Pregnant women and those experiencing the early years of motherhood have used online forums for many years to share experiences and seek information. Now there are hundreds of apps that have been designed for similar purposes. As part of an integrated research program looking at apps and other digital media for pregnancy and parenting, I have been researching these apps using several approaches. In a survey of 410 Australian women who were pregnant or who had given birth in the past three years, I found that almost three-quarters had used at least one pregnancy app, while half of the women who already had children reported using a parenting app (see here for an open access report on this survey and here for a journal article about it).

With Gareth Thomas from Cardiff University, I have also conducted a critical analysis of the content of pregnancy apps themselves. This involved analysing all pregnancy-related apps offered in the two major app stores, the Apple App Store and Google Play. We examined the app descriptions, looking for how the developers marketed their apps and what they offered. See here and here for articles that have been published from this analysis. Update: we have now published an article focusing on apps for expectant fathers here.

This study found that the apps designed for pregnant women represent pregnancy as a state in which women must maintain a high degree of vigilance over their own bodies and that of their foetuses.

Many apps promoted this level of self-monitoring, often seeking to render the practices aesthetically-pleasing by using beautiful images of foetuses or allowing women to take ‘belfies’ (belly selfies) and share these on social media.

Among the most surprising of our findings were the large numbers of pregnancy-related games designed for entertainment. These include pregnancy pranks such as fake foetal ultrasounds to fool people into thinking someone is pregnant. We also found many games for little girls that are on the market. The encourage girls to give pregnant women ‘make-overs’ so that they will ‘feel more confident’ and look beautiful, ready for the birth. Some even let players perform a caesarean section on the characters, who remain glamorous and serene even on the operating table. The types of messages about pregnancy and childbirth that are promoted to their young female users are troubling.

Other apps are directed at men who are becoming fathers, although there were far fewer of these apps compared with those for pregnant women. We noticed from our analysis of these apps that even though quite a few of them are marketed as being written ‘by men, for men’, they typically portray the father as a bumbling fool, who requires simplistic or jokey information to keep him interested in the impending birth of his child.

Men are advised not to stare at attractive women and to constantly reassure their partners that they find them attractive. Foetuses are compared to beer bottles so that men can learn about foetal development in supposedly unthreatening ways.

Our overall finding, therefore, is the highly stereotypical gendered representations of pregnant women and expectant fathers in these apps. Women are encouraged to use apps to achieve the ideal of the self-monitoring ‘good mother’, closely tracking their bodies because they have their foetus’s best interests at heart in every action they take. They are expected to celebrate their pregnancy and changing bodies – there is little room for ambivalence. Their male partners, on the other hand, are assumed to be uninterested and to require nudging to act in a supportive role to their partners. And little girls are encouraged to accept and perpetuate the ‘yummy mummy’ stereotype in playing the pregnancy games that are marketed to them, and to view caesarean sections as a quick and easy way to give birth.

This post has been republished with permission from the author, and can be found here.