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STOCKHOLM SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS, SWEDEN 2019 SWEDEN ECONOMICS, OF SCHOOL STOCKHOLM ISBN 978-91-7731-153-9 ADMINISTRATION BUSINESS IN DISSERTATION DOCTORAL Marketing and consumer research has a long tradition of using gender to explain differences in consumer behavior. In recent decades, a more critical stream of marketing research has emerged to exposethe essentializing of gender differences in marketing research and practice. This research has conceptualized gender as a social construction and proposed markets and consumption as important sites for the construction of masculinities and femininities. in primarily However, focusing on consumption and cultural representations, research on gender has left markets and marketing unex plored and undertheorized. The research agenda proposed in this dissertation calls for detailed studies of a broad range of market practices. Conceptualizing gender as performed in market practice,a conceptual paperhighlights theentanglement of gen der in material market arrangements, marketing tools and techniques, and the everyday work of various market professionals. Empirically, the disserta tion builds on an ethnographic case study of a startup developing and mar keting a menstrual cycle tracking app. the Tracing categories of woman and female, and the concept of inclusion,the two empirical papers explore how the company’s evolving understanding of its user base as a highly diverse group of people plays out in various market practices, including fund user research, and product development. AN APP FOR WOMEN?: EXPLORING THE PERFORMANCE PERFORMANCE EXPLORING THE FOR WOMEN?: AN APP PRACTICE IN MARKET AND DIVERSITY OF GENDER

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An App for Women?

Exploring the Performance of Gender and Diversity in Market Practice

Riikka Murto

Akademisk avhandling som för avläggande av ekonomie doktorsexamen vid Handelshögskolan i Stockholm framläggs för offentlig granskning fredagen den 22 november 2019, kl 13.15, sal 750, Handelshögskolan, Sveavägen 65, Stockholm

An App for Women?

Exploring the Performance of Gender and Diversity in Market Practice

An App for Women?

Exploring the Performance of Gender and Diversity in Market Practice

Riikka Murto ii

Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Ph.D., in Business Administration Stockholm School of Economics, 2019

An App for Women?: Exploring the Performance of Gender and Diversity in Market Practice © SSE and the author, 2019 ISBN 978-91-7731-153-9 (printed) ISBN 978-91-7731-154-6 (pdf) Front cover illustration: © Riikka Murto, 2019 Printed by: BrandFactory, Gothenburg, 2019 Keywords: Gender, market practice, performativity, actor-network theory, diversity, marketplace exclusion

To Hilma Minerva

Foreword

This volume is the result of a research project carried out at the Depart- ment of Marketing and Strategy at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE). This volume is submitted as a doctoral thesis at SSE. In keeping with the policies of SSE, the author has been entirely free to conduct and present her research in the manner of her choosing as an expression of her own ideas. SSE is grateful for the financial support provided by Torsten Söder- bergs Stiftelse, C.f. Liljevalch Jr:s donationsfond, Grosshandlare Emil Hell- ströms stipendiefond, Herman Friedländers stipendiefond and Stiftelsen Louis Fraenckels Stipendiefond, which has made it possible to carry out the project.

Göran Lindqvist Hans Kjellberg Director of Research Professor and Head of the Stockholm School of Economics Department of Marketing and Strategy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervision committee, Per Andersson, Hans Kjellberg and Lisa Peñaloza, for their guidance and support during my time as a PhD student. I am grateful for Per for taking me on first as research assistant and then as PhD student, and for allowing me the freedom to follow my evolving research interests. I wish to thank Hans for insightful feedback and for always believing in me. I want to thank Lisa for providing a fresh perspective to my research. I am grateful for the support of my colleagues, past and present, at the Center for Market Studies. Especially, I wish to thank Ebba Laurin, Ingrid Stigzelius, Karim Thomé, Tina Bengtsson, Sara Melén and Lei Huang. Fairouz Hussien, Johan Nilsson, Gianluca Chimenti and Nurgül Özbek have been a constant support during these final months. I am very happy to not be going anywhere. Special thanks go to Lisa Lindén, my opponent during the mock de- fense, and Magdalena Petersson McIntyre, my opponent during the thesis proposal seminar. I enjoyed my discussions with you and found your questions, comments and suggestions immensely helpful in further developing my work. This research would not have been possible without the people who worked at Clue while I did my fieldwork. I would like to thank everyone for so generously sharing your time and thoughts. Especially, I am thankful for Mike Lavigne for his enthusiasm for my research and for inviting me to study Clue. I am grateful for the financial support provided by Torsten Söderbergs Stiftelse, which has made it possible to carry out the project. In addition I wish to thank Gålöstiftelsen, C.f. Liljevalch Jr:s donationsfond, Gross- handlare Emil Hellströms stipendiefond, Herman Friedländers stipend- viii iefond and Stiftelsen Louis Fraenckels Stipendiefond for supporting my travels to courses and conferences. Finally, the hands-on support of my family has been crucial. My par- ents, Suvi and Leo, were an invaluable help during the spring. Sindri, thank you for holding the fort during these final months.

Stockholm, October 7, 2019

Riikka Murto

Contents

Part 1 Summary of the thesis ...... 1 Introduction ...... 3 Literature review ...... 7 Gender as a variable ...... 8 Gender as a social construction ...... 13 Gender identities in consumption ...... 13 Cultural representations of gender ...... 14 Markets and marketing in gender research ...... 16 Conceptual framework ...... 21 A few principles from actor-network theory (and after) ...... 21 Conceptualizing markets as practical accomplishments ...... 24 Conceptualizing gender as a practical accomplishment ...... 27 Additional concepts for exploring the performance of gender and diversity in market practice ...... 32 Gender categorization ...... 32 Marketplace exclusion ...... 37 The case ...... 43 The app ...... 43 The company ...... 44 Methodology ...... 47 Research approach ...... 47 Selecting a case and gaining access ...... 48 Collecting data ...... 52 Analysing data ...... 57 Summary of the papers ...... 59 x

Paper 1: The performance of gender in market practice ...... 59 Paper 2: Categories of gender in representational practice ...... 61 Paper 3: Designing for everybody? Consumer inclusion and exclusion in digital product development ...... 62 Concluding discussion ...... 65 Contributions to marketing research on gender and diversity ...... 65 Contributions to constructivist market studies ...... 68 A research agenda for exploring the performance of gender and diversity in market practice ...... 71 References ...... 75 Part 2 Research papers ...... 87 Paper 1: The performance of gender in market practice ...... 89 Paper 2: Gender categorization in representational market practice ...... 117 Paper 3: Designing for everybody? Representing and inscribing as mechanisms of marketplace exclusion/inclusion ...... 153

Part 1 Summary of the thesis

Chapter 1

Introduction

Ida Tin, CEO and co-founder of Clue, was frustrated by the fact that, while fertility is a constant theme for forty years of every woman's life, there is a sur- prising lack of effective high-tech tools to help women really understand their fertility cycle. (Clue, press release, July 2013)

I figured the apps couldn’t be THAT bad and that I could probably just ignore the pregnancy stuff. But I was wrong. Even the onboarding process was very frustrating and I felt that my identity as both a queer person and a woman with irregular periods was completely erased. (Delano, 2015)

What does it mean to create ”an app for women”? The above pair of quo- tes captures some of the tensions involved in creating and marketing menstrual cycle tracking apps. The first quote, from the press release announcing the release of the Clue menstrual cycle tracking app in July 2013, depicts fertility as ”a constant theme for forty years of every woman's life”. Much of the company’s early communications represent period tracking as something that matters for all women. The second quote is an ex- cerpt from an article entitled “I tried tracking my period and it was even worse than I could have imagined”, by Maggie Delano, researcher, Quanti- fied Self organizer, and advocate for inclusive design. In this text, she describes her experiences trying out Clue and Glow, the most high-profile period-tracking apps at that point. She concludes that “while Clue was only marginally heteronormative, Glow was off the charts”, assuming that avoid- ing or achieving pregnancy was why she wanted to track her period. Both apps had trouble dealing with her very short cycles. Delano felt that her “identity as both a queer person and a woman with irregular periods was 4 AN APP FOR WOMEN? completely erased” in the apps’ onboarding processes. Clearly, there is a tension between representations of all women as potential users of period- tracking apps and representations of women and menstruators as a diverse group with differing needs and identities. This tension is at the center of my dissertation. Building on a case study of the company developing and marketing the Clue app, I explore the performance of gender and diversity in market practice. While Clue is one of the apps criticized by Delano, the company is committed to addressing “every variety of need, including the asexual, sexually active, the full spectrum of straight, LGBTQ, cis and even common medical conditions such as PCOS, and all possible life stages from perimenarche to postmenopausal”, as Mike LaVigne, Clue’s Chief Product Officer at the time, writes in his public reply to Delano. The company’s evolving understanding of the app’s user base as radically diverse plays out in different practices of representing the app, and its users and market(s), to different audiences internally and externally, and is negotiated in practices of user research and product development. In these practices, the categories of woman and female are negotiated and inclusions and exclusions are produced. My dissertation seeks to broaden the agenda of marketing research on gender and diversity. Traditionally, consumer research has approached gender as a variable that explains differences in consumer behavior (e.g. Mey- ers-Levy, 1989; Dubé and Morgan, 1996; Noseworthy et al., 2011). During the past few decades, a more critical stream of research has emerged that, rather than essentialize gender differences, understands gender as a socially and culturally constructed category (Bettany et al., 2010). Especially, this critical gender research has explored the construction of gender identities in consumption (e.g. Thompson, 1996; Moisio et al., 2013; Thompson and Üstüner, 2015) and the representation of gender in marketing imagery (e.g. Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998; Ostberg, 2010; Gurrieri et al., 2012). I argue that, in its exclusive focus on consumption and marketing imagery, this research has failed to fully explore the role of markets and marketing in shaping what it means to be a man or a woman. Research on the construction of gender identities in consumption backgrounds markets, reducing them to a provider of consumption resources. Research on gender in marketing imagery suggest that advertising weilds power by not only depicting CHAPTER 1 5 gender ideals but also by contributing to uphold these ideas. However, this research is limited by its focus on finished ads rather than the production of advertising. Beyond studies of consumption and marketing imagery, we need studies focused on “practices that are enacted within particular markets that differentially benefit men versus women in ways that sustain typical gender inequalities” (Fischer, 2015: 1720). I argue that marketing research on gender needs a framework that is able to trace how different notions of gender – more or less stereotypical, reflexive or inclusive – enter networks of marketing practices and either fail to have an effect or have effects that contribute to structure the market opportunities and experiences of differently gendered individuals. In this dissertation, I critically engage with marketing and consumer research on gender and diversity. Drawing on actor-network theory, constructivist market studies, and feminist science and technology studies, I shift attention to the performance of gender in market practice, defined as “all activities that contribute to constitute markets” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a: 141). In the three conceptual and empirical papers that make up this dissertation, I seek to develop a theoretical approach for understanding how gender is performed in market practice. My conceptual paper reads marketing and other social science research through the vocabulary of market practice and highlights the many ways in which market practice incorporates gendered consumer representations and gendered bodies. The two empirical papers, with a starting point in exploring Clue’s evolving understanding of women and menstruators as a very diverse group, bring to light how gender categorizations are performed in a variety of representational market practices, and how ideas of market inclusion and diversity are performed in user research and product development practices. This dissertation addresses the following research questions:

• How could a market practice approach to gender look like?

• How are gender categorizations performed in Clue’s representational market practices? 6 AN APP FOR WOMEN?

• How are marketplace inclusions and exclusions performed in Clue’s practices of user research and product development?

• How can these findings contribute to the development of a theoretical framework to understand how gender is performed in market practice?

The structure of the dissertation is as follows. The next section reviews existing marketing and consumer research on gender. I then introduce my theoretical framework and the conceptual vocabularies of the three papers. This is followed by an introduction to the empirical case, and a discussion of methodology. After introducing the three papers, I discuss the contributions of this dissertation to, first, marketing research on gender and diversity, and, second, constructivist market studies, as well as discuss ideas for future research. Part 2 of the dissertation consists of the three papers.

Chapter 2

Literature review

This section reviews existing research on gender in the fields of marketing and consumer research. Marketing and consumer research on gender can be divided in two broad camps. The first camp – dubbed “sex difference” research (Bettany et al., 2010), “gender effects” research (Hearn and Hein, 2015), or “T-test gender research” (Dobscha, 2019) by the proponents of the second school – conceptualizes gender as a variable and explores the effects of gender on marketing outcomes and consumer behavior. The second school, then, is critical of the tendency of the first school to essentialize gender differences. This second school, known as “gender research” (Bettany et al., 2010), understands gender as a social construction and proposes markets and consumption as important sites for the construction of masculinities and femininities. It is to this second stream that my dissertation aims to contribute. In this chapter, I first review literature that has treated gender as a variable. As this discussion is primarily meant to illustrate what it means to treat gender as a variable in consumer research, I limit myself to papers published in Journal of Consumer Research, one of the leading journals in the field. I then move on to the more critical gender research, and argue that markets and marketing remain undertheorized in this research. 8 AN APP FOR WOMEN?

