80 Gender Matters felt (Palmer in Lu 2008). Women carry with them their subordinate status in the home to the workplace, and this comes to define their status in the workplace. In fact, the increasing participation of women in the labor force is seen as the increasing double burden of both paid work and homework (Lu 2008, 7). These studies, however, focus primarily on women workers in the manufacturing, export processing zones, agricultural and informal sectors, as well as on migrant women. Those that touch upon the effects of IT on women (Cabrera-Balleza 2005; Lu 2008 and 2009) do not elaborate on the effects or gendered impact of call center work on women and the implications of such work on gender relations and gender division of labor. To date, there have been no in-depth studies conducted about the effects of call centers jobs on the gender relations and gender division of household labor, and on the reproductive role of women, despite the fact that BPO jobs have increased exponentially and that majority of these jobs are occupied by women. Moreover, the nature of work, working conditions, and the over-all set-up in a call center is significantly different from other industries, which necessitates a closer look at the call center industry. Robotic Efficiency and Other Labor Concerns: Studies on the Effects of Working in Call Centers The growing literature on the effects of working in call centers are generally gender-blind, that is, women and men are perceived to be similarly affected by the working conditions and over-all set-up in call centers (see for instance, Pico 2006; Deery et al. 2010; Dizon and Gregorio 2010). One of the most mentioned effects of call center work is excessive stress. With a few exceptions (see for example, Taylor and Bain 2005; Ofreneo et al. 2007; Asuncion 2008), studies mentioning this problem do not differentiate the effects between women and men. A research conducted in a large telecommunications company in Australia, for instance, revealed that call center

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