It is commonly quoted that it takes 17 years to move research or evidence into practice (really helpful, right?). Knowledge translation and dissemination have become more popular in recent years to help close this gap and get knowledge to the public sooner, so maybe we are down to a 15-year lag now (just kidding, to my knowledge there hasn’t been an updated statistic). As part of my PhD work that explores women’s experiences of dating app facilitated sexualized violence, I have been working on conducting a scoping review. A scoping review is a type of research synthesis that maps the existing literature on a specific topic. I am going to share here what I found during this process, while the findings are still relevant and timely – so rebellious.
To start a scoping review, researchers usually work with a librarian to identify relevant studies from electronic databases (these are databases that generally only universities have access to). For this scoping review, my colleagues and I screened a total of 974 studies that were identified as being relevant to our research question: What are the experiences of women on dating apps? In the end, we were left with 16 studies that met our inclusion criteria/answered our question. All studies were published in 2016 or later and discuss women’s experiences in various parts of the world (Australia, Canada, China, New Zealand, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States). This is what I can tell you from those articles:
*Please note that these are summaries and broad generalizations from the 16 included studies
Women do have positive experiences on dating apps:
– Dating apps provide women a convenient and socially acceptable way to meet friends and form intimate relationships.
– Dating apps can be exciting, fun, and pleasurable for women.
– Dating apps can be a liberating and empowering space for women to exercise sexual agency and identity.
– Dating apps can remove barriers for women who are 30 and older to meet new people in a convenient way.
– Dating apps can help women move on from past relationships and boost their self-esteem.
Women do have negative experiences on dating apps:
– Harassment is excessive and inevitable. Harassment includes receiving unwanted sexual messages, unsolicited sexual pictures, and threats to release private photos without consent, especially when women refuse/reject their match. In turn, women adopt strategies to self-censor their activity online to reduce risks.
– Women often feel pressure to follow specific social and gender norms in order to be successful on the apps. Women also believe their profiles are not considered by potential partners if they do not fit within the normalized beauty standard (e.g., white, blonde hair, blue eyes).
– Low-self-esteem, self-doubt, and self-confidence can result from dating app use, and is dependent on the number of matches and the outcome of the matches.
– Bisexual, queer and trans women can feel discriminated against, as well as feel shame about their app use.
– Trans women can feel sexualized and fetishized on dating apps.
– Indigenous women experience both sexist and racist messages with sinister undertones after identifying as Indigenous.
– Women experience risky encounters and even danger, including sexualized violence, as a result of dating app use.
Overall, we still have a long way to go in exploring dating app facilitated sexualized violence. This scoping review identifies that only a small body of literature exists relating to women’s experiences on dating apps, and much is still unknown…AKA my doctoral work is not irrelevant (🙌). My research will continue to explore this topic, which will both add to current literature/knowledge and hopefully result in some much-needed change.
Until then, stay safe and be kind to each other online!
Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay
*Here are the references for the 16 included studies if you would like to attempt to access them from the ivory towers/read about this topic in more detail:
Carlson, B. (2020). Love and hate at the Cultural Interface: Indigenous Australians and dating apps. Journal of Sociology (Melbourne, Vic.), 56(2), 133-150.
Chadha, K., Steiner, L., Vitak, J., & Ashktorab, Z. (2020). Women’s Responses to Online Harassment. International Journal of Communication, 14, 19.
Chan, L. S. (2018). Liberating or disciplining? A technofeminist analysis of the use of dating apps among women in urban China. Communication Culture & Critique, 11(2), 298-314.
Chen, X., & Liu, T. (2019). On ‘never right-swipe whites’ and ‘only date whites’: gendered and racialised digital dating experiences of the Australian Chinese diaspora. Information, Communication & Society, 1-18.
Choy, C. H. Y. (2018). Smartphone apps as cosituated closets: A lesbian app, public/private spaces, mobile intimacy, and collapsing contexts. Mobile Media & Communication, 6(1), 88-107.
Duguay, S., Burgess, J., & Suzor, N. (2020). Queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine. Convergence, 26(2), 237-252.
Dwyer, Z., Hookway, N., & Robards, B. (2020). Navigating ‘thin’dating markets: Mid-life repartnering in the era of dating apps and websites. Journal of Sociology, 1440783320948958.
Farvid, P., & Aisher, K. (2016). ‘It’s Just a Lot More Casual’: Young Heterosexual Women’s Experience of Using Tinder in New Zealand.
Ferris, L., & Duguay, S. (2020). Tinder’s lesbian digital imaginary: Investigating (im) permeable boundaries of sexual identity on a popular dating app. New Media & Society, 22(3), 489-506.
Lloyd, C. E., & Finn, M. D. (2017). Authenticity, validation and sexualisation on Grindr: An analysis of trans women’s accounts. Psychology & Sexuality, 8(1-2), 158-169.
Petrychyn, J., Parry, D. C., & Johnson, C. W. (2020). Building community, one swipe at a time: hook-up apps and the production of intimate publics between women. Health Sociology Review, 29(3), 249-263.
Pond, T., & Farvid, P. (2017). I do like girls, I promise’: Young bisexual women’s experiences of using Tinder. Psychology of Sexualities Review, 8(2), 6-24.
Pruchniewska, U. (2020). “I Like That It’s My Choice a Couple Different Times”: Gender, Affordances, and User Experience on Bumble Dating. International Journal of Communication, 14, 18.
Tang, D. T. S. (2017). All I get is an emoji: Dating on lesbian mobile phone app Butterfly. Media, Culture & Society, 39(6), 816-832.
Tanner, M., & Tabo, P. Q. (2018). Ladies First: The Influence of Mobile Dating Applications on the Psychological Empowerment of Female Users. Informing Sci. Int. J. an Emerg. Transdiscipl., 21, 289-317.
Watson, R. J., Shahin, Y. M., & Arbeit, M. R. (2019). Hookup initiation and emotional outcomes differ across LGB young men and women. Sexualities, 22(5-6), 932-950.