Continuing Tradition or Allowing for Transformation?- Online Dating as a Potential Site of Gender Innovation

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 12. Dating, Friendship, and Intimate Boundaries

Abstract

Lagging gender stereotypes within heterosexual romantic relationships persist despite broader change towards gender equality within the public sphere. Online dating is a novel site for relationship initiation that may provide a social context for gender innovation. However, as a novel site, online dating is marked by relative ambiguity in terms of the norms of interaction and roles that are expected and therefore may cause individuals to continue to utilize existing traditional gender stereotypes to reduce uncertainty. This article examines how partnered heterosexual individuals engage in sensemaking about dating through relationship formation narratives, focusing on how online dating app meeting relates to the use of gender scripts and traditional gender stereotypes of masculine agency and female communion. The results show that women who met their partners through an ODA did not utilize more agentic language in their relationship formation narratives than women who met their partners through a non-ODA context. Instead, ODA women used more communal language than non-ODA women, revealing a double-down on traditional gender stereotypes within this novel technological meeting context.

Author

• Cristina Zito, University of California-Davis