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Release Date :
Reference Number :
2009-02

 Women workers dominate in business process outsourcing

In 2005, more than half (55.4%) or 45,225 of the 81,578 workers engaged in business process outsourcing activities were women. Women workers dominated in medical transcription industries (74.5%), data processing (65.2%) and call center activities (58.8%) (Figure 1).

Among BPO industries, animated films and cartoon productions posted the highest sex ratio of 294 or 294 males for every 100 females (Table 1).

Call center employed on average 379 women workers per establishment

Business process outsourcing industries employed on the average 15 women per establishment. Call center activities, data processing, medical transcription activities, software publishing and animated films and cartoon productions were the top five industries which surpassed the average for all BPOs (Figure 3).

Majority of women workers in BPO industries were engaged in call center activities

Call center activities got the biggest share of 28,393 or 62.8 percent of the 45,225 women workers engaged in business processing outsourcing activities. Women workers engaged in data processing placed second with 6,493 or 14.4 percent (Figure 2).

Three out of four workers engaged in medical transcription were women while the reverse was true in animated films, where three out of four workers were men

Technical Notes:

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) – the delegation of one or more IT- intensive business processes to an external provider that, in turn, owns, administers, and manages the selected process or processes based on defined and measurable performance metrics.