Menstruation. It's not many people's favourite
dinner table topic.
But even if you recognise there's nothing embarrassing
about your period, you might still file it under personal
or try to be discreet about it.
This conversation vacuum means there are still huge gaps
in our understandings of our bodies.
But not everyone is clueless. There are people out there
who know more about our cycles than we do.
And for them this intimate knowledge is just good business.
I've been looking into period tracking apps and why
they're worth so much money. I've also been learning how
our hormones are making us buy stuff without us even realising.
I've searched period tracking and there are loads and loads that come up.
I'm going to download the two ones that I know
are the most popular ones.
That one, right. So I'm just gonna keep filling out both these apps
for the next couple of weeks and I'll report back.
These apps help you avoid pregnancy or plan it
by analysing information about your cycle that you input daily.
Female technology or femtech is now its own booming industry
but it did take a while for app developers to start thinking
seriously about reproductive health.
Back in 2015, when Apple put out its health kit,
it could track all kinds of information about your health, right?
It had the capacity to track all kinds of really specific data points.
Even what your sodium intake was.
– Health. Woo!
But it didn't have any capacity to track menstruation,
which was, you know, an odd choice given that women
have needed to keep track of that for ages.
And so we've seen a big change, right, from sort of
the self-tracking space neglecting women's health altogether,
to, you know, over the past few years there's been a billion dollars
of investment from 2015 onward in femtech.
There are hundreds of apps that are specifically oriented
towards tracking specific aspects of women's sexual
and reproductive health.
So it's just exploded as an area.
We are just heading to Kings Cross station now and we're going to find
some women, hopefully on their lunch break, and ask them a bit
about their period apps.
– Who are you going to talk to? – I don't know.
Do you use a period tracking app?
– Yes. – Yes, I do. – Yes.
– It does ask quite a few things.
– The heaviness, the lightness.
– How you're feeling, your mood, your flow.
– How many hours of sleep you've got.
– How sexually active you are.
– Differences in any pain or discharge, things like that.
– What your skin's gonna be doing. What your hair's gonna be like.
– Stuff to do with your sex drive.
– There's a lot actually that you can kind of put in.
What's weird about this app is that it's supposed to be
just for tracking your fertility, tracking your period and it's like
your own personal thing.
But there's just so much extra content in here.
There's polls, there's forums. It's almost like its own
social media platform, all based around menstruating.
Poll of the day. How do you deal with PMS?
Exercise, chocolate, cry or sleep? What's your go-to period product?
What fabric underwear do you wear? Do you douche? No.
Why are we giving away all that amount of data if it's
not giving us back any kind of analysis that is related to this data.
They just give us back two sets of information.
When was our period and when is our fertile moment.
Where does the information go? Have you thought about that?
– No. I really don't know.
– Oh my God, yes. Where does that information go? I have no idea.
– God, I never even thought about that. I never thought about that.
– So there are likely at least four ways in which your data could be used.
One, it could be sold directly to other companies for
marketing purposes, for advertising purposes.
Two, it could be shared with other parties and you don't even know
who those third parties are.
It could be shared with research institutions for research purposes.
Or it could be aggregated to form different profiles and
those profiles can also be sold.
– Aggregated data is usually anonymised.
So if you're giving information about women sort of as a group, right,
you might give information about the average among your users
or kind of trends among your users.
This person is likely to get pregnant, is likely to get sick and so on and so forth.
Here we go. Literally two hours ago, I filled in a poll
on the app which asked about UTIs, urinary tract infections.
I filled it in. And then I go on Facebook and this is there.
OK. I have honestly 100% never had this advert before. Not once.
So it turns out that our bits are being mined for profits
and through apps, we've basically become a silent partner.
But hormonal cycles were aiding sales targets long before femtech was a thing.
Basically a mating and parenting trade-off that happens
within the timespan of about 30 days.
Day one is when women get their period.
Oestrogen is going to increase over the next 14 days.
Our sexual desire increases. Non-human primate females,
when their oestrogen levels are high, they're actually becoming
more physically aggressive, using threatening gestures
and even physically attacking other females in their group
who they're competing with for the attraction of partners at that time.
In humans, this is kind of acted out indirectly.
Marketers are now learning how to exploit these subconscious drives
to sell us things we didn't even realise we wanted.
– What we found in our research is that it's increasing women's preferences
for cosmetics, sexy clothing.
But whatever the product, women are going to be more
receptive to the message if it's framed in a way that
communicates that this product is going to help them compete
with other women.
As soon as the egg is pushed out, another hormone takes off –
a hormone called progesterone, which is a hormone that's
very critical to maintaining a pregnancy.
That's going to increase women's preferences
for consumer products that are associated
with perhaps parenting, or nesting behaviour.
Products associated with home goods, women would be
particularly interested in when progesterone is high.
So when you take these biological insights and
combine them with all the data we're throwing out there,
where do you end up?
Recently brands have started to catch up with this information,
getting down to that fine-grained detail on how we can
target consumers using the information about
women's hormone cycles.
Marketers are kind of agnostic toward consumer welfare
and more focused on the bottom line
and they always have been.
This isn't new now that we can reach consumers
in a more directed or targeted way and that's where the knowledge comes in.
If you know about it, you can correct for it.
I do really believe that there are like huge benefits to knowing
what's going on with your body.
And for lots of people, myself included, that means
tracking your cycle.
I'm going to try and keep an eye on it and maybe think
about the kind of things that I'm buying and see whether it could be
my hormones talking.
And I'm definitely, definitely going to get a less creepy tracking app.
Thanks very much for watching. If you have any thoughts,
leave them in the comments below.
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