
How period trackers have changed girl culture - matco11
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/how-period-trackers-have-changed-girl-culture/
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eveningcoffee
As the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data
about their users cycle into a monetary value.

Is there research how certain periods of the cycle would affect women shopping
behaviour (or behaviour in general)? I am asking this to understand how much
value is in such information.

Perhaps there are other aspects I am overlooking?

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onion2k
_As the app mentioned is free, I would deduce that they try to turn the data
about their users cycle into a monetary value._

There are good reasons why people might want to make this sort of app beyond
selling the data. There's a huge potential for health care service providers -
if women don't need prescription drugs or appointments to see their doctor,
and any other medical issues are resolved more easily because there isn't the
problem of the drugs interacting with the pill, then that represents a vast
saving in the cost of supplying services.

~~~
eveningcoffee
The maker of one of such app mentioned, Clue, is a Berlin based startup:
[https://www.helloclue.com/company.html](https://www.helloclue.com/company.html)

I guess that 4 people do not work for free. I understand that _There 's a huge
potential for health care service providers_, but how could this company get
money out of this? This app is free for everyone. I do not connect the dots
why one health care service provider should fund it. So perhaps you could
elaborate it from this point of view?

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onion2k
In the case of Clue it looks like they are selling data insights, although it
looks more like they're interested in overall trends rather than individuals
(caveat: based on their marketing). They're already quite big at 22 staff (the
4 you saw on the site are the founders), and they're still hiring. That's all
paid for with VC cash at the moment. I don't imagine they can easily cover
that level of burn without targeting enterprise customers once the inventment
runs out, which likely will be things like white label apps sold directly to
health care providers - in European countries there's often one major provider
that's run by the government. Selling a white-labelled app to them that can
save the provider a large sum of money wouldn't be that hard.

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eveningcoffee
Yes, but this one insurance instance is run by the state or directly
controlled by the state.

Are women really so naive that they would provide such information to the
state?

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StavrosK
I never understood the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary
process that half of all people have.

~~~
xyzzyz
It's not unlike the stigma behind a completely natural and necessary process
that almost all of people have, which is defecation. Operationally speaking,
the two are very similar. So, why is there a stigma behind defecation?

~~~
braythwayt
I don’t know about operational speaking, but epedemiologically speaking, the
two are very different.

One of them is associated with e. coli, a lethal bacterium that even in modern
times and developed nations kills people on a regular basis, e.g. Walkerton,
Ontario, where seven people were killed by improperly treated drinking water
in 2000:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak)

It’s easy to see why humans have developed behaviours and social stigma around
defecation.

Menstruation is very different. Our social behaviours around it may have more
to do with our social behaviours around genders, sexual availability, and
other stuff. I’m not an anthropologist, so I’ll just stop here before I dig a
hole for myself.

I’ll just note that the two are very unlike in very important ways.

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xyzzyz
I'm not a native speaker, so forgive me for not expressing myself clearly
enough, but isn't urination also considered to be defecation, or does
defecation in English refers only to the "number two"? I'm asking, because
urine is mostly sterile.

However, my point was that while there are a lot of obvious differences,
defecation is similar enough to menstruation, such that it's not surprising
that stigma is also similar.

~~~
braythwayt
I’m only familiar with the word “defecation” being used to denote expelling of
faeces:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defecation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defecation)

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zkirill
It must be fascinating to work on an app where the target demographic is
slightly less than half of the world's population. The CEO's Twitter feed is
very interesting too.

[https://twitter.com/idatin/status/659853258496851968](https://twitter.com/idatin/status/659853258496851968)

What may seem as a simple tracker app on the surface is actually a very
complicated product tackling many problems all over the world.

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Udo
To someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s like me, this seems like a strange
regression in some ways. The overwhelming majority of girls were on the pill
pretty much when they became sexually active, and when I look at my age group
right now, that's still the case to this day. The pill was considered normal,
safe, and liberating. Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced,
and of course there was a completely reliable schedule that came with it.

Just two decades ago, period trackers would not have been all that useful to
most people. That's a big culture shift.

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yumptonpa
You think it's a good think that the majority of women were resorting to a
drug to cope with a normal healthy body function?

I think it's good if more women are able to cope without the drugs.

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golergka
I think that the pill is supposed to "cope" with potential unwanted pregnancy,
not with periods.

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yumptonpa
> Many said their menstrual problems were greatly reduced, and of course there
> was a completely reliable schedule that came with it.

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golergka
Thanks, I can read. My point is, while this might be a desirable side-effect,
this is not the reason women are on the pill.

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mkaziz
Actually, a lot of women who have really bad periods sometimes specifically go
on the pill to reduce their intensity. Source: friends in med school who have
gone through their ob-gyn rotations.

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golergka
Wow, I had no idea. Thanks.

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toomuchtodo
Just to add to mkaziz's info, my wife specifically went on the pill in her
teens, and was on it through her early through mid twenties specifically to
address how painful her periods were.

Its not well known, but some women's periods can be debilitating (several days
where you experience intense pain and cramping, where you don't even want to
get out of bed).

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facepalm
Is it really such an issue in the US? I find that hard to believe. I can
imagine it is not a popular subject, just like other subjects of hygiene. But
that is not the same as being stigmatized.

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jacquesm
Period trackers don't protect against STDs, and neither does 'the Pill'.

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falcolas
And like other "rhythm" based contraceptives, they are not great protection
against pregnancy either.

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glossyscr
A bit click-baity title since the product's USP is not even mentioned:

When to have unprotected intercourse with a 'lower' probability of getting
pregnant

EDIT: Thanks for the downvote, please elaborate

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peteretep
That is explicitly mentioned in the article.

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glossyscr
true, I was too fast but the mention in the article feels more like a side
benefit, from what I heard it's one of the core features, here the snippet:

"They also can record when you had sex (Clue’s icon for protected sex is a man
wearing a tie) or remind you to pack tampons"

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peteretep
There's a much longer snippet further down

