Irene Mwendwa wants to prove the internet’s design is a women’s rights issue

Irene Mwendwa hails from Machakos, a small village nestled in the Eastern part of Kenya, about 63 kilometres southeast of Nairobi, the country’s capital. The name means flowers. She carries this with her: the bloom, the light, the beauty that flowers bring into spaces. She describes herself as a farmer, a firstborn, a young African woman trying to survive in Nairobi.

She is also a tech lawyer who has spent years documenting how the internet punishes women leaders.

In 2024 and 2025, the world witnessed a super election cycle. Over 70 national and local elections happened across 60 countries. It was the most elections the world had seen in over a decade. Technology, people said, would be the great equaliser. Digital platforms would amplify voices. Women would finally have the tools to compete.

Despite the promise of digital tools as a great equaliser, the data reveals a stark regression in global leadership. According to the United Nations (UN) Women, the share of women in cabinet-level positions slipped from 23.3% in 2024 to 22.9% in 2025, leaving just 27 countries globally with a woman at the helm.

Mwendwa was not surprised. She has been studying this for years. She knows why.

Mwendwa’s work starts with a simple observation: the data does not represent us. It does not look like us. It does not speak like us.

“African women, we are colourful. We are excitable. We excite people. We have vigour,” she says. “If you look at how data is presented and used to build technologies and innovation, this always falls out. And it’s not because it cannot be done. It’s because the standard is a white male standard.”

According to Mwendwa, the internet was built in English. The algorithms that decide what content gets seen, what behaviour gets rewarded, and what voices get amplified all reflect that origin. And when diversity, equity, and inclusion programs began to be rolled back at major tech companies, the problem worsened.

“If there were 10 women, African women or black women or women of colour in these companies, the numbers have dwindled significantly,” Mwendwa says. “You’ll be going online and feeling like there’s just something off. And that’s because the people who were hired and who were fighting for us in some of these companies are no longer there.”

This lack of representation is a structural failure with tangible consequences for the continent’s digital infrastructure. When fewer African women build technology, the resulting products often fail to account for the unique contexts and realities of half the population.

This gap creates systems that, at best, ignore women’s needs, such as the significant gender gap in mobile internet usage across Sub-Saharan Africa, and at worst, actively harm them. Without women in the room to influence algorithmic logic, technology can become a tool for technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), where platforms prioritise engagement over the safety of vulnerable users.

Mwendwa studies what she calls digital political culture. It is the phenomenon of how some groups of people are rewarded for jokes online, while other groups are punished for the same behaviour.

“We will enjoy memes of a few male leaders where we’re saying we connect with this gentleman because they are charismatic,” Mwendwa explains. “Whereas when it’s a woman leader, whether political or in corporate settings or community leadership, when memes are going around about who they are, they end up being punished by the same content.”

Mwendwa doesn’t think this is accidental. Social media platforms are designed to reward engagement. Polarising content moves faster. Attacks generate more clicks. Women leaders, especially young women trying to enter politics, face coordinated harassment campaigns that platforms profit from but do not stop.

She points to a case that still haunts her: Marielle Franco, a Brazilian councilwoman murdered in 2018. Franco was a vocal advocate for climate justice and land justice. She challenged gender norms. She faced sustained online attacks—coordinated, brutal, public. Then she was killed.

“Most of the people who were engaged in very big coordinated online attacks have never been apprehended,” Mwendwa says. “Nothing has ever happened to them. Most of them continue to engage every day online and continue attacking other women.”

One of the things Mwendwa has investigated is how platforms treat verified accounts. Many women leaders have blue checks—Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. The verification is supposed to signal credibility.

“They believe this person is high ranking,” she says. “The way people engage with them is not the same way they engage with you and me, who may not have a big following. So they exclude certain categories of people from protection.”

Mwendwa warns that women are punished for defending themselves online, a statement corroborated by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) research showing that 73% of women in high-visibility roles like journalism face online violence, leading many to simply disconnect.

“People expect a woman to communicate a certain way,” Mwendwa says. “People expect a woman to be affiliated with certain things—religion, a political party, a culture. You’re supposed to act in a certain reserved way. So you can see how this design of the internet punishes certain groups of people. It’s a structural issue.”

The economics are straightforward: polarisation is a feature, not a bug. For platforms, a coordinated attack on a woman leader generates high-velocity engagement; replies, quote-posts, and shares, which translate directly into more ad impressions. While the platforms realise these gains, the “social cost” is externalised to the women.

The price of visibility is measurable. Data from Plan International’s ‘Free to Be Online?’ report reveals that 58% of girls and young women globally have experienced online harassment, with 25% of those targeted opting to disconnect or limit their public discourse to avoid further abuse.

The reason coordinated attacks continue, Mwendwa argues, is simple: there are almost no consequences.

Platform offices are not based in Africa. This makes legal action difficult. Nigerian authorities took Meta to court over data privacy violations in 2024. The case took two years, with Meta having to pay a $220m fine for unfair, discriminatory practices and a settled $32.8m penalty regarding user data privacy. As of publication time, Meta has yet to fully pay the fine. “Many governments end up saying the social media platform offices are not based in our countries, and therefore it’s quite hard to investigate, to address it in our court systems,” Mwendwa says. “It can take a long time. It can be quite expensive. You will need data sets, evidence, and a lawyer coming from the global north to testify in a Nigerian court.”