Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Menstrual cycle tracking apps combine feminist empowerment, scientific knowledge, medical advice, and commercial logics. Drawing on interviews and interface analysis, this presentation examines how these apps blur activism and influence while shaping women’s health infrastructures.

Paper long abstract

Menstrual cycle tracking apps (MCTAs) have become everyday technologies for millions of people, positioning private digital technoservices at the center of contemporary women’s health innovation. Indeed, the most widely used apps are not limited to simple calendars for tracking past and predicting future menstrual cycles. A significant part of their activity involves producing media content (videos, podcasts, articles, encyclopedic resources) and health-, nutrition-, or well-being–related advice, delivered within the apps in personalized ways based on users’ data, through notifications, daily advice, and chatbots.

Moreover, MCTAs promote discourses that valorize feminist ideals of empowerment through knowledge and the reappropriation of gynecological expertise by women. Such discourses are present both among app founders and among users, whose motivations frequently reflect a desire to challenge conventional gynecological and pharmaceutical narratives surrounding women’s health and fertility. These activist framings are reinforced by the use of MCTA data for women’s health research, a field that is chronically underfunded and increasingly threatened in some countries, including the United States.

At the same time, MCTAs are commercial platforms whose business models rely on algorithmic visibility in app stores, personalized health predictions and guidance through paid subscriptions, as well as on capturing users’ attention within the app ecosystem.

MCTAs are relevant for examining the blurring of boundaries between activism and influencing, and between scientific popularization and commercialized content. Drawing on interviews with designers and scientists (n = 54) and interface analysis, we examine how economic, scientific, and medical stakes shape these applications’ infrastructures and operations.