This week, yet another survey testified to the empowering effect of call centres. These business outsourcing centres have had to fight the popular image of the call centre as white-collar sweatshops, where workers must handle unusual working hours and high levels of stress induced by doing routine but demanding work.

But many call centres have now taken steps to improve working conditions, introducing better stress management training. They have also been credited with bringing a new generation of women into the workplace for the first time, setting into motion a complex set of changes.

The shiny happy argument for call centres goes something like this: they provide “respectable” employment, allowing women from even conservative families to join the workforce, many for the first time. The night-time working hours have added another layer of relative freedom: neighbours who might have raised eyebrows at the odd woman working late at a company or in a newspaper office are more tolerant of the call centre effect.

From the feminist point of view, the attitudinal changes ushered in by call centres in both small town and metropolitan India should be hugely welcome. But a CII survey released in the same week by Anu Aga, the highly respected CEO of Thermax, raises troubling questions. The CII survey took a look at the number of women working in management positions ? junior, middle and senior ? across a spectrum of Indian companies. It works out to just about six per cent ? an abysmally low figure. More women seem to enter the business marketplace at junior levels; there are more and more women in middle management; but the boardroom is still a male preserve.

There are several reasons for the low percentage of women in senior corporate jobs. Motherhood and the demands of running a family are still huge mid-career obstacles. Though some companies provide cr?ches, day care, and flexible working hours, these practices are by no means universal.

And women who take advantage of maternity leave or flexible working hours often find themselves sliding down a few rungs on the corporate ladder. It’s going to require a revolution in the way companies see parenthood, not just motherhood, to bring about actual change: until raising children and running families are given as much importance as meeting corporate objectives for men and women, real change will be elusive.

So what future are we offering that bright, shining, new generation of women who’re just stepping into the working world via the call centre boom? A chance to spend time and effort on your career for a few years before either an entrenched conservatism against lady bosses or the imperatives of raising a family take you out of the workforce again?

That’s just not good enough for the six per cent of women who’re already in the corporate world, and it’s a very shabby deal to offer the hundreds more who’re knocking at office doors. Or those call centre jobs will become the equivalent of the ornamental and ultimately unused college degrees that an earlier generation of women earned, but used only as decorative additions to their list of matrimonial qualifications.