Women’s History In The Contact Center: How The Shift From Analog To Digital Would Have Been Impossible Without Them

TW: Mention of suicide.

Here at CCW Digital we regularly reflect on women’s impact on the customer experience, and how women can support one another through this industry that while not made by them has found success through them. In these conversations, conferences, meetings and writing analyses, we also take a closer look at how the role of women in the contact center has evolved. We even question why the history of customer contact was so devoid of female representation prior to the call center.

Even before the call center made customer service what it is today and gave women an entry point into the business world, of course, there were phone lines. The invention of the telephone and those phone lines would pave the way for the communication methods we use to improve the customer experience in the current day. The people who expertly worked those lines–women–would open up a new world of technological advancement for their gender. Years later, with the invention of GSP, WiFi and internet technology, women would once again offer their skills and intelligence to the call center space, catapulting it to success while still working towards the gender equity that we desire in the CX space.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we’re introducing you to three women who, though years apart, possessed the skill, confidence and willingness to lead the pack for women at work. They single handedly created the roadmap for the digital, omnichannel customer experience we know today. The work they did changed the world and created new lines of profession. The risks–some life threatening–that they and their peers took made a lasting impact on contact center culture and what life is like for women in customer contact today.

Emma Nutt, The World’s First Woman Telephone Operator

After Alexander Graham Bell won the U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876, the first phone line and later the first telephone exchange were created, inventing new technology into American society. In the telephone’s early days, calls couldn’t connect immediately–they needed someone—a telephone operator—to manually relay calls on what’s known as a switchboard to connect callers’ wires. (Yes, this is where “getting wires crossed” comes from!)

By 1878, the teenage boys who were trained to deliver telegraphs had been hired by Bell to transition into new roles as phone operators in New England. Considering that it took standing, kneeling and anywhere from two to six people to plug switches into tall switch boards, teenage boys were a labor-appropriate and cost effective way to seamlessly integrate the phone system into daily life as a form of communication. But where teen boys were limber and nimble at connected calls. their work ethic left much to be desired: they were rowdy, impersonal and struggled to successfully connect the calls. Bell’s new hires quickly became a well-known problem. One journalist who studied the rise of the telephone would go on to write, “Boys, as operators, proved to be most complete and consistent failures. Their sins of omission and commission would fill a book.” “When some other diversion held their attention, they would leave a call unanswered for any length of time, and then return the impatient subscriber’s profanity with a few original oaths,” agreed historian Marion May Dilts in her book, The Telephone in a Changing World.

At the same time that Bell was struggling to reign in the telephone’s workforce and keep the momentum of its popularity, the Industrial Revolution was kicking up and westward expansion was winding down. As a result, the role of women in the workforce was increasing, particularly that of young, unmarried women living in paisley expanding cities. They were tasked with helping support their households while the men in the family worked long factory hours or were still west in search of prosperity. During the mid to late 1800s factory jobs, housekeeping, assisting in room boarding for apartments and secretarial positions were the most common positions for young women. By the time the telephone was up and running, women became the prime candidate for the role of phone operator. As we’ve discussed previously here at CCW Digital, women have been socially and emotionally conditioned to generally possess all of the skills you would identify in the ideal job candidate for today’s call center–in fact, according to CMP Research nearly 70% of women working in call centers today identify as women.

As women were viewed as more  compassionate, organized, diligent and sociable than teenage boys, Alexander Graham Bell saw an opportunity to improve the customer service component of his patent and inventions. And so, on September 4, 1878, 18-year-old Emma Nutt began working for Bell from the Edwin Holmes Telephone Dispatch Company in Boston, Massachusetts. Mere hours later, her sister Stella also joined her in the line of work. According to historical accounts, Nutt worked for 54 hours a week at the pay rate of $10 per month for a 54-hour workweek, totaling approximately $315 a month at today’s currency rate. She appeared to have a “pleasant and soothing voice,” and supposedly remembered every number in the New England Telephone Company directory. Her skill and adaptability to the changing technology allowed Nutt to pioneer the communications field and open the doors for more women as phone operators–by the end of the 1800s, nearly all operators were women. They became known as “telephone girls,” and Nutt herself was one for nearly 40 years.

