The Financial Lives of Sex Workers

OVERVIEW

Working with a multidisciplinary, multinational team, we engaged a legally, culturally and financially marginalized community in an effort to understand their financial relationships and behaviors.

To understand and accurately tell their human stories, we sought to:

• Understand how sex workers manage their personal finances

• Learn about barriers sex workers face while navigating financial systems, and

• Uncover how money affects views of their personal and professional identities

DELIVERABLES

• User Research Profiles

• Final Presentation of Findings

Learning to Define Sex Work

Sex work is often stigmatized and reduced to one-dimensional stereotypes. However, stories from individuals within this community paint a more complex picture.

We sourced research participants through our social networks, developed a discussion guide, and interviewed six participants who self-identified as sex workers. Each participant had a unique story to share and often worked in multiple roles across the industry. These roles include:

• Sexual Surrogacy

• Porn

• Domination (“domming”)

• Camera modeling (“camming”)

• Erotic Modeling

• Sugar Baby

• Erotic Massage

Key Questions Asked

1. How do you manage your finances?

2. How do you navigate traditional financial systems that may not recognize your work as legitimate or legal?

3. How does money play a role in how you view your work and/or yourself?

Crafting a Discussion Guide

With a foundation in contextual knowledge and a framework for question areas to be addressed, we crafted a structured yet flexible discussion guide to frame our in-person interviews.

Finding and Interviewing Sex Workers

Through a stream of contacts and their friends, our team was able to schedule interviews with a set of six participants with diverse linkages to the sex worker community.  Each participant had a different story to share and contributed invaluable insights to our research. 

Emerging Themes Through Mind Mapping

Leveraging mind maps allowed participants to explore themes they spoke of in their interviews and unlock ulterior feelings, motivations, and behaviors not previously discussed.  Participants were asked to draw maps with themselves in the center, then associate words and ideas around money/finance that branched out from the center.  They then highlighted areas of stress (in red), areas that inspire and bring hope (in blue), and discussed their map with us afterwards.  Through this process, we uncovered a greater theme of power (and lack of power) underlying our discussions around money and finance. 

Observation to Insight

As a team, we began by sifting through our interview notes and compiled key findings on post-it notes. Using the rose-bud-thorn methodology, we clustered post-it notes and engaged in the lively discourse of defining insights, helping us further to understand a greater picture of interconnected insights. 

Mapping Emergent Themes

Throughout our research we discovered a common linkage in the experiences and decisions of our participants; the near constant negotiation of multiple spectrums of power.  As we sought to better understand and communicate the role that Power plays in the lives of our participants, we mapped their experiences, roles and relationships on a multiple spectrum of Power.

Consensus & Articulation

Together as a team, we reviewed our interview notes and mind maps, then used affinity clustering to categorize the notes among common themes. This helped us identify rich insights about our participants in terms of their financial practices, long-term goals, and perceptions of their identity as sex workers. We told their story in a final presentation that covered these major insights:

INSIGHT #1

Sex Workers access financial and professional knowledge through their community.

INSIGHT #2

Sex Workers face cannot capitalize on traditional financial systems - accordingly, many develop distinct habits, practices, and work arounds.

INSIGHT #3

More than just money, sex work is about forging an individual identity around ones body, sexuality, and empowerment.

KEY INSIGHT

Because of legal vulnerability and social taboo, Sex Workers are required to constantly negotiate internal and external power dynamics.

Interview Summaries

In order to communicate individual responses and their connection to broader insights, we crafted single page synopsis for each individual interviewed.

REFLECTION

This work demanded that we proceed in a spirit of reciprocity, empathy and active listening. Each person we interviewed shared very intimate, at times emotional stories and it was our duty to create a safe, respectful space. Anonymity and respect was of utmost importance.

We also recognized that there was a self-selection bias. This particular group of participants consider themselves (mostly) empowered by sex work and were willing to volunteer for our design research project, but we must acknowledge that there is also a more vulnerable subset of sex workers who do not share this experience.