, 1993; Lawson, 1999). In addition, feminists’ important
insights into the gendered processes of transnationalism and globalization and the
role of gender hierarchies in constituting cultural constructions of difference are
central in mapping the spatial dynamics of call centers (e.g. Nagar et al., 2002;
Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Mohanty, 2002). Moreover, a feminist geographic

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perspective destabilizes and more fully interrogates the notions about the “end of
geography” or “the death of distance” (Larner, 2001, 300), which circumscribes
contemporary discussions of the telecommunications industry in popular and
academic discourses.

The Gendered Geography of Call Centers
Most broadly, call centers are defined as sites wherein services related to
technical support, sales, and reservations are rendered for firms and clients in
remote locations3 (Larner, 2001, 298; Richardson and Belt, 2001; Belt et al., 2002;
Richardson and Gillespie, 2003). Though call centers are most commonly
identified as centralized operations, technological advances and pressures on labor
costs are facilitating the growth of home working in the industry (Gurstein, 2003;
Wilson and Greenhill, 2004; Shanley, 2005). Call centers are established by a wide
range of industries, but are most frequently associated with banking, information
technology, telecommunications, insurance, and medical services (Batt et al., 2004;
Elmouldden, 2004). Call centers include “in-house” centers, which serve a firm’s
own customers, and subcontracted or “outsourced” centers, which serve the
customers of other firms on a contractual basis. In-house call centers constitute 86
percent of the market while outsourced centers account for 14 percent (Batt et al.,
2004). Because the bulk of this work requires the receiving and/or making of
telephone calls and information processing, employees in call centers have nearly
continuous interface with customers. Call center “agents”, as workers are called in
industry literature, commonly accept approximately 120 calls per day (Thompson
2003, 143, cited in Elmouldden, 2004, 6). The numbers of calls taken per day tend
to be much higher in subcontracted and outsourced call centers in both global
‘north’ and global ‘south’ contexts (Batt et al., 2004).
With the exception of the Internet, call centers are frequently identified as
the fastest site for expansion in the global telecommunications industry. In fact,
industry reports contend that call centers are the most rapidly growing global
service sector with approximately 160,000 operations worldwide (Gurstein, 2003;
Elmouldden, 2004). A 2004 US call center industry report estimates that 50,000
call centers in the United States employ approximately three percent of the
workforce (Batt et al., 2004). Perhaps more adequately highlighting the dramatic

3 Belt et al. (2002) call attention to the fact that call centers do not actually comprise an
industry in traditional terms, given the wide range of services provided in the call center sector.
Nonetheless, references to the “call center industry” within the literature are prevalent. Larner
(2001) further complicates the definition of call centers by highlighting the increasing significance
of e-commerce (computer and internet based exchanges) and the “potential for ‘virtual’ call centers
involving teleworkers in spatially disaggregated locations” (Laner, 2001, 298).

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growth of call centers, a recent business article claims “companies like GE Capital
and Convergys are hiring as many as 400 people every month to feed their growing
demand. GE Capital even has a call center to handle the job applications for their
call center” (Shastri, 2004, 1).
Despite the large proportion of information service jobs predicted to be
outsourced in the near future, a significant portion of growth in this industry
remains located within ‘first’ world nations (Batt et al., 2004; Gurstein, 2003;
Richardson and Gillespie, 2003). In fact, recent industry data documents the US
teleservice industry as generating more than $660 billion in sales in 2001,
accounting for approximately six percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) (The Telemarketing Resource Center, 2004). Tracking the size and growth
of the call center industry is difficult because of data limitations;4 in fact, “customer
service representative” appeared as an occupational category for the first time in
the 2000 US Census (code 524). In spite of these statistical dilemmas, the number
of employees working in call centers within the United States in 2003 was
estimated to be about 4 million, up from approximately 2.5 million in 1999 (Wirtz,
2005). The states of California and Texas contain the highest number of call
centers, but growth in other more rural Western states such as Idaho, Oregon,
Colorado, Arizona, and Washington is also evident in the most recently released
Business and Economic Census (Economic Census, 2002).
In both the “onshore” and “offshore” contexts, the call center industry is
particularly reliant on women’s labor. Though the exact percentage varies by
cultural and geographic context, it is estimated the at least 70 percent of the global
call center workforce is comprised of female workers (Elmouldden, 2004). In this
US, the 2004 Call Center Industry Report documents 66 percent of call center
workers to be women, but also importantly acknowledges wide variation across the
industry with women disproportionately concentrated in lower-pay call center
occupations. For instance, the number of women employed in retail and financial
service call centers is much higher than the national average: women make up 73
and 69 percent of workforce respectively (Batt et al., 2004).
Prompted by the unprecedented growth of “outsourcing” within the global
telecommunications sector, the “offshoring” of call center work has received a
substantial amount of consideration in popular media discussions (e.g. Porter,
2004; Shastri, 2004; Davis, 2004). Contemporary debates range from the

4 First, as a sector, call centers take on many forms (e.g. in-house, back-office, or home-
based) and are affiliated with many industries, making their individual operations difficult to count.
Second, there was no call center category within the Standard Industry Classification (SIC) system.
More recently, the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) has included a call
center category, but the most up-to-date information comes from the most recent Business and
Economic Census.

