With the rise of big data studies and the assumptions of what big data as sociocultural artefacts (Lupton, 2015) can predict, improve and provide us with, it can be difficult to justify an interview study when investigating onlife (Floridi, 2015) traces. From a critical perspective, however, it is important to try and understand the motives and needs behind these digital traces and methodologically to dive deeper into the everyday lives of the people producing the data (boyd & Crawford, 2015). Thus, my research focus is on exploring why women use apps for tracking and which purposes these apps might fulfil but also who benefits the most from these self-tracking practices. Today’s femtech Femtech or female technology is a term coined by Ida Tin, CEO for the company behind the period tracking app, Clue.
Privacy has always been a feminist issue, perhaps most strongly emphasized in the often-cited slogan “the personal is political” (Hanisch, 1970), which challenges the dichotomy between private and public life as well as the notion of the subject being self-governing. Instead, feminist scholars have claimed the opposite by outlining theories of the non-sovereign, relational subject (Hanisch, 1970; MacKinnon, 1989; Pateman, 1989). This dichotomy seems crucial when studying how self-tracking practices are embedded in the everyday lives of women and emphasizes the importance of the concept of privacy in this regard. In addition, how does privacy undergo changes in terms of the subject moving from offline to online spaces but still intersect with concepts of control and empowerment (Richardson, 2011)? In Western culture, the concept of privacy has been associated with the private sphere connected to home. The home is where a man has his private belongings under complete and utter control (e.g. his materialistic goods, his children and his wife). From an early feminist perspective, privacy has been seen as a possible cover up for repression, abuse and violence happening in the household, where women were bound and controlled by their husbands without interference from the public – the outside (MacKinnon, 1989). On one hand, it has been difficult for women to find a room of their own – as described in Virginia Woolf’s (1929) famous essay
Females make up half of the world’s population and will inevitably experience menstruation in their lives from menarche to menopause. However, even though menstruation is natural and vital to the reproductive process, it bears with it a resilient cultural taboo Throughout Judeo-Christian history, menstruation has been connected to something impure, and the taboo of menstruation has been the main reason to exclude women from positions of authority (Phipps, 1980).
When studying women’s use of period trackers, individual in-depth interviews are able to embrace the sensitivity and sensemaking surrounding the topic as well as identifying the experiences that are often hidden (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2007). The interviews were carried out in Denmark during 2017. My initial aim was to explore how digital menstrual cycle tracking is embedded in the everyday lives of Danish women. I want to understand how women experience tracking their cycle with an app, what kind of necessities the app might fulfil and how this fulfilment potentially differs from keeping track of menstruation in an analogue way or via an online calendar. Inspired by prior studies on period apps from a user and design perspective (Bretschneider, 2015; Epstein et al., 2017), I also aim to find out how period tracking with an app corresponds to the experience of the menstruating body in a socio-cultural context: what does it mean to digitize the body, and is it only a matter of controlling reproduction that encourages women to use period apps? Twelve Danish women who use apps for tracking their menstrual cycle were recruited via Facebook and Twitter using a purposeful sampling technique; interviewees were recruited until data saturation was achieved and no new themes emerged. They ranged in age from 26 to 49 ( As part of the fourth wave of feminism, it is common to refer to individuals experiencing menstruation as “menstruators” rather than “women” to include transgender individuals and cisgender individuals. However, in this article, the interviewees are referred to as women, as it is the term that they used themselves.
