Gendering old age: The role of mobile phones in the experience of aging for women

Abstract

Although the mobile phone is currently one of the most pervasive communication technologies, little discussion of it has been framed within a gender perspective and fewer of those discussions from an aging perspective. The study focuses on older women as a meaningful group; one that is constantly underrepresented in academic and commercial studies of the mobile phone. The focus of the research is on the use of the mobile phone by older Portuguese women using a Life Course approach. The key findings are that the mobile phone has different roles and affordances depending on women’s life stages. If it is true that young women show a higher pre-disposition to a more diversified and intense use of the mobile phone, older women do not always correspond to the stereotype of lack of interest or skills, on the contrary the mobile phone seems to play a very important role in many of these older women’s lives.