Although the telephone gave way to a female-dominated field, similarly to their factory working counterparts, female phone operators still had multiple cavates to when, where and how they could work.Only women who were single, between 17-26, tall enough to reach the top of the switchboard, and not Black or Jewish could be employed as operators. Women working the switchboards could only dress in all black, and were not allowed to wear jewelry. The jobs became fast paced with mounting pressure to provide impeccable customer service to callers looking to connect. In metropolitan areas call volumes were so high that in order to connect them as quickly as possible, some women took to wearing roller skates at work.

Like today, their calls were monitored, but with such strictness that operators were not allowed to even speak to each other for their 10+ hours long shift as they sat in straight backed chairs. At times, they even worked double shifts with a short, unpaid break. The stress came to a head in 1899, when a 25-year-old San Francisco operator named Anna Byrne killed herself due to the amount of burnout she experienced while manning the phone lines. “I firmly believe that the espionage to which telephone girls are constantly subjected drives them to suicidal desperation,” the coroner who collected Byrne’s body said. “They are overworked; and no mercy is shown them when a slight offense is committed by a trivial infraction of the company’s rules.”

“The wonder is that more telephone girls don’t kill themselves,” one operator told the San Francisco Examiner at the time. “We are not allowed to speak even in a whisper to each other the nine hours we are on duty, much less smile, and to laugh out loud is the height of recklessness.” The abuse of operators would continue even after Emma Nutt retired: by 1919, 8,000 New England Telephone Company phone operators would stage a walkout demanding better pay, better conditions, and a more humane approach to providing good customer service on the phone lines. They nearly shut down phone service across Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. Less than a week later, the company raised their wages and gave the women the right to bargain collectively. These efforts to fight for worker’s rights coincided with the suffragist movement and another wave of technological advancement, and by 1930, telephone lines no longer required an operator.

Hedy Lamar, The Woman Who Laid The Building Blocks of WiFi Technology

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was an exceptionally smart child. Born in 1914 during World War I in Vienna Austria to a concert pianist, she learned to play music and dance ballet early on in life. By the age of five, she could take apart and assemble a music box with a clear understanding of how each piece operated. Despite her inclination towards education, she followed in her musician mother’s footsteps and by age 16 was acting in Berlin. Over the years she received critical acclaim for her roles in German films and garnered a dedicated following. One of her admirers was an Austrian munitions dealer, Fritz Mandl, who she later married in 1933. Kiesler would go on to describe the marriage as being short-lived: “I knew very soon that I could never be an actress while I was his wife…He was the absolute monarch in his marriage … I was like a doll. I was like a thing, some object of art which had to be guarded—and imprisoned—having no mind, no life of its own.” In addition to feeling imprisoned in her marriage, her husband was also friends with members of the Nazi party and would have them over for dinner frequently. For Kiesler, who was Jewish, it was impossible to reconcile with that reality. In 1937 she left her husband and fled to London, but kept the dinner conversations on wartime weaponry in the back of her mind.

While in London Kiesler changed her name to Hedy Lamar and made the acquaintance of Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios. From there she was quickly made a Hollywood starlet. She worked alongside talent such as Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, and rubbed elbows with high profile Americans like movie producer and famed pilot Howard Hughes.They briefly dated, and in that timeframe she connected with Hughes over a love of invention. Although her life consisted of acting she still had a workbench at home where she would tinker and Hughes gifted her aviation equipment to work with during her down time on set. He also brought her on tours to see how airplanes were manufactured and introduced Lamar to the scientists behind the aviation projects. At the time, Hughes was invested in building faster airplanes for the U.S. military, so in an effort to explore new plane wing designs Lamar purchased books about fish and birds to categorize the fastest fins and wings of each. Upon presenting her findings to Hughes, he called her “a genius.”

Lamar was constantly motivated to invent–“improving things comes naturally to me,” she would say. Her draw to science led her to rework the structure of a stoplight and even create a soda similar to Coca-Cola. As she acted, learned and created, the world was gearing up for a second global war. That war would serve as the backdrop against which she and famed composer George Antheil would create the "Secret Communication System.” Now referred to as "frequency hopping,” this method of transmitting radio signals rapidly changes the carrier frequency of those signals across a large spectral band. At the time of World War II, it was a way for radio guidance transmitters and torpedo's receivers to jump frequencies. Thanks to Lamar’s work in 1942, enemy interception of warcraft and classified information became less of a concern in wars moving forward. In the current day the invention is worth an estimated $30 billion and now serves as the basis for the WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth technology we use today.

