Leaking the secret: women’s attitudes toward menstruation and menstrual-tracker mobile apps

Abstract

This study explored how menstrual-tracker mobile apps have characteristics that reflect menstruation as a taboo in the U.S. culture. Objectification theory and gender schema theory provided a conceptual and overarching framework to explore how the U.S. sociocultural context may play a role in the development of norms and assumptions surrounding menstruation, and in turn, menstrual-tracker mobile apps reflecting society’s norms and assumptions about menstruation as a taboo. A dearth of literature exists about menstrual-tracker mobile apps as cultural products, and an online survey was conducted among a convenience sample of female undergraduate students (n = 258) to investigate if a correlation exists between their attitudes toward menstruation as a taboo and menstrual-tracker mobile apps’ concealment features, self-control features, and sharing features. The analysis of the data revealed that female undergraduate students’ attitudes toward menstruation as a taboo in this study correlated to their attitudes toward concealment features and sharing features but not self-control features on menstrual-tracker mobile apps.

Keywords:

• Period tracker apps
• menstruation tracking apps
• women's health apps
• women's health
• mobile health apps
• self-tracking

Disclosure statement

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