Overview of the sample
Nana | 40 | Office assistant | Clue | 2 years |
Maja | 37 | PhD fellow | Clue | 2 years + |
Susan | 28 | BA in drama | Woman’s Log | 2 years + |
Sonja | 32 | BA in nutrition and health | My Days | 5 years |
Sandra | 26 | MA in media studies | Clue | 1 month |
Donna | 26 | Consultant | Clue | 1 year 3 months |
Eve | 31 | MA in natural science | Woman’s Log | 6 years |
Dea | 49 | State attorney | Clue | 1.5 years |
Judith | 36 | CEO in PR company | Clue | 4 years |
Ruby | 29 | PhD fellow | Clue | 4 months |
Freya | 28 | MA in Scandinavian languages | Natural Cycles | ¾ years |
Silvia | 28 | MA in aesthetics and culture | Clue | 2 years |
All the interviewees were recruited using the snowball sampling technique, being aware that one downside to snowball samples is that they can quickly skew to one type of group or demographic (Tracy, 2013). Looking at the sample for this study, it clearly shows that the majority of the interviewees are highly educated, white and heterosexual. Future research could benefit from expanding the sample size and including a broader variation of demographics to approach more conclusive findings. Throughout the transcription, each interview was coded with different themes for further analysis. The coding process was inductive as the themes were derived from the data: from the words of the interviewees and from my observations. I asked the interviewees to show me their period tracker to see if it was placed on the front screen or in a hidden folder and to observe how they navigated the app. It made sense to have the materiality of the app present. The themes appearing in the first-cycle coding and refined and strengthened in the second-cycle coding (Tracy, 2013) were privacy, shame and reassurance.
Main reasons for use
To seek insight, as a private calendar, to keep notes on bleeding private, to decide who to share menstruation with. | Privacy | → private data, privacy policy, sharing preferences |
To navigate days of pain, to avoid menstruation being used against you, to hide reproductive labour. | Shame | → menstrual stigma, reproductive shame, shaming others, shamed by culture |
To compare length of cycle, to explain unstable emotions (PMS) and physical symptoms (pain, cravings), to gain reassurance. | Reassurance | → the app as reassurance, coping with negative emotions, PMS |
This ongoing process made it possible to locate similar narratives among the interviews and develop them further. Major interrelated themes occurred: shame related to privacy, shame and privacy related to menstruation and shame and reassurance related to one another. Regardless of age, profession and sexual orientation, these themes were common among the interviewed women and formed the process of analysis. In the following, I will consider how the interviewees experience privacy in connection to period tracking.
Each of my interviewees was asked if they had read the privacy policies in the app and whether they had considered giving permission to the app company to back up their data. None of them had either read the regulations or were able to remember whether they had given permission to the company. Typical responses among the women were:
[…] yes, I probably have, so they might own my blood. But, really, it is just my period. It is fine by me. It is pretty innocent data for me […] I wouldn’t categorize it as sensitive data. [it] is not something that I care so much about. [I would have done so] had it been my bank account.
This corresponds well with prior studies on willingness to give up privacy when using online services (Culnan & Milne, 2001; Fox, 2000; Hann et al., 2002; Jensen et al., 2005; Phelps et al., 2000). The risk of losing control or ownership over tracked data based on monthly experiences with the menstruating body is not considered to be a risk in the same way as losing control over one’s bank account is. The interviewees showed much greater concern about the stigma of menstruation experienced in their analogue world than the potential loss of data in cyberspace. In the interviews, they expressed how they felt the necessity to hide and cover up signs of their own – or others’ – menstruation before starting to use the app:
If I was using my outlook calendar, I would use some sort of code that didn’t say period […] but said something else that I knew meant period. I made marks in my calendar but that was also too obvious […], it just seems a bit embarrassing, I guess […]. I mean […] it is private to me. I have this friend and I have recommended her to use the app because I saw on her refrigerator that she had a calendar where there were little crosses […] and I was like isn’t it better that you have it on your smartphone so it isn’t that obvious?
The effort put into not only hiding or covering up one’s own bleeding patterns but also a friend’s menstruation – shaming another woman – not to be harmful but out of the best intentions to help her hide it so it is not so obvious that she is menstruating is noticeable. That women perform self-policing to adjust and subjugate themselves to the norms and expectations of society is related to the Foucauldian concept of self-policing (Foucault, 1979), and one could ask whether using an app for tracking menstruation is dealing with a cultural, structural problem or simply just relocating it. The women I interviewed experienced the app as a way to push back on cultural norms by using it to reclaim the body, as Judith described: “[The app] has an element of feminism like a reclaiming the body attitude that I really like, you feel like being part of a really cool community”. The interviewees articulated issues with online calendars in today’s workplaces, which often means that colleagues have access to each other’s calendars, and the fact that they sync with our smartphones means that private appointments, or notes displayed there, are accessible at work:
[…] but it is also because the calendar is often shared with someone else, there can potentially be several people seeing it, so in that way it is possibly also a bit taboo for me […]. If I am to look at it objectively […] well, then I guess it is because I don’t want other people to see that I have my period?