Gender as a variable

A sizable body of literature explores the effects of gender on marketing outcomes and consumer behavior. In its most common form, this research examines how males and females differ in ways that are relevant for marketing and consumer behavior. According to this research, gender differences exist in information processing (Meyers-Levy, 1989; Meyers-Levy and Maheswaran, 1991; Dubé and Morgan, 1996; Noseworthy et al., 2011), goals (Meyers-Levy, 1988; Winterich et al., 2009; Dommer and Swamina- than, 2013; Zhang et al., 2014), attitudes (Dahl et al., 2009), and socialization (Fischer and Arnold, 1990; Fisher and Dubé, 2005; Brough et al., 2016; Nikolova and Lamberton, 2016). For example, Meyers-Levy and Maheswa- ran (1991) find that, in the absence of message or task factors that strongly encourage a particular type of processing, females are more likely than males to process advertising messages through detailed elaboration of message content, while males are more likely to be driven by overall message themes or schemas in their processing. Research on the effects of differing goals has its basis in agency-communion theory. According to this research, males’ agentic orientation and females’ communal orientation are reflected in differences in the likelihood of transmitting negative word of mouth (Zhang et al., 2014) and in donation behavior towards in-groups and out- groups (Winterich et al., 2009). Differences in attitudes towards sex are used to explain men’s and women’s different reactions to sex in advertising (Dahl et al., 2009). Finally, explanations based on socialization argue that men and women behave differently because they are expected to behave differently. Men, especially, are found to be concerned with gender-identity maintenance, leading them to avoid such feminine-coded behaviors as green consumption (Brough et al., 2016) and compromise options (Nikolo- va and Lamberton, 2016). Closely related to gender difference research are studies applying an evolutionary logic to explain behaviors such as women choosing sexier clothing near peak fertility (Durante et al., 2011) and using luxury products to signal to other women that their romantic partner is especially devoted to them (Wang and Griskevicius, 2014). The studies reviewed above differ in how they discuss the underlying reasons for gender differences. Many studies just don’t expand on this: men CHAPTER 2 9 simply are agentic and women communal, and the genders just process information differently. Others suggest underlying explanations. Meyers-Levy (1989) points at brain structure, and suggests that some differences in product judgment stem from males’ cerebral hemispheres being more lat- eralized, or functionally specialized, than females’ more symmetrically organized hemispheres. Dahl et al. (2009) use both evolutionary and socialization models of human sexuality to back their contention that women and men have different motives regarding sex. They conclude that “gender differences in sexual attitudes probably result from an interaction of evolutionary and socialization factors” (217). Socialization is likewise evoked when gender differences are explained with males adjusting their behaviors toward what is socially desirable (Fisher and Dubé, 2005) or in accordance with masculine gender norms (Brough et al., 2016). Meyers- Levy and Loken (2015) have summarized the different theories explaining the origins of gender differences as social-cultural theory, evolutionary theory, hormone and brain science approaches, and marketing’s homegrown selectivity hypothesis that makes no specific claim about the origins of gender differences but points to different strategies and thresholds in processing information. While explanations for the origins of gender differences vary from the biological and evolutionary to socialization, research on gender differences in marketing and consumer behavior, as a whole, can be described as essen- tialising and deterministic. This research posits that there are fundamental differences between the genders, and that these differences have effects that are relevant to marketing and consumer behavior. Gender, in this view, can be treated as a variable and its effects measured. Even when gender differences are explained with socialization, the situation is understood as being stable to the degree that gender differences can be treated as if they were essential. Processes of socialization are beyond the scope of this research as are the boundaries of what is understood as masculine and what as feminine. In other words, gender is treated as a black box (Latour, 1987) that can serve as the basis for generating hypotheses. For example, Fisher and Dubé (2005: 852) can present the following hypothesis, where Aad refers to attitude to the ad: “Whereas no effect is expected for females, the presence of another male has a negative effect on males’ viewing pleasure 10 AN APP FOR WOMEN?

and Aad for low-agency emotion appeals.” This hypothesis relies on several black boxes, findings of previous research that are treated as facts. For example, there is the fact that contemporary masculine stereotypes are tied to the pursuit of agency, and, hence, that low-agency emotions are counterstereotypical for men. There is the fact that males have been socialized to avoid the expression of counter-stereotypical emotions in social settings, while females have been socialized to communicate with others about a variety of emotions. All these black boxes allow Fisher and Dubé (2005: 852) to hypothesize “a gender by social context interaction effect for low- agency emotions” in advertising. Treating gender as a black box does not mean that the patterns of gender difference are necessarily seen as completely free from outside influence. For example, Meyers-Levy (1988) cautions that the situational demands of taking part in an experiment might take precedence over a subject’s otherwise natural tendency to adopt a sex role consistent perspective in evaluating information. That is why her studies on the influence of sex roles on judgment rely on procedures such as the use of sex role primes to activate subjects’ sex roles. At the same time, though, she seems to be suggesting that sex roles are inherent to each sex. She suggests that males’ agentic self-oriented sex role is activated by the communal as well as the agentic prime, and females’ communal self- and other-oriented sex role is activated by the agentic as well as the communal prime. Both gender- appropriate and gender-inappropriate sex role primes activate associations to one’s appropriate sex role. As a whole, research on gender differences in marketing and consumer behavior has a tendency to conflate the biological and the social. Interest- ingly, the language used in the texts does not for the most part vary based on the underlying theory. Traditionally, the term ‘sex’ has been used to refer to the biological aspects of being male or female, while ‘gender’ has been associated with the psychological, social, and cultural aspects of maleness and femaleness (Kessler & McKenna, 1978: 7). However, the reviewed papers consistently refer to ‘gender differences’, even when they ascribe a biological base to the discovered differences, and overwhelmingly use the biologically-coded terms ‘males’ and ‘females’ to talk about the compared CHAPTER 2 11 groups, even when socialization is suggested as the underlying reason for differences. Some researchers have been more reflexive in their choice of terminol- ogy. Fischer and Arnold (1990) emphasize the differences in meaning between sex, gender-role attitudes, and gender identity. Sex, according to them, is used to refer to biological sex. Gender-role attitude refers to “an individual’s level of agreement with traditional views regarding the roles and behaviors stereotypically allocated to each sex” (335). Gender identity reflects a person’s degree of identification with communally oriented feminine traits and agentially oriented masculine traits. Elsewhere, they have cautioned against the use of the term sex role, as it has been used to refer to all three of these constructs (Fischer and Arnold, 1994). Winterich et al. (2009), rather than compare males and females, compare consumers with a masculine gender identity and consumers with a feminine gender identity. They suggest that “many roles, attributes, and attitudinal differences at- tributed to biological sex are, in fact, manifestations of gender identity” (200). They conduct two experiments exploring the effect of gender identity on donation behavior. However, in a third study, they use “biological sex” as a proxy for gender identity, in order to enhance the practical implications of the research. They argue that it is potentially difficult to determine gender identity prior to soliciting donations, whereas biological sex is “an easily identifiable demographic variable that organizations can and do use to segment potential donors” (209). It remains unclear how Winterich et al. “measured” the “biological sex” of their online panel participants, or how they suggest marketers identify the biological sex of potential donors. According to them, the different measures of gender identity, Bem’s Sex Role Inventory, a prime, and biological sex, rendered “identical” results (212). Schmitt et al.’s (1988) test of gender schema theory represents another attempt to separate the concepts of sex and sex role. Bem’s Sex Role In- ventory is used to divide subjects in four groups: Those scoring above the median on both masculinity and femininity scales are categorized as androgynous. Those scoring below the median on both scales are categorized as undifferentiated. Those scoring below the median on the sex- incongruent scale are categorized as traditionally sex-typed. Those scoring below the median on the sex congruent scale and above the median on the 12 AN APP FOR WOMEN? sex-incongruent scale are categorized as cross-sex-typed. The study tests the predictions of gender schema theory that sex-typed and non-sex-typed (androgynous or undifferentiated) individuals differ in their processing and evaluation of gender-related information. The study does not obtain the predicted sex-type effects but indicates strong sex effects. Beyond gender differences research, gender effects have been in focus in research that explores the effect of such variables as brand name gender (Yorkston and de Mello, 2005) or service provider gender (Matta and Folkes, 2005; Lee et al., 2011). Yorkston and de Mello (2005) argue that gender’s role as a categorization tool underlies the effects of linguistic gender marking on brand evaluations and brand recall. Based on gender stereotypes associated with product categories, individuals assign semantic gender to products. In formal language systems, such as Spanish, products also have formal gender, based on the structure of the noun designating the product. Likewise, brand names have a formal gender. According to the authors, congruency between product gender and brand name gender im- proves brand recall and attitudes. Other research turns to gender as a way of operationalizing stereotype effects. Matta and Folkes (2005) vary the gender of a service provider so that it is either stereotypical or counterstereotypical for the occupation. They conclude that while a service provider of the counterstereotypical gender is seen as less representative of the firm’s other service providers than a service provider of the stereotypical gender, excellent service from a counterstereotypical provider enhances comparisons of the firm with other firms more than the same level of service from a stereotypical provider. Lee et al. (2011) study how consumers react when they believe that a transaction partner will view them through the lens of a negative stereotype. The stereotype they focus on is women’s lack of competence in science, technology, engineering, and math. They argue that when this stereotype is salient, women’s but not men’s intention to purchase differs as a function of service provider gender. They conclude that women tend to avoid out-group transaction partners, or men, when influenced by stereotype threat. In summary, the research discussed above treats gender as a variable that can be used to explain various aspects of consumer behaviour. While the research reviewed above does not necessarily designate biology as the CHAPTER 2 13 lone base for gender differences, this research does treat gender as a black box that is stable enough to explain differences. The groups of men and women are presented as useful and unproblematic. Also, the usefulness of these categories extends beyond gender differences as is exemplified by the studies on brand name gender and stereotype effects. Next, I move on to what Bettany et al. (2010) call gender research.

Gender as a social construction

Bettany et al. (2010) suggest that ‘gender’ research differs from gender effects research, discussed above, in that it is characterized by “an implicit critical impetus that challenges essential sex differences, and a political agenda for social and cultural change” (7). This research understands gender as a social construction and posits markets and consumption as important sites for the social construction of masculinities and femininities. While this is a heterogeneous stream of research, two questions, especially, have occupied researchers interested in the social construction of gender. First, research has discussed the construction and performance of gender identities in consumption. Second, research has explored cultural representations of gender. In this section, I will first introduce these two streams of research and will then go on to discuss the undertheorizing of markets and marketing in this research.

Gender identities in consumption Research on gender and consumption has asked how individual consumers and communities of consumption construct and perform gender identities. The construction of masculinities and femininities has often been studied in contexts of identity conflict, such as working mothers’ juggling lifestyle between traditional motherhood and career orientation (Thompson, 1996) or men’s identity work between traditional bread-winner masculinity and new models of masculinity and fatherhood (Holt and Thompson, 2004; Coskuner-Balli and Thompson, 2013; Moisio et al., 2013; Bettany et al., 2014; Klasson and Ulver, 2015). This research recognizes consumption as a key process through which identity conflicts are managed, as when Moisio et al.’s informants use Do-It-Yourself (DIY) home improvement projects 14 AN APP FOR WOMEN? in their construction of domestic masculinity. Likewise, this research has explored consumers’ experiences in resisting or accommodating gendered expectations in different spheres of consumption. For example, this research has explored gendered experiences of singleness (Lai et al., 2015), poverty (Hutton, 2015, 2019), and interacting with a private school system (Rojas Gaviria et al., 2019) While the focus in this literature has often been on the management and resolution of conflicts, Moisio et al. (2013: 311), suggest that “perhaps scholars ought to conceptualize masculinities as a set of conflicting or complementary consumer performances”. This suggestion, applied to both masculinities and femininities, is taken up by researchers who, rather than study the construction of “a coherent self-identity” (Thompson, 1996: 389), ask how gender is performed. This question implies a more fluid notion of gender that allows for non-binary explorations. This perspective, often drawing on Butler’s (1990) work on gender, suggests that “there is no central or core gender identity“ (Goulding and Saren, 2009: 40). Rather, gender is performed as it is “continually reproduced in social relations and enacted through relationships with objects, products and consumption phenomena” (Cronin et al., 2014: 369). For example, Goulding and Saren (2009) study the performance of deviant gender identities in the Goth community and Peñaloza (1994) discusses how gender boundaries are crossed and en- forced in consumers’ practices. Consumer research applications of Butler’s ideas have emphasized the potential for gender resignifications (Peñaloza, 1994; Martin et al., 2006; Goulding and Saren, 2009; Harju and Huovinen, 2015) as well as the structuring influence of the heteronormative matrix (Valtonen, 2013; Thompson and Üstüner, 2015; Lai et al., 2015). Recent work has explored the role of consumption activities such as roller derby (Thompson and Üstuner, 2015) and live-action role-playing games (Seregi- na, 2019) in creating a reflexive awareness of gender as a performance.

Cultural representations of gender This sub-stream explores the reproduction of cultural ideals of gender in cultural representations, such as cookbooks (Brownlie and Hewer, 2007; Cappellini and Parsons, 2014), television programming (Kjeldgaard and Storgaard Nielsen, 2010; Zayer et al., 2012), and other popular culture rep- CHAPTER 2 15 resentations (Ostberg, 2010; Molander et al., 2019). Research on advertising representations (Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998; Schroeder and Zwick, 2004; Gentry and Harrison, 2010; Ostberg, 2010; Gurrieri et al., 2012; At- kinson, 2014; Ourahmoune et al., 2014) and representations in other forms of consumer marketing (Takhar and Pemberton, 2019) has been prominent. Cultural representations pertaining to both gendered body ideals (Pat- terson and Elliott, 2002; Ostberg, 2010; Gurrieri et al., 2012) and gender roles (Gentry and Harrison, 2010; Atkinson, 2014) have been studied. This stream of research builds on the assumption that representations are performative: “the language that appears to be merely describing the subjects actually constitutes them” (Ostberg, 2010: 53). In the case of advertising images of men, “representations do not merely ‘express’ masculinity, rather, they play a central role in forming conceptions of masculinity and help construct market segments” (Schroeder and Zwick, 2004: 22). Research on the representation of women and men in advertising suggests that advertising representations often reinforce traditional distinctions between the sexes (Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998; Ourahmoune et al., 2014). For example, Gurrieri et al.’s (2012) visual analysis of three social marketing campaigns shows “how the simple, doable healthy lifestyle practices promoted to women actually reproduce idealized understandings of femininity and normalized body projects for women that perpetuate stereotypes” (131). The analyzed advertisements equate women’s health with aes- thetics rather than wellbeing. Also, by participating in the idealization of women’s bodies, social marketing stigmatizes nonpriviledged bodies. Ac- cording to Atkinson (2014), green advertising in pregnancy magazines, “by making the child the subject and the brand the expert, moves the mother outside the frame”, leaving her “with no other role but to minimize or ne- gate her environmental footprint, and consequently her entire existence” (268). When it comes to the representation of men, Ostberg (2010) finds the norm of having a big enough penis to be subtle but ubiquituous in representations of masculinity. Others observe subtle changes in the ways women and men are represented. Schroeder and Zwick’s (2004) study of the visual representation of the male body in advertising suggests that advertising discourse is shifting its limits, and new possibilities for masculine identity are opening up. Despite the shifting limits, however, gender rela- 16 AN APP FOR WOMEN? tions remain oppositional and male dominance remains. Gentry and Harri- son (2010) suggest that while television advertising now shows women in less stereotypically traditional roles, it still perpetuates a very traditional male gender norm. This stream of research has also explored representations that seek to question existing stereotypes and structures. Molander et al. (2019) suggest that hero shots of involved fathers conquer more radically new discursive territory. Matich et al.’s (2019) study of the #freethenipple social media campaign suggests that the campaign ends up “perpetuating, rather than challenging, the postfeminist commodification of women’s sexuality” (Matich et al., 2019: 341).

