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like shares services and business process outsourcing. The IBM
report said that unlike India’s BPO hot spots, labor costs in the
country have not increased as much.
The Philippine call center and business process outsourcing
(BPO) industry is a major source of employment in the country
and one of the largest sources of revenues (Bool & Sale 2010).
Employment in the BPO sector has grown considerably and reached
its peak in 2003. In 2008, outsourced work provided 237,175 jobs,
and this industry was worth an estimated USD3.3 billion in revenues,
which was about three percent of the gross domestic product (GDP)
(Amante 2008).
The dramatic increase in BPO and call center jobs has
spawned numerous research about this industry and its effects on
workers around the world (see for instance Bain et al. 2002; Taylor
and Bain 2005; Pico 2006; Deery et al. 2010). This review of
literature examines whether, among the growing literature on the
effects of working in call centers, the gender differentiated impact
of BPO work has been adequately explored. While men and women
may be similarly exposed to the same stressful working environment
and demanding work load, the effects are not necessarily the same.
The structural inequalities between women and men and the gender
division of labor tends to place a higher burden on working women
since they are in charge of unpaid and undervalued reproductive
work to maintain and sustain their families (Pineda Ofreneo 2005).
Hence, this study reviews the existing literature on the effects of call
center work on workers, focusing on women workers’ experiences
and the effects on them of call center work.
This area of study is important considering that women
make up the majority of call center workers (Belt et al. 2002). In the
Philippines, almost sixty percent of workers in the call centers are
women (NSO-GDC 2009). According to Cabrera-Balleza (2005),
BPO is currently the single largest technology-enabled employer of
women.
This article is divided into five parts: “Call Centers and
BPO’s: an overview”; “Global outsourcing and the continuing
feminization of labor”; “Robotic efficiency and other labor concerns:
studies on the effects of working in call centers”; “Gender matters in