The app can offer a private calendar only meant for notifications of bleeding and ovulation days and only accessible to the user. Sandra (26) has tried to get pregnant for almost a year and is using the app to keep track privately of ovulation days. For her, the need to hide menstruation away also becomes the need to hide a potential failure in reproduction, as she explained: “It is also a little taboo in a sense I don’t need people to know that we are trying until we have succeeded”. Today, the femtech industry is providing the market with numerous digital solutions to support and develop women’s reproductive health, all based on the woman filling in data and the algorithm predicting future days of menstruation, pain, PMS and ovulation. In that sense, the responsibility for reproduction is still solely placed on women – still being responsible for getting pregnant, responsible for not getting pregnant and responsible for being in a bad mood. Simultaneously, women are the ones leaking data to the industry and in that sense become prosumers – both producing and consuming data (Lupton, 2016). When the privacy policies remain a procedural mechanism that is detached from everyday life and lacks transparency, it becomes less important and difficult to grasp and thus does not provide the user with better privacy (Nissenbaum, 2011). Judith described how she does not mind sharing data with the app but permitting data access to the donor she and her partner were using to become pregnant felt too close:
I assume that when [the app company] share my data and use it for their big data analysis, then it is anonymized and that I kind of disappear in the crowd. This was suddenly very one-to-one.
When sharing data is separated from the body, it feels anonymized, and Judith felt like she disappears in the abundance of data. Allowing someone in our everyday life to see when we ovulate or menstruate is far more private and intimate and can lead to negative evaluation and objectification, as prior studies have shown; it suddenly becomes very “one-to-one”, as Judith explained. Privacy in that sense becomes a twofold matter for the interviewees; they instinctively distinguished between onlife and analogue privacy, between the datafied and the analogue body. In their analogue life, they can (and are prone to) control and hide what they consider to be private, related to their female cycle. In their onlife, however, the situation is far more complex. What they are offered by the app as a private room can potentially be accessed by others. Nissenbaum argued that the right to privacy should be the same online as offline, as onlife is social life (Nissenbaum, 2011); however, it is difficult for the interviewees to claim that right in their onlife. They cling to the notion of being anonymized, disappearing into the crowd and referring to their data as just being data traces of their blood – divorced from their bodies. The urge for privacy is strikingly different when it relates to their datafied bodies than to their analogue bodies. This makes room for an industry that capitalizes not on the female body but rather on the societal and cultural stigma
Maybe I trust it too much […] but I do trust that it knows what the different things are at least”, said Judith (36) and thus situated the app as a standard for what is normal when it comes to the female cycle. The app serves both as a “friend” providing comfort but also as a normative standard to measure everyday emotional and embodied experience, like am I normal? Is my cycle normal? Is it normal to feel the way I feel? Donna and her partner have tried to get pregnant for one year and she is struggling with the fact that something might be wrong with her. She recently experienced a miscarriage and, while still recovering emotionally, she emphasized the reassurance that she gains from comparing cycles with peers who also use the app:
I have two friends, one has just given birth and the other one recently lost (...) and we just sit there together with our phones and Clue Clue is the name of the app that Donna and her friends use.