Gladys West, The Godmother Of GPS Technology And Civil Rights Advocate

Like Lamar, Gladys West was an academically gifted girl. She was born in 1930 to Virginia farmers and early on in life knew that she did not want to be a day laborer. “I was gonna get an education and I was going to get out of there. I wasn’t going to be stuck there all my life,” West told The Guardian in 2020 via Zoom. The closest school house to her at the time was a three mile walk away, where she and six other classmates were taught in one room. It was clear that she possessed an academic gift, and upon that realization her parents began saving to send her to college. They struggled to build their savings for years, and it wasn’t until West won a college scholarship that she was finally able to continue her education.

She graduated from Virginia State College in 1952 with a bachelors and a masters degree in mathematics, and began her career teaching in segregated schools in the state. In 1956 she became the second Black woman ever hired at the Naval Proving Ground in Virginia as a mathematician. She was known by her colleagues for her skills and dedication, something that West, age 92, takes great pride in. “I just got there and I was a serious woman. I didn’t have time to be playing around,” she recalled. “I started to think to myself that I’ll be a role model as the Black me, as West, to be the best I can be, doing my work and getting recognition for my work.” Despite the fact that her office wasn’t segregated, her experience at the naval base was still one of isolation–she was one of four Black employees in the entire organization. Outside of the naval base, civil rights sit-ins were taking place and reminded West of what she as a Black woman with a masters degree working in mathematics meant to the future of her community. Although she wanted to participate in the advocacy efforts, she and her colleagues weren’t allowed. Instead, West chose to make lasting contributions in the field of math and science by breaking down stigmas surrounding race.

“They hadn’t worked with us, they don’t know [Black people] except to work in the homes and yards, and so you gotta show them who you really are,” West explained. “We tried to do our part by being a role model as a Black person: be respectful, do your work and contribute while all this is going on.” She did so in many ways: she was an expert at solving complex mathematical problems by hand, and later went on program computers to do them for her. In the 1960s, West was part of an award-winning airforce study that proved the regularity of Pluto’s motion relative to Neptune. She later became a project manager, overseeing a team of five people to work on the first satellite to monitor the oceans. Part of the project included  programming an IBM 7030 Stretch computer to create a mathematical model of the shape of the Earth. West’s work on that computer was the start to what we now know as GPS tracking. “You never think that anything you are doing militarily is going to be that exciting,” she admitted. “We never thought about it being transferred to civilian life, so that was a pleasant surprise… But to see other people so excited about it, that was amazing.”

All It Takes Is A Generation Of Women To Change The Future Of The Contact Center

In the three historical accounts we’ve shared with you, you’ll notice that while more than 100 years separate the end of Emma Nutt’s life to that of Gladys West’s, there are moments in each woman’s story that coincide. The year that women are no longer needed as phone operators, West is born. While West is gaining her education in 1942, Hedy Lamar is already creating the technology West will build on 20 years later. Thanks to Nutt, neither woman is resigned to the liminal role of phone operator–one is a mathematician who goes on to get a PhD at age 70, the other makes her mark on the world as not only the “most beautiful woman in film,” but a scientist who changes the way we connect with one another. One’s profession embraces the suffragist movement, another takes a stance against antisemitism, and a third combats racism with her knowledge and confidence. The involvement of each woman in each invention has not only a direct impact on the other, but it all has a lasting impact in the way each of us lives our daily lives, engages with society and does our jobs.

Call centers would not be possible without these women, who oftentimes are forgotten in the context of scientific advancement, modernity and business. We need a phone for some clients, we need WiFi to connect with others, and a GPS location helps companies connect their customers by phone or online with agents in their timezone, or who share the same geographic, linguistic or cultural experience. When you pick up a phone, send an email, or check an address today, make sure to thank a woman. More specifically, be sure to thank these women.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash