“Shifting old-fashioned power dynamics”?: women’s perspectives on the gender transformational capacity of the dating app, Bumble

ABSTRACT

Digital dating apps have impacted contemporary intimacy. One popular app, Bumble, claims to be “shifting old-fashioned power dynamics” by requiring women to “go first” in conversations with “matched” men. Drawing on focus groups with predominantly white, university-educated women who have used Bumble, this article articulates the challenges to gender norms during app use. Bumble provided a safe space to subvert gendered expectations, gain confidence to initiate conversations and appreciate the societal expectations often put on men. Contributing further to feminist media scholarship, we critique Bumble’s advertising as articulating a post-feminist sensibility and expose the limits of the transformations such a sensibility claims to herald. Our focus on women’s understanding and experiences of the app gives essential insights into how technological design challenges, to some extent, the existing gendered patterns while also creating tensions between such challenges and women’s internalized gendered behaviors and expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Dating app
• online dating
• gender roles
• digitally mediated
• conversation initiation
• sexuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. No information was collected on identification as cisgender or transgender, nor any information regarding sexual orientation, with our focus being broadly on “women’s experience of seeking men”.

2. Kelly used this, which is colloquially understood as being too eager or desperate for male attention and being perceived as sexually promiscuous.

3. “Shattered” is a colloquial British English word meaning “exhausted”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret Young

Margaret Young (Meg) is a researcher at a global media and marketing services organization. Margaret’s research explores gender, power, identity, and social change, focusing on how digital technologies intersect with social norms. E-mail: [email protected].

Steven Roberts

Steven Roberts is Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Australia. His research primarily focuses on youth, gender and social change. Steve’s recent books include “Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming” (with Marcus Maloney and Tim Graham; Palgrave 2019) and “Youth Sociology” (with Alan France, Julia Coffey and Cathy Waite; Palgrave 2020).