A strategy to cope with stigma is to build self-esteem and acceptance together with others who define and experience themselves in the same way. By spending time with others and sharing the stigma, it vanishes (Stangor & Crandall, 2000). According to shame researcher Brené Brown (2012), shame vanishes if we talk about it, not if we hide it away in the dark. The ability to be notified about premenstrual symptoms (PMS) makes it easier to cope with feeling irrational, sad and introverted and seeking conflicts on purpose. The women described how looking at the little clouds covering the days when the algorithm predicts PMS is soothing and calming. Some chose to receive a notification a day before PMS begins, and some even chose to take screen dumps of those notifications and send them to their partner to prepare them for emotionally unstable days, using algorithmic predictions as a way to make sense of their everyday analogue lives. Dea described her job as stressful, and she uses her app to reassure and reaffirm herself in hectic times. Her tracking increases when she experiences pressure in her job, and she described how she does not want colleagues to look at her as a person lacking control and not being able to do her job due to menstruation:
The fact that I menstruate […], I don’t want that to be part of my work life […]. I don’t want it to influence their (colleagues and superiors) review of me and what I do […]; maybe they will think that I am premenstrual or something, and I prefer to be in control of when I think that is relevant. [Self-tracking] can be a sort of confirmation to myself that it is okay that I feel the way I do […] so in that sense it can reassure myself. I guess there is something in it […] something like it is true that I am tired […] it reassures me […] apparently, I need to have something that can reassure me in this.
Organizational and institutional attitudes towards the menstruating body might vary; however, it is striking that women seek comfort and reassurance in an app because it is too stigmatizing to disclose feeling stressed or exhausted due to period-related pain. Regardless of their workplace, the interviewees from this study collectively expressed the perception of a culture that does not support or embrace the female (reproductive) body (Gatrell, 2007) and taking precautions to avoid being subjected to negative evaluations by colleagues or friends based on their menstrual status. This corresponds to prior studies on how negative evaluations of women are related to their menstrual status (Johnston-Robledo & Chrisler, 2003; Roberts et al., 2002). These precautions materialized among the interviewees in hiding their period in creative ways to keep the fact that they bleed every month hidden from their surroundings. I found that they experienced relief in being provided with a solution to engage with their menstruating bodies in private and that this solution is far more valuable than the risk of leaving substantial onlife traces to be accessed by others.
In this article, I have examined the motives and needs embedded in the usage of period trackers to explore how digital traces from datafied bodies transmit meaning to the everyday life of women who use these trackers. Based on twelve individual in-depth interviews with Danish female self-trackers, I have suggested that period trackers serve not only as digitized management tools to keep track of bleeding days but also as private scopes to engage with the menstruating body: a place to find reassurance and to escape menstrual stigma in everyday life. This indicates that menstruation (still) bears a string of taboos as something one needs to keep hidden and reaffirms prior studies on menstruation and feminist thoughts on the female reproductive body as being leaky and volatile (Chrisler, 2011, Chrisler et al., 2014; Grosz, 1994; Schildrick, 1997). Thus, is using a period tracker just a new digitized way of subjugating and self-policing the female body? The interviewees experienced the period tracker as a way of reclaiming the body – using algorithmic predictions to make sense of their everyday life, be it by individual engagement with the app, by sending screen dumps of PMS notifications to a partner or by comparing unstable cycles with peers. These findings constitute an original contribution to the underresearched field of female self-tracking by situating the usage of self-tracking technologies within a framing of privacy as a feminist objective and historical perspectives on the female body. When the female body is datafied, the interviewees expect to disappear in the abundance of data, which emphasizes why privacy continues to be such an important issue for feminist theory, beginning with the attack on the public/private divide and progressing to an ongoing investigation of privacy related to the female body in off- and online spaces. Questions to pursue in future research could concern data regulations (i.e. GDPR) and how they fit with the IoT and self-tracking practices (Lindqvist, 2018). Self-trackers become prosumers – both consuming and producing data (Lupton, 2015) – which means that we must be aware of the power balance between us (the users) and the industry: what are we giving and what do we receive in return? What kind of knowledge is produced through the self-tracking practice and who benefits from that knowledge? Thus, at the same time, the needs that are potentially formed by societal norms and structures, motivating the datafication of our bodies, are acknowledged. There is much more to these intersections of privacy, datafied bodies and menstrual stigma than can be subsumed in a small interview study. With this article, however, I hope to point towards a more destigmatized dialogue about the female body – in the interplay between digital technology, personal data and issues of ownership and privacy.