This inquiry explores one female-dominated, low-status, very regimented workplace that is emblematic of the globalized service economy: call centres. Drawing on 187 call centre service interactions, institutional documents, interviews, and observations from call centres in two national contexts, the inquiry employs an innovative combination of quantitative and qualitative discourse-analytic techniques to compare rule compliance of male and female workers. Female agents in both national contexts are found to comply more with the linguistic prescriptions despite managers and agents emphatically denying the pertinence of gender. The inquiry provides a new perspective on language and gender, indicating the need to extend the methodologies and theories currently favoured to grasp how language continues occupational division in twenty-first-century workplaces.