“I Like That It’s My Choice a Couple Different Times”: Gender, Affordances, and User Experience on Bumble Dating

Abstract

The dating app Bumble has been lauded as the “feminist Tinder” largely because of its defining feature: Only women can initiate the conversation after a match. Using in-depth interviews with 14 users, this research explores cisgender women’s experience of Bumble, through an affordances framework. The findings show that women strategically use the various affordances of the app to not only look for matches but also to actively avoid harassment and danger. The implications of this “negotiated use” as invisible gendered digital labor, as well as the overall limitations of Bumble as a “feminist” app focused on choice, are discussed.