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ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 5 (1), 28-49
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documentation of job losses in industrialized nations, the legitimation of
outsourcing trends by free-trade protectionists, and accounts of increasing anxiety
in ‘first-world’ nations resulting from the outsourcing of information services.5
Although industry representatives, recruiters and business analysts characterize call
center work as knowledge based, technologically advanced labor in a skilled
environment (e.g. Davis, 2004; Shastri, 2004), the majority of academic accounts
have drawn attention to the routinization and repetition of call center work, to the
extent that these activities are often compared to the work undertaken in factory
assembly lines (Fernie and Metcalf, 1998; Bain and Taylor, 2000; Taylor and Bain,
1999).
Because the call center industry involves the separation of certain service
activities, work is spatially concentrated at specific, often disparate, offices or
departments. Ostensibly, “front office” activities, involving face-to-face customer
interaction, are separated from “back office” activities, such as data processing and
service provision, in order to realize economies of scale and labor and land cost
savings (Richardson and Gillespie, 2003). Following this line of industry
organization, call center services are commonly spatially separated from
headquarter offices and located in places where labor costs and land rents are
lower. The central technology shaping employment procedures in call centers is the
Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system, which distributes calls and their
spacing and monitors work performance (Belt et al., 2002; Elmouldden, 2004). As
a consequence of this system, Fernie and Metcalf (1998) describe the call center
work environment as an “electronic panopiticon” in which calls are “force fed” to
call center agents on an “unstoppable conveyer belt”6 (Fernie and Metcalf, 1998,
9). According to their argument, the ACD technology allows call center workers to
be constantly surveilled by supervisors, often in remote locales.
Call center work primarily requires the reading of a script given by
employers in order to mediate employee interaction with customers on the phone
(Batt et al., 2004; Belt et al., 2000; 2002). In fact, the scripted nature of the work is

5 One does not need to look far to find documentations of these anxieties. These discussions
usually center around the discomforts of interacting with workers in the ‘third’ world (Mehta and
Datta, 2004; Brodeur, 2004) to feelings of anger and discomfort stemming from the loss of jobs
from ‘first’ world nations to the ‘third’ world (Mehta and Datta, 2004; Konrad, 2004). A recent
quote captures these tensions in the high-tech industry: “‘Globalization’ is becoming a dirty work to
US high tech workers, increasingly anxious and angry as their jobs disappear overseas, never to
return” (K. Mieszkowski, quoted in Elmouldden, 2004, 2).
6 Fernie and Metcalf’s (1998) analogy receives criticism, particularly from Bain and Taylor
(2000) for describing supervisory power in call centers as seamless. A growing body of work
documents resistance and subversion by call center employees (e.g. Taylor and Bain, 1999)

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increasingly compared to a form of theatrical performance.7 Though not all call
centers require standardized scripts, most call centers provide a list of instructions
to follow, typically encompassing items that agents should or should not
communicate in their interactions with customers8 (Elmouldden, 2004, 6). Crucial
to call center scripting is the maintenance of personal traits and emotional behavior.
For instance, accents and voice tones must be standardized and workers are
encouraged to be well-mannered and friendly to customers. The consequences of
straying from these standardized mandates can be severe (Belt et al., 2000).
Stemming from the external façade agents are required to take on, call center work
is often related to Hochschild’s (1983) concept of emotional labor (e.g. Taylor and
Bain, 1999; Fernandez et al., 2005). A recently interviewed call center employee
explains the requirements for her job in this way: “You have to be polite even if the
customer is rude; I have to give a patient ear to all” (Mehta and Datta, 2004, 1).
Such efforts, therefore, clearly require call center agents to manipulate themselves
in order provide service or to respond to customer needs. Given the feminized
structure and constitution of the call center workforce, the governance of call center
agents is necessarily gendered. A call center manager, explaining the gender-
differentiated outcomes of his surveillance, notes: “I find that the girls do the work
better, they stay on-line and like what they are meant to do…..whereas I think the
men are constantly coming off-line and to try and do other things” (in Belt et al.,
2002, 30).
Reflecting the gendered composition of the industry, women are
concentrated in the more routinized, clerical related jobs while men comprise a
greater proportion of the more technical, software-related employment in the
telecommunications sector (Sim and Young, 1995; Belt et al., 2002; Larner, 2001;
Wajcman, 1991). Although call centers are particularly reliant on a gendered labor
force, most industry literature does not attend to the trend of “feminization” within
telecommunications and also does not differentiate between male and female
employees (Elmouldden, 2004; Larner, 2001). Nonetheless, male and female labor
within call centers is both viewed and utilized differently by managers and
employers (Belt et al., 2002). Indeed, research on call centers extensively
documents that firms perceive women as best suited for call center work because of
their presumed communication and social abilities, in particular, their capacity to
“smile down the phone” (Larner, 2001, 303; also Marshall and Richardson, 1996;

7 The scripting of call center interactions has been significantly debated. In non-Western
contexts, particularly in India and the Philippines, for instance, American TV shows and movies are
often utilized as training tapes as part of a “voice neutralization” process (Elmouldden 2004). In
fact, Ali Zaidi has written a play entitled Alladeen that focuses on the theatrical nature of call center
work among Indian women.
8 Ironically, one of the items that call center agents are frequently asked not to reveal is
their location.

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