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Women power coming of age, courtesy ITES

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW DELHI: If there is one fruit the country can really rejoice as a fallout of the rise of the ITES industry is that it has led to a sudden spurt in the employment rates of women. Most call centers have women employees in excess of 40 percent. Some centers even have as high as 60 percent share of women in their workforce.



Indian BPO is predominantly voice-based and that too outbound calls. Of its total workforce of 5,000 employees, Wipro-Spectramind Services has a women to men ratio of 49 percent to 51 percent; Mumbai-based Infowavz International has a total of 1,000 employees, of which, 380 are women which is approximately 40 percent of its workforce.



TracMail India with an employee base of over 1,800 agents has 35 percent women in its workforce while ICICI OneSource with a base of over 2,400 employees has 60 percent women in its workforce. Daksh E-services also claims to have over 60 percent women in its workforce. Some organizations like GE have an internal mandate to employ over 60 percent of its workforce as women.



Most organizations claim that there is no clear preference for women and it is just that there are more ideal women candidates whom they find suitable for the given job profile. At the same time, it is also acknowledged that the attrition rate for women employees is higher given the high stress levels, the long working hours and the problem of working at night. Besides, most employees working in call centers are in the 19 years-24 years age group and women who get married during that time tend to leave the job soon after their marriage.



However, this trend of more women employees in call centers is more visible in the North and the Western part of the country. In the South, although there has been considerable increase in the number of women employees in call centers, yet it is quite low. This is attributed to the unconventional working hours that call centers have.



Organizations also take care to reassure parents and guardians of women working in call centers about the safe environment in which they work. Said Zia Sheikh, CEO, Infowavz International, "We ask parents of women employees to come to our centers and see the environment in which the people work." Companies also arrange for pick-up and drop facilities for employees due to the odd working hours.



However, even though the number of women at the agent level and middle management level is high, the numbers come down drastically in the top management level. Women seem to predominate in roles, which require customer support and in the training department.



The high rate of women employees (45 percent on an average) in the ITES sector is a welcome change from the low 12.5 percent women being employed in the IT industry. According to a Dataquest-IDC survey in October 2002, the highest number of women was employed by NIIT at 29 percent while Rolta India employed the lowest number of women at four percent. Top software companies like Infosys employs 17 percent women, TCS employs 20 percent and Wipro employs 19 percent women.



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