Markets and marketing in gender research While gender research in the fields of marketing and consumer behaviour makes a valuable contribution in challenging the idea of essential male/female difference and proposing markets and consumption as important sites for negotiating gender, markets remain undertheorized in this research. It has been suggested that markets are “everywhere and nowhere” in marketing literature (Venkatesh et al., 2006; Araujo et al., 2010). This is also the case in gender research. Gender identity research, in its exclusive focus on consumption, treats the market as a backdrop for consumers’ construction and performance of gender, a backdrop that provides consumers with market-mediated consumption resources. The backgrounding of markets means that there is a dearth of studies focusing on “practices that are enacted within particular markets that differentially benefit men versus women in ways that sustain typical gender inequalities” (Fischer, 2015: 1720), or, in more general terms, studies focusing on how specific markets and market practices structure the market opportunities and experiences of differently gendered individuals. Marketing, likewise, remains understudied. While a growing body of research has begun to explore the practices of marketing professionals (Sun- derland and Denny, 2011; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2010; Ariztia, 2015; Jacobi et al., 2015), gender research has yet to look ‘inside marketing’ (Zwick and Cayla, 2011). Along with research on cultural representations of gender, feminist critiques of marketing research touch upon the topic of gender and marketing. Feminist critiques of marketing and consumer research point to CHAPTER 2 17 the presence of a masculine ideology in the knowledge production processes within these fields. This stream of research identifies a masculine bias in marketing academia (Maclaran et al., 2009) and in the assumptions (Bristor and Fischer, 1993; Joy and Venkatesh, 1994; Peñaloza, 1994), theories and methods (Bristor and Fischer, 1993; Hirchman, 1993), and rhetoric (Fischer and Bristor, 1994) of marketing and consumer research. Researchers find feminist perspectives missing and diluted in marketing and consumer research (Catterall et al., 2005; Hearn and Hein, 2015). This stream of research does take up the role of marketing but is limited to academic marketing alone: feminist critiques of marketing and consumer research have shown little interest in marketing practice, or the relationship between marketing theory and marketing practice. While research on representations of gender, especially as it pertains to advertising representations, does take up marketing’s role in reproducing the gender system, it is limited by its focus on the end-results, the published or broadcast ads, alone. Methodologically, research on gender representations has analyzed finished representations, such as published or broadcast ads. These studies seek to expose the patterns of representations in a specific field, or the evolution of such patterns over time. The practices of marketing professionals are left untouched. Furthermore, the literature on representations of gender tends to equate marketing with advertising, largely ignoring other areas of marketing practice, and has a tendency to conflate advertising with culture. This is evident when advertising is analyzed paral- lel to other instances of culture, as when Ostberg (2010) analyzes advertising alongside popular culture representations and self-help resources, or when advertising is chosen as the object of study because it is seen as a powerful instance of visual culture (Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998). The privileging of representations over the production of representations, com- bined with the conflation of marketing with culture, has discouraged research that asks what role marketing – as a set of practices, tools, and techniques that are inextricably both cultural and economic (McFall, 2004; Slater, 2011) – plays in performing gender. Schroeder and Zwick (2004: 21 – 22) argue: “Almost all products are gendered in a practice of normative sexual dualism reinforced and main- tained within the interlocking cultural institutions of marketing communica- 18 AN APP FOR WOMEN? tion and market segmentation.” As discussed above, gender research in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior provides ample support for Schroeder and Zwick’s (2004) assertion that advertising reproduces stereotypical notions of gender. The other half, market segmentation, has received much less attention than advertising. Few studies have looked at market segmentation, or other practices that work behind advertising. No- table exceptions include the studies by Zayer and Coleman (2015) and Malefyt and McCabe (2016). Zayer and Coleman (2015) study advertising professionals’ perceptions of how gender portrayals impact men and women and the influence of these perceptions on strategic and creative choices. Rather than examine specific cases of advertising work, the authors focus on the ethical conceptualizations of advertising professionals and their institutional environments. Malefyt and McCabe (2016) are hired by a manu- facturer of feminine hygiene products to research the cultural underpinnings of menstruation. The research they conduct for the company discovers a change in women’s discourses of menstruation but this change is not fully reflected in the ad campaign resulting from their research. The authors explain this disconnect as an effect of “an ideology divided by gender roles” (568). Their research does not empirically explore the chain of events leading from the research to the advertising campaign. The tendency to forgo detailed empirical studies of marketing practices, and point the finger at ideology or power hierarchies, is shared by diversity research in general, not just gener research. Research argues that the exclusion and marginalization of consumers based on, for example, race, gender, body size, age or disability stems from historical structures of oppression, such as racism, sexism, fattism, agism, and ableism, respectively (Gopaldas and Siebert, 2018; Kearney et al., 2019). According to Gopaldas and Siebert (2018: 339), “the key mystery for us to solve is not why social forces have existed in history, but why commercial forces amplify rather than mitigate these social forces”. In explaining the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of marginalized groups in market imagery, Gopaldas and Siebert (2018) speculate that these patterns of representations are explained by “a vicious circle of social and commercial forces” (339). While Gopaldas and Siebert’s (2018) assertion that marginalized consumers are underrepresented and misrepresented is based on a detailed study of lifestyle magazine CHAPTER 2 19 covers, their discussion of the vicious circle is not based on empirical research. Finally, research on advertising representations of gender provides only a partial picture of the mechanisms upholding (or undoing) a binary gender system. This research has asked how marketing shapes what it means to be a man, or a woman. Through the representation of men and women in advertising and cultural products, marketing constructs masculinities and femininities, or links attributes – such as bodily features (Patterson and Elliott, 2002; Ostberg, 2010), activities (Brownlie and Hewer, 2007), and identities (Atkinson, 2014) – to these binary poles. These representations are often stereotypical and reinforce traditional distinctions between the sexes (Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998; Ourahmoune et al., 2014). The differences in the representations of men and women contribute to upholding an understanding of gender premised on sex difference. Stereotyping helps to maintain boundaries between gender categories (Avery, 2012). However, this literature has little to say about the practices of gender categorization. To illustrate the significance of gender as a category of social organizing, let us consider, again, research on gender effects in marketing – only this time from the perspective of gender categorization. This research demonstrates the ubiquity of gender categorization in explaining consumer behavior. It’s not only consumers, or only humans, that can be usefully categorized based on gender – brand names and product categories have gender as well (Yorkston and de Mello, 2005)! Also, this research shows how different biological and social bases can be applied in gender categorization, while at the same time tending to conflate the biological with the social. My contention is that this type of use of gender categorization is not limited to academic researchers but that also market researchers and other market professionals rely on categories of gender to make sense of the world. Fo- cusing on gender categorization sheds a light on another unexplored topic: sex. Research on gender identities and representation of gender has largely accepted the traditional division of labor among the analytical concepts of sex and gender, and focused on gender, the socially constructed elements, while leaving sex to experimental researchers. The idea that sex, too, is constructed has not been explored in marketing and consumer research. Like- wise, categorization brings with it the question of inclusion and inclusion.

Chapter 3

Conceptual framework

The conceptual starting point for my dissertation is the actor-network theory invitation to “treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a con- tinuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located” (Law, 2009: 141). In this section, I first discuss what, for me, are the key implications of this invitation. I then go on to reflect on how this informs my understanding of, first, markets, and, second, gender. Finally, I provide a short overview of the more specific concepts that are used and developed in the two empirical papers.

A few principles from actor-network theory (and after)

Actor-network theory first emerged as an approach for understanding the construction of scientific facts (Callon, 1984; Latour and Woolgar, 2013; Latour, 1987) and technological systems (Callon, 1986, 1987; Law, 1987). These studies suggested that the success of a scientific theory or an innovation depends on its ability to associate heterogeneous elements in a way that resists dissociation (Law, 1987). For example, Callon (1984) shows how a group of researchers interested in scallops seeks the collaboration of both social and natural entities: fishermen, scientific colleagues, and scallops. Law (1987), similarly, shows that the ability of the Portuguese to establish a maritime trade route to and from India depended on the association of “entities that range from people, through skills, to artifacts and natural phenomena” (129). These authors adopt a principle of generalized symmetry that states that all the elements in a heterogeneous network 22 AN APP FOR WOMEN? should receive the same consideration. Specifically, “the social elements in a system should not be given special explanatory status” (Law, 1987: 130). Actor-network theory is characterized by an ontology that stresses the emergent and plastic character of reality – this is a sociology of verbs rather than a sociology of nouns (Law, 1994). As stated above, actor-network theory proposes to “treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a con- tinuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located” (Law, 2009: 141). This means that what might otherwise be understood as a cause or explanation becomes an effect. For example, rather than treat the social and natural as pre-existing categories, actor-network theory insist that the separation of the two is an outcome to be explained (Latour, 1987). Social aggregates are not resources for explanation but what emerges as a result of a process of association (Latour, 2005). Power, likewise, comes to be “treated as a consequence rather than as a cause of action” (Latour, 1986: 264). Actor-networks, complex assemblages of materials, technologies, people and discourse, need to be enacted for actors to exist and action to be taken (Bajde, 2013: 3). Furthermore, actor-network theory insists that the elements that make up a network are shaped by their association in the network. Callon’s (1984) scallops and fishermen assume new identities as they become associated with the researchers’ project. Also, “behind each associated entity there hides another set of entities that it more or less effectively draws together” (Callon, 1987: 94). A key concept in actor-network theory is translation – indeed, sociology of translation has been suggested as an alternative name for the approach (Callon, 1984). Translation, in this view, is the basic social process by which something spreads in time and space. The spread in time and space of any- thing, such as claims, orders, artefacts, or goods, is in the hands of others (Latour, 1986: 267). A translation model of power suggests that “a com- mand, if it is successful, results from the actions of a chain of agents each of whom ‘translates’ it in accordance with his/her own projects” (Latour, 1986: 264). To further make this point, Latour introduces the terms inter- mediary and mediator. While intermediaries transport meaning or force without transformation, for mediators, “their input is never a good predic- tor of their output” (Latour, 2005: 39). Rather, mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to CHAPTER 3 23 carry” (Latour, 2005: 39). According to Latour, the difference between ANT and social construction is whether the means and tools of construction are treated as intermediaries or mediators. In ANT, “there exist endless number of mediators, and when those are transformed into faithful intermediaries it is not the rule, but a rare exception that has to be accounted for by some extra work” (Latour, 2005: 40). In ANT, “the word ‘translation’ now takes on a somewhat specialized meaning: a relation that does not transport causality but induces two mediators into coexisting” (Latour, 2005: 108). The aim of ANT, the sociology of associations, or the sociology of translation, is to trace associations: “there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (Latour, 2005: 108). Early studies of actor-networks focused on tracing the translations that led to the stabilization of a network, often foregrounding the efforts of actors such as scientists and managers. Summarizing some of the ways in which subsequent work has extended this agenda, Law (2009) notes a shift from construction to enactment and performance and from a single coherent reality to multiplicity. The move away from construction emphasizes that “there is no stable prime mover, social or individual, to construct any- thing, no builder, no puppeteer” (151). The terms enactment and performance emphasize that “in this heterogeneous world, everything plays its part, relationally” and “all of these assemble and together enact a set of practices that make a more or less precarious reality” (151). Mol’s (2002) work and the concept of multiplicity rid actor-network theory of the assumption that “successful translation generates a single coordinated network and a single coherent reality” (Law, 2009. 152). Mol (2002) suggests that the different versions of an entity enacted in different practices are just that, multiple realities, rather than different perspectives on a single object. The different actor-networks of the object can relate to each other in different ways. Sometimes, but not always, they are coordinated into a single reality. In summary, I draw from actor-network theory the principle that reality is produced in the associations of heterogeneous elements. There is an inherent uncertainty in these processes, as highlighted by the concept of translation and, especially, the concept of multiplicity. This dissertation sets 24 AN APP FOR WOMEN? out to explore the performance of gender in market practice. Next, I discuss how these principles of actor-network theory have informed the study of markets.

