How Transgender Women Found Freedom in Call Centers

By Lynzy Billing

The Philippines is the undisputed call centre capital of the world. Home to the customer service operations of such multinational companies as IBM, eBay and Capital One, the industry employs half a million people in more than 400 centres across the country, and in 2016 contributed $25 billion to the national economy.

As well as boosting the national economy, the call centre business has had another, perhaps unexpected, effect: It has provided transgender women with a safe space to express their gender identities at work. Since the call centre boom kicked off in the mid-2000s, thousands of transgender agents have entered the industry, often because of the lack of job opportunities in their chosen fields.

Kate Montecarlo Cordova has been working in call centres for 13 years. Today, she is a senior manager.

“The biggest issue that transgender women face is economic. We are like any other women or men, we have skill sets,” she says. “But in the Philippines, many industries do not employ transgender women, so we end up working in a different industry to where our skills lie.”

Outside these business process outsourcing (BPO) companies, as they are known in the Philippines, there are few opportunities for transgender Filipinas to present themselves in their authentic gender identity and escape discrimination.

“My friend is a doctor and yet no hospital will hire her because she is a transgender woman, and so she will have to find work elsewhere,” Cordova says. “Skilled and educated women are affected financially, as they end up in jobs with a lower wage and not suited to their expertise.”

“And at the same time, a hospital is without a doctor.”

But call centres are different. Given the anonymous nature of the work, many transgender women can explore their gender presentation and identity in the workplace, wearing women’s clothing and using women’s names, a freedom that would be impossible in most other industries in the country.

“The ability to be an openly transgender woman in the workplace gives them the confidence to be themselves outside, in their communities,” Cordova says.

Before the arrival of call centers, most transgender women found work in the beauty and entertainment sectors. Cordova won the Miss Gay Philippines beauty pageant in 1995.

“In the ’80s, there was no work for transgender women here outside the pageant industry,” she says. “Beauty pageants, in particular, offered a way for transgender women to earn money and be recognized.”

While these industries were a rare refuge for transgender women, they offered low wages compared to 20,000 pesos ($370) a month available in call centres today – more than double the national minimum wage. Call centres also offer more stable and secure work in the form of full-time positions, rather than contingent and often part-time service work in entertainment, where workers usually have to rely on tips.

Many call centres are run byU.S. companies, and so adopt American anti-discrimination policies, which are more robust than those in the Philippines. Some even provide domestic partner benefits which recognize the partners of LGBTIQ employees for health cover, regardless of gender identities.

Support for Trans Employees

Though call centres offer a relatively LGBTIQ-friendly environment, they often lack policies specific to the needs of transgender people. So employees have set up support groups within their workplaces to provide solidarity and support. At the Philippine headquarters of Canadian company TELUS international, LGTBIQ employees set up a support group called Spectrum Philippines, which has nearly 500 members.

“If I wasn’t working in a BPO company and no one accepted me, I wouldn’t have been able to support my family,” Amiel de Dois, a member of Spectrum Philippines, says. But with her income from the call centre, she was able to put her brothers through school.

“One of them is now a professional teacher, while the other one, hopefully, she becomes an accountant – I said ‘she’ because she’s also transgender.”

De Dois started out as a customer service agent at TELUS 10 years ago and is now a senior operations manager.

“Here in TELUS, they look at you beyond your appearance [to] what you can contribute to the program or organization. And I guess that’s one thing that they saw in me.”

Discrimination Persists

While Cordova and de Dois have found career success, they represent only a small percentage of transgender women in positions of leadership. Emmanuel David of the University of Colorado Boulder has studied the call centre industry in the Philippines. He says that for the most part, employers overlook transgender women for promotions and career progression.

Transgender women tend to be clustered in positions with shorter occupational ladders, David says, leading to stunted career growth.

Janeille Natividad, 30, has been working at a call centre in Quezon City for the past four years, but she says she doesn’t see a bright future for her career.

“I am only in this industry because I can present myself as female,” she says. “In other industries, I would have to cut my hair and dress like a man. I cannot go into other work. I am stuck in this industry.”

And for some employees, something as simple going to the bathroom during a workday is a challenge. “Most call centres do not have a specific policy allowing transgender women to use the female restrooms, despite companies claiming to be LGBTIQ-inclusive,” Cordova says.

“It has nothing to do with your genitals. It’s to do with security and the psychological effect barring transgender women from women’s restrooms has. Psychologically I’m a woman, so not being allowed to use a woman’s restroom is a major struggle for me.”

Unlike Cordova’s employer, three of the biggest call centre operators in the Philippines – IBM, TELUS International and Convergys – do have gender-neutral bathrooms in addition to male and female toilets.

Strengthening Rights Outside the Workplace

There are currently no gender recognition laws in the Philippines that would allow transgender people to change their names or gender status on legal documents, even if they have reassignment surgery. This is somewhat of a regional anomaly: other Asian countries such as Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan recognize a third gender on specific government-issued documents, while China provides an administrative process to change gender markers on official identity documents.
But change might be on the horizon. On September 20, 2017, an Anti-Discrimination Bill passed its third reading in the House of Representatives, after 17 years of failing in Congress. The bill would prohibit unfair discrimination against LGBTIQ people, and make it illegal for anyone to force a person to take a medical or psychological exam to assess their gender identity. The bill also proposes jail terms for those who violate its provisions.

Advocates take hope in another bill – one that will make the Philippines the last country in the world to legalize divorce – which passed the committee stage of the House of Representatives for the first time in March this year.

“It would lead to more opportunities for me to work in different industries without discrimination,” Natividad says.

“Divorce wasn’t allowed here, but now the law is passing in Congress, so maybe we will get gender recognition laws also.”

Cordova and Natividad stress the importance of policies being formulated outside the workplace that allow transgender people to change their name and gender on legal documents without being forced to undergo surgery. For some, that may mean a way out of the call centre business.

This article originally appeared on Women's Advancement Deeply. You can find the original here. For important news about women’s economic advancement, you can sign up to the Women's Advancement email list.