Conceptualizing markets as practical accomplishments

The above-discussed principles of actor-network theory have been influen- tial in informing a body of research that understands markets as practical accomplishments. The Laws of the Markets, edited by Michel Callon (1998a), forms the starting point for the interdisciplinary field of constructivist market studies. Callon (1998b), in his introduction to that volume, builds on the actor-network theory argument that science is not separate from the objects it studies, and argues that “economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions” (2). In marketing, this stream of research has worked to return markets to the spotlight as the object of study for marketing, to re- connect marketing to markets (Araujo et al., 2010). In this section, I discuss the key developments that inform my project to explore the performance of gender and diversity in market practice. As said, constructivist market studies understand markets as practical accomplishments (Araujo et al., 2010). Likewise, this approach conceptualizes the various entities populating markets as practical outcomes rather than stable building blocks. For example, this approach has explored the constitution, in market practice, of entities such as market actors (e.g. An- dersson et al., 2008; Cochoy, 2008), objects of exchange (e.g. Finch and Acha, 2008; Finch and Geiger, 2010, 2011), and business models (e.g. Dog- anova and Eyquem-Renault, 2009; Mason and Spring, 2011). In other words, constructivist market studies “stress the emergent and plastic character of reality” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a: 140). This approach directs attention to processes and favors detailed studies of specific markets. Kjellberg and Helgesson (2007a) propose a conceptual model of markets as constituted by practice. They define market practice broadly as “all activities that contribute to constitute markets” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, CHAPTER 3 25

2007a: 141). They propose a threefold conceptualization of market practice as exchange practices, representational practices, and normalizing practices. Exchange practice refers to “the concrete activities related to the consum- mation of individual economic exchanges” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a: 142). Representational practices are “activities that contribute to de- pict markets and/or how they work” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a: 142). Finally, normalizing practices refer to “activities that contribute to establish guidelines for how a market should be (re)shaped or work according to some (group of) actor(s)” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a: 143). Kjellberg and Helgesson (2007a) draw on Latour’s (1986) concept of translation to conceptualize the links between the different types of market practices. In this dissertation, I follow Kjellberg and Helgesson (2007a) in conceptualizing markets as performed in market practice. Constructivist market studies, again drawing on actor-network theory, have emphasized the participation of materially heterogeneous entities in the processes that bring about markets (Callon, 1998b; Cochoy, 2007, 2008, 2009; Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a). Constructivist market studies’ focus on processes of emergence and the heterogeneous elements involved in these processes has allowed the approach to shed light to aspects of market practice that otherwise have been either ignored or essentialized. For example, Callon (1998b) rejects both the position of economics of seeing people as calculative by nature and the sociological critiques of the unreal- ism of this position. Instead, he argues that when market actors appear as calculative agents, this is not because this is in their nature. Rather, this is seen as the outcome of heterogeneous processes of association, with economic theories as one participant (Callon, 1998b, 2007a). Likewise, constructivist market studies have highlighted the contribution of market- things and market devices – objects, frames and tools – in equipping the cognition of market actors, calculative or otherwise (Cochoy, 2007, 2008, 2009). Also, constructivist market studies, in line with Callon (1998b), maintain that economics, broadly defined, is performative. While Callon (2007a) includes in his definition of ‘economics at large’ not only academic economists but “all agents who participate in the analysis and transformation of economic markets” (336), early studies in the performativity of economics 26 AN APP FOR WOMEN? tended to explore the contribution of academic economics in performing (financial) markets. For example, MacKenzie and Millo (2003) study how the Black-Scholes-Merton option prizing model succeeded, for a while, in performing its version of an options market, to a large part because traders started using the model to calculate prices. Later research has broadened this research. Constributions from marketing, in particular, have highlighted the performativity of marketing theories, practices, and devices (Mason et al., 2015), stating that “marketing produces markets – not only, nor on its own, but still” (Araujo et al. 2010). This research suggests that, in most markets, Austinian performativity, where one theory succeeds in performing its version of the market, is the exception (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006). The more typical case is that of generic performativity, where ideas “in some non-exclusive way partake in shaping reality” (845). Performativi- ty can be conceptualized as the chains of translations linking practices appearing as ideas to practices appearing as reality (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006). Callon (2007a) emphasizes the difference between performativity and self-fulfilling prophecies. The notion of a self-fulfilling prophecy explains the success of a theory in terms of beliefs; an economic theory will predict the behaviors of economic agents, if these agents believe the theory to be true. The notion of performativity, one the other hand, “goes beyond human minds and deploys all the materialities comprising the sociotechnical agencements that constitute the world” (323). This includes tools, equip- ment, metrological systems and procedures as well as different professions, competencies and non-humans. Finally, market practice is characterized by multiplicity (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006). First, individual market actors, such as companies, do not necessarily act in accordance with a single market perspective. Rather, they may engage in diverging market practices, such as when the marketing department and product development work based on differing understandings of the consumer. Second, market practice brings together many market actors, “whose actions are based on varying definitions of the relevant envi- ronment” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006: 849). Third, many market actors engage in efforts to reshape markets. This temporal dimension further un- derscores the argument for multiplicity. When methods and practices are CHAPTER 3 27 understood as performative, we need to talk of multiple realities rather than multiple perspectives on a single reality. In this perspective, “different (yet overlapping) versions of the same objects are enacted through different practices” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006: 849). Drawing on Mol’s (2002) work on multiplicity, Kjellberg and Helgesson (2006: 850) suggest, “it is not necessary to assume that every performed inconsistency implies conflict or breakdown”. Important transformations take place in the chains of translations where ideas gain reality. “Therefore, market practices that result from translating inconsistent ideas need not be incompatible.” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006: 850). On the other hand, certain practices are practically incompatible. Even this doesn’t necessarily imply conflict. According to Kjellberg and Helgesson (2006: 850), the co-existence of multiple and potentially conflicting versions of the same entity only implies conflict or need for coordination if two or more of these versions encounter each other in a specific situation. I now move on to discussing what it means to understand gender along these lines, as a practical achievement, and, specifically, how we can conceptualize gender as performed in market practice.

Conceptualizing gender as a practical accomplishment

Drawing on the principles of actor-network theory discussed earlier, I understand gender as a practical achievement, or an effect of a continuous recursive process involving materially heterogeneous entities. The status of an individual as a woman, for example, is an effect of the association of heterogeneous elements. A woman is a hybrid collective. The vagina, in certain circumstances, contributes to making a woman (Callon, 2007a: 329). In other situations, clothing, make-up, and one’s manner of speaking might be more significant. In yet other situations, a ticked box in an online interface has relevance. Beyond individual bodies and identities, this understanding of gender directs attention to the association of gender with, for exemple, groups of people, characteristics, and spheres of life. This approach can be put to work to trace the associations that produce gendered 28 AN APP FOR WOMEN? products or market segments, for example. The identity of an electric shav- er as a product for women might depend on its placement next to other similar products, a design language that hides technology (Van Oost, 2003), and shades of purple and pink. Targetting a market segment of millennial men, again, might depend on demographic data, insights produced through a series of men-only focus groups, and Facebook’s ad delivery algorithm. Processes like these sometimes (often?) treat gender as a black box (Single- ton, 1995). Drawing on actor-network theory to conceptualize gender exposes the woman-man duality as an effect, as would any (social) constructivist perspective. In addition, the principle of generalized symmetry leads to an understanding of the sex-gender duality as an effect. Gender, in everyday parlance as well as academic research, commonly refers to the psychological, social and cultural components of differences between men and women. Sex, then, commonly denotes biological differences between men and women. Making this distinction often amounts to suggesting that sex differences are natural, while gender differences are constructed. Actor- network theory, as discussed earlier, refuses a priori distinctions between the natural and the social or the cultural. Rather, these distinctions are understood as outcomes of the processes of association. Sex and gender should be understood, symmetrically, as outcomes of a heterogeneous process of association. In order to not essentialize the difference between sex and gender, I adopt gender as the primary term for discussing the performance of differences between men and women, no matter what the supposed base for these differences. This acknowledges the tradition of applying this term to the differences that are understood as constructed and the connection of this term to feminist projects. I am not alone in arguing that sex and gender are best understood as the outcomes of the same process. This stand can be found in ethnomethodological theories of gender (Garfinkel, 1967; Kessler and McKenna, 1978; West and Zimmerman, 1987; Westbrook and Schilt, 2014), Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004) theory of gender performativity, and feminist science studies (Roberts, 2007; Fausto-Sterling 2000). Ethnomethodological theories of gender have conceptualized sex and gender as the outcomes of the same process and have explored how people construct a social reality CHAPTER 3 29

“where there are two, and only two, genders” (Kessler and McKenna, 1978: 3). Kessler and McKenna (1978) use the term gender even when referring to those aspects of maleness and femaleness that have traditionally been understood as biological. They do this to emphasize their position that “the element of social construction is primary in all aspects of being female or male” (7). They emphasize the centrality of processes of gender attribution in producing a binary gender system in practice. In Paper 1, I combine the vocabulary of constructivist market studies with Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004) concept of gender performativity and conceptualize gender as performed in market practice. My conceptualization of gender as performed should not be understood as implying a voluntaristic human subject capable of performing any version of gender at will. In countering this reading, I rely on the notion of performativity, as articulated in Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004) work on gender and Callon’s (1998b, 2007a) writings on the performativity of economics. Butler (1990: 141), then, argues that gender attributes and acts are “not expressive but performative” – they “effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal”. Callon (1998b: 2), similarly, maintains that economics “performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions”. Central to both Butler’s and Callon’s conceptions of performativity is the rejection of the single subject as the utterer and performer. Callon (2007a: 323), especially, emphasizes that “performativity goes beyond human minds and deploys all the materialities comprising the sociotechnical agencements that constitute the world in which these agents are plunged”. To denote the de- parture from exclusively human performances, Callon (2007a) sometimes prefers the term performation over performance. Saying that gender is performed, in the sense of Butler and Callon, doesn’t make gender any less real as a category of social organizing. What it suggests is that gender is a historical category that has been naturalized (Butler, 1990, 2004). Reiterative performances, performances that adhere to current gender norms, are constructed as natural, whereas transgressions of gender are frequently subject to social punishments that range from awk- ward smiles to the surgical correction of intersexed persons to violence (Butler, 2004). Especially, the body has been naturalized as determining the sex of an individual. Callon (2007a: 329), drawing on Mol’s (2002) critique 30 AN APP FOR WOMEN? of Butler, states that entities such as the vagina, “which have come to be considered as natural and therefore outside the social”, are a part of performing gender. While the vagina does not make a woman, “it contributes to making her, at least in certain circumstances” (Callon, 2007a: 329). But- ler’s take on the issue – contrary to what Mol’s (2002) and Callon’s (2007a) critique of Butlerian analysis might suggest – is remarkably similar. Rather than deny or reify biological differences, she insists in asking what are the discursive and institutional conditions under which certain biological differences become the salient characteristics of sex (Butler, 1994). The gendered and sexed body “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Butler, 1990: 136), or as Callon (2007a: 329) puts it: “the identity of each entity, human or nonhuman (including the vagina), is never set once and for all, definitively constructed”. The notions of gender performativity and economic performativity share an anti-essentialism, arguing that the category of women (Butler, 1993), like the homo economicus (Callon, 1998b), the economic man, is best understood as an outcome, the result of practice, rather than a natural category or the hidden nature of man. However, what really defines these approaches is their focus on the processes underlying ontological effects. Performativity, then, can be described as a specific understanding of the processes through which ideas – utterances, discourse, theories etc. – have effects. I argue that Butler’s definition of performativity as citationality has important similarities with the market studies understanding of performativity as chains of translations. Both assume a constitutive instability in processes of performativity – even if this is a point of contention between Butler (2010) and Callon (2010). Butler (2010) has criticized Callon of not building fallibility into his account of performativity but rather presuming that performativity works – a charge Callon (2010: 164) takes issue at, stating that he agrees with Butler in that “the general rule is misfire”. Certainly, other authors in the market studies tradition have further emphasized the inherent uncertainty of performative effects, for example by distinguishing between Austinian and generic performativity (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006). Kjellberg and Helgesson (2006) describe Austinian performativity as “situations where there is an exclusively and exceptionally strong link between a specific theory and a real market” (845) and generic performativity CHAPTER 3 31 as situations where ideas “in some non-exclusive way partake in shaping reality” (845). They emphasize that generic performativity is the general case while Austinian performativity is rare. The implication of constitutive instability has different consequences in Butlerian thinking and in the market studies tradition, and the traditions have assumed different perspectives. For Butler, this implies room for resistance and the need to locate strategies of subversive repetition, and she tends to take the perspective of marginalized individuals. As articulated in the preface to Gender Trouble, she asks, “What best way to trouble the gender categories that support gender hierarchy and compulsory heterro- sexuality?” (Butler, 1990: viii). When applied to marketing and consumption, this runs the risk of black-boxing markets and marketing. Certainly, consumer research applications of gender performativity have focused on the possibilities of resistance (Goulding and Saren, 2009), or “the complex interrelations that arise between the resignification and reiteration of ortho- dox gender norms” (Thompson and Üstüner, 2015: 257). What the market studies vocabulary adds is a focus on the details of market practice. While Butler does deal with the materiality of the body, the concept of citationality fails to direct attention to the heterogeneous networks that are the focus of the concept of translation. The vocabulary of market practice, for example, brings to light the contribution of marketing tools and techniques in performing gender. Cenceptualizing gender as performed in market practice, I seek to bring light to aspects of gender performance that have been undertheorized in previous research on gender in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior. The broad conceptualization of market practice as “all activities that contribute to constitute markets” (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a: 141) directs attention to previously ignored practices. The focus on processes of translation brings out the contribution of bodies and other materialities as well as the contribution of economic theories. Of course, market practice is not alone in performing gender. Gender is performed in, for example, the practice of law and medicine along with many everyday practices. However, the expansion of markets to new domains means that market practice becomes increasingly important as a site for the performance of 32 AN APP FOR WOMEN? gender. Next, I discuss the more specific conceptual vocabularies of Paper 2 and Paper 3.

Additional concepts for exploring the performance of gender and diversity in market practice

Paper 1, a conceptual paper, combines the ideas of economic performativity and gender performativity, as discussed above. The two empirical papers, in addition, rely on more specific conceptual vocabularies related to categorization and marketplace exclusion. In this section, I discuss the conceptual vocabularies of Paper 2 and Paper 3.

Gender categorization Paper 2 defines gender categorization as the practices of using references to gender to place boundaries around objects. Categorization, or the placing of boundaries around objects (Azimont and Araujo, 2010), performs the members of a category as similar with each other in some respect, and dissimilar with non-members. An example of gender categorization in representational market practice is gender-based segmentation. Other examples include practices such as the division of employment statistics “by sex” and the labeling of a market or a product category as “feminine hygiene products”. Drawing on a long line of feminist scholarship (Kessler and McKen- na, 1978; Martin, 2001; Butler, 1990; Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Roberts, 2007) that understands the construction of gender as deeply interlinked with the construction of sex, I include in my definition of gender categorization both instances of referring to labels traditionally understood as socio- cultural (e.g. housewife) and instances of referring to labels traditionally understood as bio-medical (e.g. female). In exploring gender categorization in representational market practices, I build on constructivist market studies work on representational practice and ethnomethodological theories of gender categorization. To study gender categorization, I rely on the conceptual tools of constructivist market studies. In this view, “social categories are not natural or CHAPTER 3 33 self-sustaining but enacted by a variety of performances and artifacts” (Azimont and Araujo, 2007: 849). Both the reclassification of a naturalized category (Azimont and Araujo, 2010) and the emergence of a new category (Blanchet 2016) have been theorized as a process of translation depending on the enrollment of heterogeneous allies such as market research, managers, and objects. Translation, in this view, refers to the basic social process by which things travel, often changing in non-trivial ways as they travel (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a). Categories are emergent, and categorization contributes to shape other entities, such as markets and organizations (Azimont and Araujo, 2007, 2010; Sjögren and Helgesson, 2007). Categori- zation is performative in the sense that it helps to bring into being the categories it means to describe. A key takeaway from this research is the focus on categorization conflicts. Azimont and Araujo (2007) study category review meetings, where a retailer and its suppliers, manufacturers of non-alcoholic beverages, discuss past performance and future prospects. The suppliers, in their presentations for the retailer, propose different ways of defining and segmenting the market. Depending on their stakes in the market, they either rely on estab- lished category definitions or seek to redefine the category of non-alcoholic beverages or some of its sub-categories. Blachet (2016) describes the emergence of the category of ethical fashion as building on a critique of existing categories. Sjögren and Helgesson (2007) describe the various ways in which pharmaceuticals are categorized. In bio-medicine, various schemes exist for classifying pharmaceuticals according to therapeutic characteristics and chemical composition. These are different from the categorization of pharmaceuticals in clinical practice, where doctors, in close relation with individual patients, enact delineations of similarity and difference. Health economics provides yet another way of categorizing pharmaceuticals. Using quality-adjusted life years as the unit of measurement, treatments for different illnesses can be categorized based on their cost-effectiveness. The work of the organization deciding on the subsidization of pharmaceuticals depends on coordinating these competing logics of categorization. Azimont and Araujo’s (2010) study of the reclassification of a petrol station network shows a confrontation between the logics of productivity and market segmentation. The authors conclude, “a categorization process that started as a 34 AN APP FOR WOMEN? technical exercise turned into a political debate about the current and future shape of the company’s network” (1017). In ethnomethodological studies of gender, gender categorization has been discussed under the labels of “gender attribution” (Kessler and McKenna, 1978), “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman, 1987), and “determining gender” (Westbrook and Schilt, 2014). Much of this work has its roots in Garfinkel’s (1967) classic study of “Agnes”. Through the case of Agnes, whom he describes as an intersexed person, Garfinkel illustrates the management of sex status and proposes “the normally sexed person as a contingent, practical accomplishment” (181). Importantly, he argues that Agnes’ practices of passing are not unique to her but rather make observa- ble that and how “normals”, too, accomplish sex status. At the same time, Agnes, according to Garfinkel, shared with persons who are able to take their own normally sexed status for granted an acceptance of the naturalness of dichotomous sex. Garfinkel’s (1967) discussion of Agnes does not explicitly separate the analytical concepts of sex and gender. Kessler and McKenna (1978) acknowledge the traditional definition of gender as designating the psychological, social and cultural, and sex as the biological, components of maleness and femaleness but elect to use gender even when referring to those aspects that have traditionally been understood as biological. They do this to emphasize their position that “the element of social construction is primary in all aspects of being female or male” (7). Kessler and McKenna’s (1978: 3) central question is, “How is a social reality where there are two, and only two, genders constructed?” Their answer is to emphasize the pri- macy of gender attribution. They conceptualize the gender attribution process as an interaction between displayer and attributor that share a knowledge of the socially constructed signs of gender. To aid gender attribution, the displayer can accentuate relevant cues, while the attributor contributes to their accentuation by selective perception. Once a gender attribution has been made, the attributor filters signs through the gender attribution that was made. West and Zimmerman (1987), in their re-reading of the case of Agnes, distinguish between sex, sex category, and gender. They define sex as “a determination made through the application of socially agreed upon biolog- CHAPTER 3 35 ical criteria for classifying persons as females or males” (127). In everyday life, sex category, “the socially required identificatory displays that proclaim one’s membership in one or the other category” (127), stands as a proxy for sex. Agnes did not possess the socially agreed upon biological criteria for classification “as a member of the female sex” (West and Zimmerman, 1987: 131, italics in original). In everyday life, however, commonsense categorization helped her preserve her categorization as a female. As also pointed out by Garfinkel (1967) and Kessler and McKenna (1978), there is a basic trust that people are what they appear to be. Finally, West and Zimmerman (1987: 127) define gender as “the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category”. Agnes, in addition to preserving her sex categorization, faced the challenge of behaving in ways that would be seen by others as “normative gender behavior” (134). Taken together, Garfinkel’s (1967), Kessler and McKenna’s (1978), and West and Zimmerman’s (1987) works suggest that both sex and gender, as traditionally understood, are socially constructed categories and interactional achievements. Further- more, these works suggest that people are assumed to have the essential sex characteristics that match their gender attribution. There exist different bases for sex/gender categorization but they are all expected to coincide. Westbrook and Schilt (2014) expand ethnomethodological theories of gender beyond face-to-face interactions. They propose “determining gender” as an umbrella term for “social practices of placing others in gender categories” (32). They argue that, in addition to everyday interaction, gender determination occurs at the level of legal cases and policy decisions, where criteria for who counts as a man or a woman is devised, and at the level of imaginary, in discussions concerning hypothetical interactions with trans-people. Westbrook and Schilt compare three cases where trans- people’s access to gender-segregated locations is at stake: a proposal allowing people to change sex markers on their birth certificates without requir- ing genital surgery, so called bathroom bills, and controversies over trans- people in sports. They find the criteria for determinging gender to vary across social spaces. According to them, there is a slow shift away from pure biological determinism, and identity-based, rather than biology-based, criteria can be used to determine gender in nonsexual gender-integrated 36 AN APP FOR WOMEN? spaces. However, when it comes to admitting actual and imagined trans- people in gender-segregated spaces, such as public restrooms, gender panics are provoked and people react to disruptions to the biology-based categorization system by “frantically reasserting” the naturalness of binary sex. Westbrook and Schilt’s (2014) work provides important direction to my work in that it suggests that different ways of determining gender do not necessarily align as nicely as suggested by earlier ethnomethodological studies of gender. The key takeaways from the ethnomethodological tradition are as follows: Gender is understood as a practical achievement. Gender categorization is understood as having the capacity to be used in order to achieve things in interaction. It is understood that there are competing bases of gender categorization, such as anatomy and identity, that are not necessarily aligned. Biology-based categorizations are understood as no less social than categorizations based on, for example, appearance. The distinction between sex and gender is itself a practical achievement. While this work gives important direction to my study, my definition of gender categorization, informed by the market studies vocabulary, differs in significant ways from the concepts proposed by Kessler and McKenna (1972), West and Zim- merman (1987) and Westbrook and Schilt’s (2014). I define gender categorization as using references to gender to place boundaries around objects. According to my view, categorization, or the placing of boundaries around objects (Azimont and Araujo, 2010), performs the members of a category as similar with each other in some respect, and dissimilar with non- members. Categorization is understood as a continuous process enacted by a variety of performances and artifacts (Azimont and Araujo, 2007). This conceptualization of gender categorization differs from the ethnomethodological perspective on gender in that it moves focus from how individuals are placed in gender categories to how gender categorization places boundaries around objects, not limited to human beings (e.g. women’s products). Also, the market studies conceptualization of gender categorization directs attention to a variety of performances and artifacts, not only interactions among individuals. Likewise, my approach breaks with the assumption of ethnomethodolgy that categorization is purely a “social” process.

CHAPTER 3 37

Marketplace exclusion In Paper 3, I bring together previous research on marketplace exclusion with science and technology studies work on the co-configuration of users and technologies. My starting point is an understanding of market participants, especially consumers, as diverse along a number of different dimensions. Research on marketplace exclusion has highlighted consumer experiences of exclusion in various market settings. Feminist science and technology studies have highlighted the failures of developers of technology to anticipate the needs of users different from themselves. I draw on these approaches to further explore the ways in which markets and marketing structures the experiences of differently gendered individuals. Here, I understand gender as an intersectional concept (Gopaldas and Fischer, 2012; Gopaldas and DeRoy, 2015) and pay attention to the intersection of gender with other categories of difference. Burgess et al. (2017) and Saren et al. (2019) propose the concept of marketplace exclusion to draw together contributions mainly from Trans- formative Consumer Research, Macromarketing, and Critical Marketing. The concept of marketplace exclusion directs attention to “the mechanisms through which certain individuals and communities are barred from the resources and opportunities provided by the market to other citizens” (Saren et al., 2019: 2). Marketplace inclusion, then, refers to the incorporation of diversity, especially the incorporation of previously overlooked and excluded groups (Henderson and Williams, 2013). Marketplace exclusion influences consumers based on race (Crockett and Wallendorf, 2004), socio-economic class (Burgess et al., 2017; Castilhos, 2019; Hutton, 2019), gender identity and expression (McKeage et al., 2018), size (Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013; Valtonen, 2013; Zanette and Pereira Zamith Brito, 2019), ability (Baker et al., 2007; Kearney et al., 2019), relationship status (Hou- ston, 2004; Lai et al., 2015), sexual orientation (Walters and Moore, 2002), and age (Gopaldas and Siebert, 2018). Marketplace exclusion has been theorized as, on the one hand, economic or physical barriers to market participation, and, on the other hand, symbolic exclusion. Barriers to participation include economic exclusion, which includes “the failure of the marketplace to provide goods and services at a price individuals can afford” (Saren et al., 2019: 2) but also phe- 38 AN APP FOR WOMEN? nomena such as “attenuated access to goods and services” in poor neigh- borhoods (Crockett and Wallendorf, 2004). Physical exclusion of consumers from the marketplace can, for example, stem from the lack of accommodations for disabilities (Burgess et al., 2017: 489). Symbolic exclusion means that consumers are “excluded symbolically either through a failure to embrace diversity and/or a misrepresentation of diversity” (Bur- gess et al., 2017: 489). While Burgess et al. (2017) mainly understand symbolic representation as patterns of representation in visual and textual representations, I argue that symbolic inclusion should also be understood as involving the ways in which products, service encounters and other in- terfaces between the market and the consumer cater for the identities of different groups and individuals. Indeed, Henderson and Williams (2013) suggest that diversity and inclusion manifest in all four elements of the marketing mix (product, price, place, and promotion), and in marketplace interactions in “business to business, business to consumer, supplier diversity, consumer to business, and consumer to consumer settings“ (1). Marketplace exclusion is seen as stemming from historical structures of oppression, such as racism, sexism, fattism, agism, and ableism (Gopaldas and Siebert, 2018; Kearney et al., 2019). According to Gopaldas and Siebert (2018: 339), “the key mystery for us to solve is not why social forces have existed in history, but why commercial forces amplify rather than mitigate these social forces”. In explaining the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of marginalized groups in market imagery, Gopaldas and Siebert (2018) speculate that these patterns of representations are explained by “a vicious circle of social and commercial forces” (339). Specifically, they suggest that aspirational marketing logics and an industry wide distribution of discriminatory work come together to co-produce cultural inertia, amplify- ing rather than mitigating the social forces of racism, colorism, ableism, ageism, and sexism etc. Aspirational marketing campaigns, selling a fantasy lifestyle, draw their inspiration from existing identity hierarchies, and, thus, reproduce these hierarchies. Furthermore, the production of marketing images is distributed across industry actors, limiting the power of individual actors to make change and meaning that there is no single actor to hold accountable. While Gopaldas and Siebert’s (2018) assertion that marginalized consumers are underrepresented and misrepresented is based on a de- CHAPTER 3 39 tailed study of lifestyle magazine covers, their discussion of the vicious circle is not based on empirical research. Saren et al. (2019), likewise, speculate on the role of marketing in producing marketplace exclusion and suggest that exclusion “can also result from the activities of retailers, marketers and cultural intermediaries in advertising, broadcasting and social media who shape the messages and measures of success, identity, and belonging in terms of the market”. According to Burgess et al. (2017: 490), consumer representations “have very real effects as they define who does and (more importantly) who does not inform the shaping of future marketing and production activities”. In order to further elaborate the relationship between consumer representations and marketplace exclusion/inclusion, I build on science and technology studies work on the co-configuration of users and technologies. Especially, I build on the concepts of user representation (Akrich, 1995), user script (Akrich, 1992), and translation (Callon, 1984; Latour, 1986, 2005). User representations, much like the consumer representations discussed above, perform marketplace exclusion and inclusion by defining who does and who does not inform product development activities. User scripts, then, refer to the materialization of these representations in products. My focus is on the processes that lead from a diverse marketplace to user representations (representing), and from user representations to user scripts (inscribing). I conceptualize these processes as chains of translations. Figure 1 summarizes the conceptual vocabulary. The concept of translation, as discussed earlier, informs my understanding of representing and inscribing in the following ways. First, the concept of translation insists that things are transformed as they are picked up by others (Latour, 1986; Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2006). Stability, rather, demands explanation (Latour, 2005). Second, translation is understood as a process with heterogeneous participants (Callon, 1984; Latour, 2005). Third, understanding effects through translation suggests multiplicity (Law, 2009; Mol, 2002). This means that the boxes in Figure 1 are multiple rather than singular – I fully expect any process to which the model is applied to showcase a diversity of users, an array of conflicting user representations, and a collection of user scripts inscribed into the product. Likewise, the arrows are uncertain. User representations do not merely, or perfectly, 40 AN APP FOR WOMEN? represent users. User representations, in turn, do not alone dictate design. And, as I will discuss below, user scripts do not determine the actions of users. The concept of translation is helpful in terms of understanding the character of the arrows in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Co-configuration of users and technologies

User scripts

Inscribing

User representa- Users tions

Representing

User representations refer to the images of users that inform design. The production of user representations can be thought of as a chain of translations that, generally, reduces complexity. I use the term representing to describe the chains of translations leading from users to user representation. Research on market research practices has highlighted the work that goes into producing representations and the ways in which this work shapes the resulting representations (Ariztia, 2015; Azimont and Araujo, 2010; Dubu- isson-Quellier, 2010; Jacobi et al., 2015; Nilsson and Helgesson, 2015; Nils- son, 2018, 2019; Stigzelius, 2018; Sunderland and Denny, 2011). User CHAPTER 3 41 representations can pertain to different facets of the user. For example, Akrich (1995) writes about the tension between representations of the user’s market role as, for example, a purchaser, and the users technical roles as, for example, a machine operator. According to her, “’the user’ is not a single entity taken on board when the project is launched, but a set of dis- parate characteristics which will not necessarily merge into a tight configuration ready to accommodate the definitive end-user” (Akrich, 1995: 174). User scripts refer to the ideas about users inscribed in the design of technical objects (Akrich, 1992; Oudshoorn et al., 2004). Innovators in- scribe in technical objects a user with specific tastes, competences, motives, aspirations, and political prejudices, for example (Akrich, 1992). In other words, innovators, in designing a product that defines and delimits the user’s possible actions, configure the user, and this struggle to configure the user is a major feature of the design process (Woolgar, 1990; Akrich, 1992; Schot and de la Bruheze, 2003). In addition to the technical competencies and actions of users, innovators also configure the (gender) identities of users or build in a gender script in the product (Oudshoorn, 2003; Van Oost, 2003). Again, I understand the process by which ideas about users become inscribed in the design of technical objects as a chain of translations. User representations take part in this process but do not alone determine the resulting scripts. Practices of product development, broadly understood, are consequential in shaping the scripts. Encounters between user scripts and users take place once a product has been launched in the market but also before that when scripts inscribed in prototypes encounter test users in usability trials (Woolgar, 1990). The encounters of users and user scripts generate further user representations in the form of sales figures and customer support queries, for example. En- counters between users and user scripts are highly consequential. A technology is likely to fail “if the user representations incorporated into the artifact fail to match the actual users” (Oudshoorn et al., 2004: 32), or if no actors come forward to play the roles envisaged by the designer (Akrich, 1992). At the same time, user scripts are understood as shaping the conduct of users (Woolgar, 1990). However, this should not be confused with technological determinism. Users will find creative and unexpected ways of using a technological product (Akrich, 1992). However, Oudshoorn et al. 42 AN APP FOR WOMEN?

(2004) emphasize that there are costs, in terms of extra work, frustration, self-doubt and anger, in dealing with a script that does not align with a user’s life and context. The script approach, while renouncing technological determinism, equally cautions against a romantic voluntarism celebrating the agency of users (Oudshoorn et al., 2004: 55). Marketplace exclusion takes place when, for some group of users, the misalignment between their lives and the user scripts means that they face barriers and costs in using the product.

Chapter 4

The case

The empirical material for the two empirical papers in this dissertation comes from a case study of a startup company developing and marketing a smartphone app for tracking the menstrual cycle. My study covers the case from the founding of the company in 2012 until June 2016. Data collection took place between March 2015 and June 2016.

The app

Clue is a free period and health tracker available on iOS and Android. The app was launched, for iOS, in July 2013. Clue for Android followed in October 2014. While the app was presented as the first step towards developing an alternative to the contraceptive pill, the company emphasized that it was not yet a contraceptive. The app, initially, allowed the user to track bleeding, pain, sex, mood (including PMS), and cervical fluid, and provided predictions for the timing of periods, PMS, ovulation, and the “fertile win- dow”, the days during the cycle when pregnancy is most likely to occur. Each category had four options. For example, under the tracking category bleeding, the user could indicate that they were experiencing light, medium, or heavy bleeding, or spotting. Under pain, the user could indicate that they were experiencing cramps, headache, ovulation pain, and/or tender breasts. The differentiating characteristics of the design were a circular representation of the user’s current cycle, the use of large buttons for tracking, and the 44 AN APP FOR WOMEN? absence of stereotypically girly design elements such as flowers or the color pink. In addition to its tracking features, the app contained information about the menstrual cycle, based on and referencing medical research. Over time, the functionality of the app has increased. While some additional tracking categories were introduced earlier, it was in connection to a redesign that a large number of new tracking categories were introduced in September 2015. The redesigned app included 23 tracking categories: bleeding, collection methods, craving, digestion, fluid, hair, pain, skin, stool, temperature, weight, emotions, energy, mental, motivation, sleep, social, appointment, exercise, meditation, party, sex, ailment, IUD, injection, me- dication, patch, pill, ring, tests, and tags. The new tracking categories, similar to the original categories, had a maximum of four tracking options. Temperature, weight and meditation were entered with a number pad, and the tags feature gave the user the opportunity to either choose from existing tags or create a custom tag by typing. The redesigned app continued to boast a non-pink design with large buttons and a circular representation of the user’s current cycle. In addition to new tracking categories, the app’s functionality has increased with the introduction of features such as analysis and the ability to share some data with others.

The company

Clue was founded in 2012. The origin story starts with the problem of nee- ding to know whether you can get pregnant or not on any given day. Clue CEO and co-founder Ida Tin explains that the idea was born out of her dissatisfaction with existing methods of birth control. The side-effects of hormonal birth control and the cumbersomeness and unreliability of other methods led her to ask , “why is it that I cannot take out my phone and it’ll tell me if it’s a day I can get pregnant or not?”. At the time of the launch in 2013, the company was working on a hardware component to go with the app. They later gave up hardware but providing an alternative to the contraceptive pill remained part of the long-term mission. During the study period, Clue was venture capital financed and did not earn any revenue. During my first fieldtrip in June 2015, two of the co- founders were travelling the world meeting investors. In October of the CHAPTER 4 45 same year, the company announced they had raised $7 million in Series A funding from two prestigious venture capital firms. During my second and third fieldtrips (in November 2015 and April/May 2016, respectively), the company was working towards proving themselves before the next round of fundraising. In November 2016, the company announced that they had raised $20 million in Series B funding. Beyond the study period, the company has started working on experiments to monetize the app, including launching Clue Plus, a paid version of the app. During the period of my study, the strategic focus of the company was growth. A key metric for the company was the number of active users. Ba- sed on the nature of the app as a tracker for a monthly cycle, the company defines an active user as a user that has used the app within the past month. In June 2015, two years after the launch of the app, the company had just passed the milestone of 1 million active users. In June 2016, the company celebrated 5 million active users. While growing its user base, the company itself has grown, constantly recruiting new team members as well as expan- ding and restructuring the office space.

Chapter 5

Methodology

Research approach

Conceptualizing gender as performed in market practice has methodologi- cal implications, and influences the choice of research sites and methods of data collection. As discussed above, gender research in marketing and consumer behavior has largely focused on the performance of gender identity in consumption and the representation of masculinities and femininities in advertising and cultural products. This has implied studying the reproduction of gender mainly through studies of consumption, observing and in- terviewing consumers, and analyses of cultural texts and images. Complementing the existing approaches, a market practice perspective on gender, markets and marketing calls for studies of a much broader ranger of practices, as discussed in more detail in Paper 1. This means moving attention from consumers to companies and other organizations, from representations to representational practice, and from cultural products to devices such as creative briefs, market research reports, and policy documents. The market practice approach is process-oriented. Gender and its categories are understood as emergent rather than stable. Furthermore, the concept of translation emphasizes the uncertainty of success in performing any specific version of reality. The concept of multiplicity emphasizes the 48 AN APP FOR WOMEN? potential for controversy. All this means that in-depth studies of gender in market practice are called for. Qualitative methods allow for this. In order to capture the important details, I’ve opted for a single case study. A single case study design allows for following developments over time, in different practices, and using multiple sources of data.

Selecting a case and gaining access

I became aware of Clue in early 2015. I had decided to focus my empirical work on the development and marketing of mobile apps, which I saw as efforts to “shape the capabilities and dispositions of consumers”, as I wrote in an overview document I presented to my supervisors that spring. To- gether with a colleague, I had collected data on hackathons that set out to solve societal and environmental problems and, typically, came up with mobile apps aimed at changing the behaviors of individuals. As I was on the lookout for additional cases, I continued collecting material on the Swedish startup space by following media coverage and social media and by attending events. Clue came to my attention through a combination of sources: In early 2015, Clue received investments from a number of Swe- dish investors and was launched in the Swedish market. These developments led to a number of articles about the company in Swedish media. Also, a friend of mine did some PR work for the company and also posted about them on her personal Facebook profile. At the time, I framed my dissertation project as a study of “tinkering with cyborgs” or of shaping the capabilities and dispositions of consumers in the development and marketing of mobile applications. I would soon adopt the term “agencing”, forcefully launched in a group of papers published online later that year and in a special issue on “agencing markets” the following year (Cochoy et al., 2016). While consumer agency and processes of agencing formed the theoretical focus for the first three years of my PhD studies, I had started thinking about the potential usefulness of a market studies perspective on gender and had written, as a course essay, a first draft of what would eventually become Paper 1. I was on the lookout for cases that could talk to issues of gender as well as agencing. CHAPTER 5 49

When Clue came to my knowledge, I had already identified health apps in general, and “fertility apps” in particular as potentially interesting for studying gender and agencing. The CEO of Clue was to speak in Stock- holm on March 24, 2015. As I signed up for that event, I went through Clue’s Facebook feed and read some online articles about or by the company. What caught my attention were a number of texts written by the company’s Head of Product, Mike Lavigne. In these texts, he described the company’s approach to design and user research. These were some of the bits that caught my attention:

“Tracking cycles is a complex problem to solve in an elegant way, particularly because we at Clue are trying to address the needs of all people who are biologically female-bodied — or, as one of Clue’s users put it, “anyone who has a uterus”. We have a long way to go, but we’re on the journey to provide a solut- ion that we feel is right. We do feel it’s important to address every variety of need, including the asexual, sexually active, the full spectrum of straight, LGBTQ, cis and even common medical conditions such as PCOS, and all possible life stages from perimenarche to postmenopausal. And we’re trying to do all that without dicing people up into a demographic, psychographic or sexygraphic. Our goal is to give everyone a utility they can use, but we had to start somewhere.” (Lavigne, 2015)

“It’s time we designers stop pandering to cultural norms, start disassembling our stereotypes, and get in touch with how people—who have a huge amount of variability—actually feel about themselves.” (Lavigne, 2014)

On March 23, 2015, I wrote in my notes:

“Clue seems like a great case. I have already earlier been thinking about studying fertility apps. Fertility apps are interesting from a gender perspective. There’s the history of birth control and the pill in empowering women and putting women in control of their bodies and lives. The rising criticism towards hormones enables the Fertility Awareness Method (FAM) to become the new way of empowering women, in control of your body without added hormones. It is also an interesting market. Startups are taking on big medical companies. Startups are building a new market. There are many tensions: nature versus technology, science versus religion (FAM has traditionally been practiced by people who for religious reasons cannot use other methods of birth control). 50 AN APP FOR WOMEN?

Clue seems even more exciting because they are trying to be inclusive in their product development. I had been thinking that studying the process that reproduces gender stereotypes would be nice but studying a company like Clue might be even better. What does it look like when a company is recognizing the performativity of segmentation and decides to fight it?”

In addition to finding Clue an interesting case for these reasons, I suspected that their ambitions in this area would help in negotiating access. I suspected that a company that has an outspoken strategy on dealing with gender might be more willing to grant access to a researcher interested in gender than a company that has not thought about the issue or has been criticized on the issue. On March 24, I attended the STHLM Tech meetup where the CEO of Clue was schedule to appear. I managed to briefly discuss with Ida. When I described my research interests, she remarked that I might want to talk to Clue’s Head of Product. I decided to do this. A couple of days later, I set out to email Mike. I considered sending a generic, polite email but decided, in the end, to focus on what I understood to be our common interests and to show how excited I was. In an email, I wrote:

“I’m a PhD student at Stockholm School of Economics where I study the development and marketing of consumer facing apps. A few words about my research and why I’m so excited about Clue: In the fields of marketing and consumer behaviour, there’s a lot of research pointing to advertising’s role in reproducing gender stereotypes and the male-female binary. The argument I’m developing is that, beyond advertising, other marketing tools and techniques take part in this construction. Consumer research and segmentation, feeding into product development and marketing communications, are two prominent examples of consequential practices that have been largely ignored in research on marketing and gender. I’ve developed this point in a conceptual paper and am now planning for a qualitative study of gender in app development, including how unconventional approaches to, for example, segmentation can make a difference.”

In the email, I suggested that we would schedule a Skype talk to discuss Mike’s work at Clue and my research. I immediately received an out-of- office reply from Mike. In mid-April, once Mike had returned, I resent the CHAPTER 5 51 email. I received a reply the same day. In his reply, Mike agreed to talk to me and vouched his enthusiasm for my research topic. We discussed over Skype the following week and Mike welcomed me to visit Clue. My strategy of showing my enthusiasm had worked. Mike became the key informant for my research. As I started my fieldwork at Clue, I wanted to find out what Clue did instead of personas and segmentation. The focus of my data collection was on how the user is represented at Clue and how these representations are used in product development and marketing. This line of enquiry forms the core of Paper 3. Gender categorization, discussed in Paper 2, emerged as an analytical theme in the course of fieldwork and analysis. Early on, I started noticing what I at first understood as different forms of feminism acting on the process. This later developed to the idea of different theories of gender, and then, different modes of gender categorization taking part in the practices I observed. Clue provides an illuminative context for studying the performance of gender in market practice. Some of the reasons for this were evident from the outset, while others have emerged in the course of fieldwork and analysis. My context of study is rich in gendered practices and discourses. Men- struation is often, in my data and elsewhere, proposed as a quintessentially female experience. Likewise, it is suggested that the worlds of technology development and venture capital are bastions of masculinity. Many apps in the category are stereotypically girly in their design – but not Clue. The app was launched as a non-pink alternative to the period tracker apps that, in the words of the founders, take their design cues from My Little Pony. ‘Hot’, or controversial, situations make visible that which is usually con- cealed (Callon 1998c, 2009), and thus provide illustrative cases for research. In the case that I have studied gender is a hot topic, whose reality is at stake and gender is a highly salient category at Clue. There is a reflexive awareness of gender stereotypes and an understanding that cultural ideas about gender are changing in a way that questions biology as determining gender. At the same time, the app is focused on a biological process that only certain kinds of bodies experience. This forces the company to relate to notions of biological sex. In other words, sex and gender are categories the company has to deal with – making it an illuminative context for studying 52 AN APP FOR WOMEN? the performance of gender in market practice. The case of Clue provides a rich illustration of the new landscape where categories of gender are increasingly questioned.

Collecting data

To study the practices of producing and using user representations, I rely on multiple methods of data collection. Interviews, ethnographic observations, documents, and online materials together provide a rich account with multiple voices. I collected the majority of the data between March 2015 and June 2016. During this period, I undertook three fieldtrips to Clue headquarters in Berlin, Germany. Figure 2 provides a timeline of data collection activities in relation to company milestones. CHAPTER 5 53

Figure 2. Timeline of company milestones and data collection

54 AN APP FOR WOMEN?

Personal interviews provided insider accounts of events. I conducted a total of 17 interviews with 8 individuals. The interviewees represented a broad range of different areas of expertise, including design, product development, user research, project management, engineering, and marketing. Most interviewees were either co-founders or early employees but a couple had only joined the company a couple of months before I interviewed them. I conducted 6 interviews with my key informant, and interviewed the remain- ing interviewees either once or twice. The interviews, while generally open- ended, varied in the degree to which they were respondent- vs. interviewer- led. Some interviews consisted of the respondent walking me through a broadly defined process, whereas others had me posing more pointed questions on an area of interest. The interviews covered past and ongoing product development processes, the general process for product development, tools for project management, market research practices, marketing, branding, fundraising, and inclusivity work. The first set of interviews, conducted in June 2015, largely focused on the overall process for product development and user research, tools and procedures, and the functions of understanding the user in different parts of the company. Later interviews, to a greater degree, focused on discussing in more detail something that had emerged as interesting during data collection, such as specific product development projects, a brand project, or fundraising. Often, I asked the interviewees to walk me through a project with the help of project documentation such as project briefs and user questionnaires. In repeat interviews, I asked the interviewees to provide an account of what had hap- pened since my last visits. I recorded and transcribed the interviews in full. Ethnographic observations allowed for following the production and circulation of user representations in action. During my three fieldtrips, I spent my days at the Clue office. Observing meetings served as an important strategy for fieldwork (Sandler and Thedvall, 2017). Initially, I decided to focus on observing meetings because I expected them to be a place where people articulate user representations aloud and on white- boards rather than just sitting silently in front of the computer. In the course of fieldwork, observing meetings gained further importance as I came to understand meetings as actors in the product development process. In the beginning of my second fieldtrip, my key informant provided CHAPTER 5 55 me with a list of their different meeting types. Other team members discussed the different meeting types and their connections to agile software development in interviews. As I was observing meetings, I noticed participants, documents, and physical settings setting boundaries to what was supposed to happen in a given type of meeting. Practically, in the end of interviews, I would ask the interviewee if they had any meetings that I could observe. I had the list of meeting types, and my key informant suggested meetings for me to attend, and, on occasion, negotiated access on my behalf. During the latter two fieldtrips, I followed a number of ongoing projects, attending the meetings related to those projects. During my three fieldtrips, I was able to observe a large variety of meetings. These included all of the meeting types on my key informant’s list (stand-up, break-out, retrospective, Friday home meeting, prioritization meeting). In addition, I attended other project-specific meetings (story- boarding, user research sessions, de-briefing after user research, brain- storming kick-off), marketing meetings including a customer support meeting, and user research sessions. I also observed several more im- promptu meetings where two team members discussed an issue. In addition to meetings, I had informal discussions with people, joined groups of people heading out for lunch, and once ran errands with the office manager. When I was not conducting interviews or observing a meeting, I sat by an empty desk or on a sofa and worked on my computer while keeping my eyes open for potential meetings to observe. In addition to observations during fieldtrips, I observed the CEO of Clue talking in an event in Stock- holm in March 2015 and attended a user event the company organized in Stockholm in February 2016. During fieldwork, I was always more observer than participant but the degree of my participation varied. In most meetings, I sat in a corner and made notes. When introducing me to outsiders, people on more than one occasion referred to me as a fly on the wall. In some meetings, I became a peripheral participant. For example, I took part in some user research sessions as the note taker, and then participated, to a limited degree, in the discussion during debriefing. As I was conducting field observations, I took notes by hand. I found taking notes by hand to be more flexible and unob- trusive than typing on a computer. As soon as possible after a period of 56 AN APP FOR WOMEN? observation, such as a meeting, usually the same or the following day, I used these notes to write more extensive notes on my computer. During fieldwork, I collected documents that were referred to me in interviews or meetings and that the company deemed shareable. This included three project briefs, a branding document, and materials either outlining future user research efforts or documenting past research. I also had limited access to the digital platforms used internally in the company. I was given temporary access to two “boards” in the company’s project management tool, Trello. In addition, I became a single-channel guest in the company’s Slack workspace. During my first fieldtrip, my key informant created a new Slack channel, named #inclusivity, and added me and a number of employees interested in inclusivity to it. The channel soon evolved into a platform for internal discussions on inclusivity and my access was revoked. During my second fieldtrip, Mike created a new channel, named #cyborg-tinkering, after the working title for my dissertation at the time, that I could use to talk to people. According to my informants, much of the day-to-day communications within a project takes place on Slack. My relative lack of access to the company’s Slack workspace limited my access in several ways. I missed out on much of the communications that took place outside of meetings, which limited my ability to observe the progression of projects between meetings. Not being a member of the channel for discussing lunch plans, I only caught wind of these plans if someone specifically invited me or if a general invitation was announce vocally. On a technical level, being a single-channel guest also meant that I could only talk to people that either were members of my channel or had already spoken to me. Finally, I collected various materials that were available online. These included video material of talks given by the founders, press releases, content from Clue’s website and social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, blog, Medium), job postings, and media articles written about Clue. These materials allowed me to capture how Clue, at various times, represented itself towards different audiences. The NCapture function of NVivo was used to capture much of the online material. Videos were transcribed and screen caps were taken of key moments in the video. CHAPTER 5 57

Analysing data

I used NVivo, and, occassionally paper printouts of key pieces of data, to analyze the data. The writing of the two empirical papers involved several rounds of coding. Initially, my coding focused on inclusivity (with sub- categories emerging along the way) and user representations (with sub- categories emerging along the way). At the same time, I did coding based on what appeared interesting in the data. After the initial rounds, writing and coding became simultaneous. Gender categorization appeared as a theme through initial rounds of coding, and led to further rounds of coding more focused on gender categorization, as I was writing and revising Paper 2. In the writing of Paper 3, my coding was informed by my initial coding on user representations and inclusivity along with the conceptual model based on previous literature.

Chapter 6

Summary of the papers

Paper 1: The performance of gender in market practice

I have submitted Paper 1 to Marketing Theory. I am currently revising the paper for resubmission to the journal. I am the sole author of this paper.

This conceptual paper puts forward the concept of market practice as a way of theorizing the role of markets and marketing in performing gender. Reading marketing and other social science literature through the concepts of market practice, performativity and translation, I discuss the performance of gender in markets. This discussion is structured in two parts. First, I discuss the chains of translations through which ideas of gender become incorporated in the products and marketing messages encountered by consumers and customers. Research on the representation of women and men in advertising suggests that advertising representations often reinforce traditional distinctions between the sexes. What the concept of market practice offers to the analysis of gendered advertising representations is tracking the networks of translations involved in the production of gendered advertising, extending the interpretive gaze of advertising research from the finished advertisements to the socio-material networks of their production. A discussion of market research and segmentation highlights moments of translation where more nuanced understandings are traded for simpler, gender-based classifications. Market research and market segmen- 60 AN APP FOR WOMEN? tation perform gender as they are translated into other practices. In addition to advertising, these representational practices are translated into product design. The translation of gender representations into product design further suggests that it is not only through language and visuals that consumers and customers encounter representations of gender. As products are designed to be held, used, and worn by certain kinds of people in certain kinds of ways, the body becomes an important interface for encoun- tering marketing ideas of gender. The second section takes as its starting point the body, and discusses how, as they become incorporated in market offerings and developed as exchange objects, bodies are gendered and valued in market practice. The aesthetic and body-centric fashion modeling market is an extreme case of commodifying gendered bodies. However, I argue that the case is more general and that most labor markets involve the valuation of gendered bodies. The valuing of bodies creates a need to manage one’s appearance. An- other example of the incorporation of gendered bodies in objects of exchange is found in exchanges where services are provided to customers. The bodies of employees and customers are part of the brand’s sociotechnical agencement and, thus, are often managed through techniques such as selective recruitment, training, and dress codes. Finally, the incorporation of gendered bodies in market offerings presents itself in a more direct form in markets where bodies and body parts become the objects of exchange. From slave auctions to prostitute review websites, these markets perform and value, or have historically performed and valued, gendered bodies, much like labor and service markets. Where body markets differ from labor and service markets is in the role that ideas of gender play in determining the propriety, legality and ethicality of treating human bodies and body parts as economic objects. The normalizing and representational practices in markets such as prostitution and surrogacy perform ideas of gender. This paper makes several contributions to gender research in marketing and consumer behavior. First, markets and marketing perform gender by circulating ideas of gender. Previous research has made this argument in the context of advertising representations of masculinities and femininities. The market practice approach extends the argument from advertising represen- CHAPTER 6 61 tations to networks of market practices. Second, markets and marketing perform gender by shaping the performances of individuals. The performances of consumers have received plenty of attention in prior research. I have extended this research by arguing that markets and marketing shape the performances of not only consumers but also, for example, fashion models, politicians, job seekers, customer service employees, and egg donors. Finally, markets structure the experiences and opportunities of differently gendered individuals. This means that differently gendered individuals have different opportunities in markets. Many markets and marketers focus on serving customers and consumers whose bodies and performances con- form to gender norms. In labor markets and financial markets, being the wrong gender, performing one’s gender in a way not “right” in the specific context, or performing gender in a way that challenges the binary system of gender often comes at a cost. This paper proposes a broadened agenda for gender research in marketing and consumer behavior.

Paper 2: Categories of gender in representational practice

Paper 2 has been conditionally accepted for publication in the Journal of Marketing Management, in a special issue entitled “Gender Impacts: Consumption, Markets, Marketing, and Marketing Organisations”. I am the sole author of this paper.

This paper theorizes gender as a category of social organizing and explores the entanglement of gender categorization in marketing practice. It has been suggested that “the interlocking cultural institutions of marketing communication and market segmentation” contribute to maintain a binary gender system (Schroeder and Zwick, 2004). Gender research in the fields of marketing and consumer behavior provides ample support this assertion. Research on the representation of women and men in advertising suggests that advertising representations reinforce traditional distinctions between the sexes. The other half, market segmentation, has received much less attention than advertising. Methodologically, research on gender representations has analyzed finished representations, such as published or broadcast 62 AN APP FOR WOMEN? ads. Few studies have looked at market segmentation, or other practices that work behind advertising. This paper proposes to extend the interpretive gaze of gender research from advertising representations to representational practice in markets. To do this, I draw on the conceptual tools of constructivist market studies, ethnomethodological literature on gender categorization, and an in- depth study of the development and marketing of a menstrual cycle tracking app. Analysis identifies three contexts that exhibit differing dynamics of gender categorization. First, in pitching the problem to investors, media, and the public at large, the company represents women as a large, homoge- neous group defined by the experience of menstruation. Second, the company tries to do away with the category of gender in its user research and design activities, with varying degrees of success. Finally, gendered language is inescapable in communications, despite efforts to severe sex from its gendered package. Across these contexts, the category of women initially appears as a useful, straightforward category that becomes increasingly problematic for the company as categories of gender multiply. The category of female takes over some but not all of the work of the category of women. Studying gender as a category of social organizing highlights the productive role of gender categorization. Gender categorization, in the case studied, takes part in performing a clear market opportunity and an important vision. Gender categorization takes part in performing relationships between the company and the app’s actual and potential users as well as between the company and funders, media, job seekers, and the general public.

Paper 3: Designing for everybody? Consumer inclusion and exclusion in digital product development

Paper 3 is an unpublished manuscript that I am preparing for submission to Consump- tion Markets & Culture. I am the sole author of this paper. CHAPTER 6 63

Previous research on marketplace exclusion suggests that representations of consumers are highly consequential in determining who comes to inform the shaping of markets. However, research on marketplace exclusion hasn’t, to date, empirically explored the practices of producing and using consumer representations. This paper draws on research on marketplace exclusion and science and technology studies work on the co-configuration of users and technology, this paper explores the chains of translations between a diverse marketplace and an evolving digital product. I conceptualize representing and inscribing as mechanisms of marketplace exclusion. Representing, here, refers to the practices of producing representations of the potential and actual users of a product. Inscribing, then, refers to building in these representations into the product. Drawing on a case study of a startup developing a menstrual cycle tracking app, this paper discusses the performance of inclusion and exclusion in practices of user research and digital product development. The findings are organized around five themes: representing exclusions, representing diversity, addressing exclusions, framing inclusive features, and pri- oritizing inclusion. In general, the case company’s practices of user research appear capable of absorbing a large amount of diversity in its user representations. Already defining the users as diverse, enabled by empathy and the framing of customer support as research, feedback from users is incorporated into increasingly broader user representations. The translations going from user representations to user scripts appear more complex as the constant presence of the need to prioritize leads the team to scope down projects with ambitious goals of inclusion. The findings propose that marketplace exclusion takes two forms: Per- forming exclusion as boundaries refers to mechanisms that exclude a group of consumers by defining them as being outside the target. Exclusion as blindspots refers to failure to reprepresent and include consumers that, in principle, are inside the frame. The paper further points to the materiality of digital products as a form of cultural inertia.

Chapter 7

Concluding discussion

The purpose of this dissertation has been to explore the performance of gender and diversity in market practice. Building on previous work in marketing research on gender and diversity, constructivist market studies, and science and technology studies, I have proposed to extend the interpretive gaze of gender and diversity research from consumption and advertising to a broader range of market practices. In the conceptual and empirical papers that make up this dissertation, I have explored the plurality of ways in which performances of markets and gender are entangled. In this final chapter of Part 1, I discuss the contribution of my research to, first, marketing research on gender and diversity, and, second, constructivist market studies. Finally, I propose a broadened research agenda for marketing research on gender and diversity.

Contributions to marketing research on gender and diversity

Marketing research on gender has highlighted markets and consumption as important sites for the performance of gender. However, previous research in the field has primarily focused on the performance of gender in consumption and cultural representations (including ads), leaving unexplored the myriad of other ways in which markets and marketing contribute to uphold a binary gender system. This tendency is largely mirrored in diversi- 66 AN APP FOR WOMEN? ty research. This stream of research, much like marketing research on gender, has devoted considerable attention to consumers’ experiences of marketplace exclusion and the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of marginalized consumers in representations such as ads and magazine covers but neglected empirical research on the mechanisms of marketplace exclusion and the role of marketing therein. The central contribution of this dissertation is to begin to fill in this gap and to bring to light the extent of connections between market practices and gender, and market practices and diversity and inclusion. First, I propose the conceptual vocabulary of market practice as a useful tool for tracing the translations where gender is performed. The main contribution of this dissertation is bringing to light the performance of gender beyond consumption and advertising. To do this I propose a market practice conceptualization of gender performance. This vocabulary understands gender and sex as performed – as the outcomes of materially heterogeneous practices. The concept of performativity emphasizes the constitutive instability of performances – the stability of gender depends on repetition, or chains of translations. This vocabulary insists on tracing translations in order to find out where stereotypes or their questioning enter the processes. Gender categorization puts focus on the way in which gender draws boundaries in market practice, as do the concepts of representing and inscribing. The broad definition of market practice as all practices that contribute to constitute markets encourages a broad view. This vocabulary turns out highly productive in pushing the boundaries of marketing research on gender and diversity. Equipped with this conceptual vocabulary, I venture beyond consumption and marketing imagery and show a large number of market and marketing practices taking part in performing gender. In Paper 1, I read previous marketing and other social science literature through the concept of market practice and shed light to gendered representational practices and the incorporation of gendered bodies in market offerings. I single out practices of representing consumers, e.g. market research and segmentation, as an important site for performing gender. I suggest that these representations not only work behind the often stereotypical market imagery docu- mented in previous research but also shape products, shopping CHAPTER 7 67 environments and prices, among others. Also, the concept of translation insist on the significance of the practices that translate consumer representations into product designs, shopping environments, and prices – for example, product development, merchandizing, and pricing practices. My discussion of the incorporation of gendered bodies in market offerings brings to light a different set of practices. In addition to the representational, normalizing and exchange practices that perform the markets for surrogacy, egg donation and sperm donation, services marketing practices, such as employee recruitment and training, likewise, configure and value the performance of gendered bodies. My empirical work, reported in Paper 2 and Paper 3, provides further evidence on the argument of Paper 1 that gender plays a role beyond consumption and advertising representations. In the case of a single company, gender categorization is performed in a number of different representational market practices and different market relationships. Beyond the advertis- er-consumer relationship, the different modes of gender categorization contribute to perform the company’s relationships to investors, journalists and prospective employees, relationships to user research participants, as well as relationships internally in terms of understanding the strategy and direction of the company. Paper 2, through its analysis of gender categorization in representational market practices, also brings to light the connections and controversies between different performances of gender categorization. The concept of gender categorization, introduced in Paper 2, brings to light the productive role of gender in organizing markets. I already hinted at this in my literature review, where I discussed the ways in which gender as a category of difference organizes knowledge production in marketing and consumer behavior. Gender categorization is used to divide consumers in, usually, two groups that are understood as reacting differently to marketing stimuli but also to group brand names and product categories (Yorkston and de Mello, 2005). Paper 2 shows how gender categorization draws boundaries around markets, products and groups of consumers. The categories of woman and female, at different points in time, draw boundaries around period tracking, female health, and femtech, and define who is to be involved in user research. These categorizations do important work in get- 68 AN APP FOR WOMEN? ting access to resources, giving strategic direction, and helping to focus user research activities. At the same time, different modes of categorization have consequences in terms of defining who is to be included. My research contributes to the literature on marketplace exclusion by theorizing representing and inscribing as mechanisms of marketplace exclusion/inclusion. Previous research has proposed the production of consumer representations as a likely culprit in producing inclusion and exclusion. My model directs attention to the chains of translations linking a diverse marketplace to user representations, user representations to user scripts, and user scripts back to a diverse marketplace. Specifically, representing and inscribing cumulatively, as a result of repreated translations, come to exclude some users and include others. While Paper 3 focuses on digital product development, the processes of representing and inscribing are likely to play a role in other practices of shaping markets and market offers. Previous research has highlighted the role of active consumer responses in advocating for greater inclusion (Scaraboto and Fischer, 2015; McKeage et al., 2018) but have done little to explore the processes underlying the responses of companies. In looking inside efforts to become inclusive, I document how inclusivity emerges as an issue in customer support framed as user research, in connection to an already broad strategy, and empathy. In implementing inclusion, the paths of different initiatives are shaped by the existing product, strategic priorities, and user representations, at least. Finally, my empirical case ventures to new territory, within marketing research on gender, in exploring the inclusion of trans* consumers as a question for gender research. While studies on cisgender men’s and women’s performancies of masculinities and femininities abound, McKeage et al.’s (2018) recent study on the vulnerability of trans* consumers remains alone in documenting the experiences of this group. Coffin et al. (2019), likewise, find that research on LGTBQ+ consumers has ignored trans* consumers, largely focusing on middle-class, cisgender, white gay men.

Contributions to constructivist market studies

Constructivist market studies explore markets as dynamic entities performed in practice (Callon, 1998a; Araujo et al., 2008, 2010; Geiger et al., CHAPTER 7 69

2012). This body of work understands entities and properties of the world as practical outcomes. Research has explored the exchange practices, representational practices, and normalizing practices that contribute to constitute markets (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007a, 2007b; Kjellberg and Olson, 2016). Research in this tradition has explored the practical construction of market entities such as product categories (Azimont and Araujo, 2007), customer segments (Harrison and Kjellberg, 2010), and business models (Dog- anova and Eyquem-Renault, 2009). This research has explored processes of valuation (Helgesson and Kjellberg, 2013) and agencing (Cochoy et al., 2016), and the production of matters of concern in markets (Geiger et al., 2014). Already in 2008, Cronin suggested that the early studies in this tradition, focused on the role of economics in performing financial markets (Callon, 1998a; MacKenzie, 2006; MacKenzie and Millo, 2003; MacKenzie et al., 2007), had overlooked the significance of gender in the performance of markets and market relationships. While later studies, as discussed above, have broadened the agenda of constructivist market studies in many ways, the field has yet to address questions of gender. Cronin’s (2008) paper, arguably coming from outside the field, remains the most significant contribution. Cronin (2008), drawing on an ethnographic study of the UK outdoors advertising market, argues that gendered typologies of consumers are cen- trally important to making and maintaining commercial relationships between media owners, media agencies, and clients. The purpose of my dissertation has been to explore the performance of gender in market practice – or how markets perform gender. Cronin’s (2008) focus on how gender takes part in performing the commercial world suggests reversing this question and asking how gender performs markets. Paper 2 adds to Cronin’s (2007) argument that gendered practices of categorization contribute to perform markets. Cronin focuses on the constant invention of new ways of classifying women’s consumption practices. Paper 2 suggests that the categories of woman and female contribute to perform a market for Clue’s product. These categories organize relationships between the company, its funders, and the app’s users. The categories 70 AN APP FOR WOMEN? of woman and female draw boundaries around markets, products and users. Gender performs markets in various representational practices. Likewise, some of the cases discussed in Paper 1 can be considerd as examples of gender performing markets. The reviewed research on the markets for egg and sperm donation and commercial surrogacy (Almeling, 2007; Markens, 2012) can be read to suggests that ideas of women as altru- istic help enact these markets as both markets and non-markets, thus in- creasing the legitimacy of extending the market logic to this area. Gendered peformances and ideas of how women are seem to play a role in performing these markets as both markets and not markets, enabling their existence. This suggests that gender is productive through normalizing practices. Finally, this dissertation contributes to constructivist market studies’ understanding of the shaping of market actors, specifically consumers. Building on its roots in actor network theory and notions of distributed action, the exploration of the shaping of the capabilities of actors has been a constant concern in constructivist market studies. This discussion has been developed under many labels: market devices (Cochoy, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011), the configuration, constitution or construction of market actors (Andersson et al, 2008; Hagberg and Kjellberg, 2010; Kjellberg, 2008; MacKenzie, 2009), and most recently under the term agencing (Cochoy et al., 2015; Fuentes and Sörum, 2019; Stigzelius, 2018; Stigzelius et al., 2018). The focus has been on how market practice shapes the capabilities and directs the actions of the consumers that are enrolled in these efforts of agencing. My focus on inclusions and exclusions in the processes of representing and inscribing asks who it is that gets enrolled in these networks, and who is not. Not all qualities of consumers’ lives, bodies and identities are moldable and they can resist the enrollment of otherwise willing consumers in these networks. This is not something inherently new to the constructivist market studies agenda, as evidenced by Callon’s (2007b) concept of orphan groups. However, the consideration of gender and other categories of difference can provide direction to this research. While the principles of actor-network theory urge against essentializing categories of difference, the analyst always has a choice in what questions to pursue and whose voices to include (Singleton, 1995; Law and Singleton, 2013). CHAPTER 7 71

A research agenda for exploring the performance of gender and diversity in market practice

The framework of market practice points the direction to a broadened agenda for marketing research on gender and diversity. Emphasizing the dependence of performativity on sociotechnical agencements, the vocabulary of market practice directs attention to the multiple ways in which ideas of gender and other categories of difference become entangled in market practice. Paper 1 outlines a broadened research agenda for marketing and consumer research on gender. In this section, I build on that outline to propose a broadened agenda for exploring the performance of gender and diversity in market practice. First, the market practice approach has implications for the choice of research sites and methods in gender and diversity research. To comple- ment the existing analyses of consumption practices and cultural texts and images, a market practice perspective calls for studies of, for instance, segmentation practices, customer experience management, and discrimination cases related to race, gender and disability, for example. This means moving attention from consumers to companies and other organizations, from representations to representational practice, and from cultural products to devices such as creative briefs, market research reports, and policy documents. Second, the market practice approach points to new markets to be studied from a gender perspective. Existing gender research has largely focused on consumer markets. Gender research in industrial marketing, on the other hand, remains non-existent (with the exception of a handful of studies discussing whether industrial advertising is sexist: Easton and Ton- er, 1983; Reese et al., 1987; LaTour et al., 1998). It might be that the existing frameworks, often focused on the visual domain of advertising, do not lend themselves as readily to the study of industrial markets, characterized by the lesser importance of advertising (Coviello and Brodie, 2001). The broader framework of market practice might be better suited to exploring questions of gender related to the key practices in industrial markets. For 72 AN APP FOR WOMEN? example, Cayla et al.’s (2013) study of business parties points to a masculine style of interaction in the rituals involved in creating and sustaining inter- organizational relationships. Similarly, the framework of market practice can be applied to the study of financial markets and labor markets, and to studying the performance of gender in processes of marketization (Çaliskaņ and Callon, 2010) and the related legal, ethical, scientific and economic de- bates. While the contested commodification of reproduction is an obvious- ly gendered example, further research is also needed on other multi-party negotiations of if and how some sphere of life should be defined as economic and organized as a market. Third, the vocabulary of market practice is well suited for intersectional analyses of gender, diversity, and market inclusion. An intersectional analysis acknowledges that each individual is positioned at the intersection of multiple categories of difference, such as gender, race, and class (Gopaldas and Fischer, 2012; Gopaldas and DeRoy, 2015). Likewise, the performance of gender in market practice is entangled with the performance of other naturalized categories of difference. The practices of valuing gendered bodies, such as recruitment and commercial surrogacy, are laden with ideas of body size, attractiveness, and class. Practices of categorization, such as market research and segmentation, commonly sort people based on multiple systems of classification – sex and gender but also nationality, occupation, and height and weight, for instance. Intersectional analyses of market practice promise to generate conclusions that are more inclusive, precise, and radical than a unidimensional focus on gender (Gopaldas and DeRoy 2015). Fourth, the vocabulary of market practice, not reducing the economy to culture, sensitizes the researcher to the contribution of marketing theories, tools and techniques in the circulation of gender ideals. Therefore, the market practice framework encourages critical reflection on the role that marketing scholars and marketing professionals play in the performance of gender in markets – and in other contexts where marketing has come to be applied. Social marketing, for example, draws heavily on commercial marketing techniques such as customer research and market segmentation (Moor, 2011), and social marketing campaigns, too, tend to reproduce gender stereotypes (Gurrieri et al., 2012). In highlighting the performativity of CHAPTER 7 73 market theories, the market practice perspective renews interest in the consequences of gendered research practices, a topic that has received little attention after the wave of feminist critiques of marketing and consumer research in the early 1990s (Bristor and Fischer, 1993; Hirchman, 1993; Joy and Venkatesh, 1994; Peñaloza, 1994; Fischer and Bristor, 1994). Fifth, the study of gender categorization in market practice gives rice to several interesting research avenues. As shown in Paper 2, gender categorization takes place in various representational market practices. Future research on gender categorization in representational market practices could explore the translation of these representations in normalizing and exchange practices. For example, how do representations of women’s interests feed into normalizing practices, such as efforts to regulate sexist advertising or changes in labor market regulations? As for exchange practices, the performance of gender categorizations in retail settings appears ripe for study. Many clothing stores present women’s and men’s merchan- dise in separate floors or sections of the store, and toy stores dedicate separate sections to girls’ and boys’ toys. Pricing is often different for products targeted at women versus men, as discussions on the “pink tax” suggest (NPR, 2018). The introduction of gender-neutral retail spaces, likewise, presents opportunities for study. Sixth, the market practice approach directs attention to the mechanisms of marketplace exclusion. In this dissertation, I have theorized representing and inscribing as mechanisms of market representation. While these concepts arise from the study technology development, they are certainly appli- cable to other contexts. Extending this framework to other areas presents many opportunities for study. How are assumption about consumers inscribed in non-technology products or service environments, for example? At the same time, there’s a need to explore other mechanisms of marketplace exclusion. Beyond company-level mechanisms, the market practice approach points to several research avenues for exploring mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in practices that cross the boundaries of individual organization. This can include studies of platforms and marketplaces as well as studies on efforts to drive change in markets. Finally, in promoting the study of specific practices and markets, the market practice approach to markets, marketing and gender resists categor- 74 AN APP FOR WOMEN? ical statements about the relationship between markets and gender. While I have largely focused on the reproduction of stereotypical ideas, prominent in existing research, the approach can also bring out cases of “crossing gender boundaries” (Peñaloza, 1994) and highlight the complex ways in which feminism, in its multiple versions, is performed in markets (Scott, 2000; Maclaran, 2012). The market practice approach can be put to work in exploring the ways in which different marketing tools and techniques, such as different ways of conducting market research, perform gender, and what their consequences are. As Arsel et al. (2015: 1553) argue, “marketing strategies that unreflectively accept the dominant cultural distinctions between ‘male’ and ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, and capitalise on social expectations and stereotypical sex roles, may be exploitative and thus ethi- cally suspect: they perpetuate and reinforce the oppressive discourses and practices that are linked to social and gender inequality”. Drawing on the conceptualization of performativity as chains of translations, I have suggested that ideas of gender transform as they travel. Some things are added and others get lost in translation. In this process, ideas about gender – ideas about male and female characteristics, theories on the causes and consequences of gender difference, and views on the ethics of gender issues – combine with different forms of market knowledge, including economic theories and the simultaneously cultural and economic work of marketing. Understanding how markets and marketing come to perform stereotypical notions of gender, therefore, requires in-depth studies of market practices. Following translations in these processes can help to answer how stereotypes enter practices and stick, or, alternatively, how more reflexive notions enter the processes and gain ground.

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Part 2 Research papers