Mwendwa says online platforms and data standards can penalise women leaders. UN Women data shows women’s cabinet share fell in 2025.
Irene Mwendwa, a Kenyan tech lawyer, is calling attention to how online platforms can reinforce bias against women in leadership.
Her argument lands as new UN Women figures show women’s political leadership dipped in 2025, after the 2024 to 2025 “super election” period.
In a TechCabal profile, Mwendwa says the internet’s design, meaning the rules and defaults behind platforms, search, and data displays, should be treated as a women’s rights issue.
She has spent years documenting how women leaders are punished online, including through harassment, skewed visibility, and narratives that spread faster than corrections.
Mwendwa’s starting point is data. She argues that the “standard” ways data is collected and presented often do not reflect African women’s identities and contexts. Data standards are the templates used to sort, label, and summarise people at scale, like putting everyone into a few boxes in a spreadsheet.
Her comments follow the 2024 and 2025 super election cycle, when more than 70 national and local elections took place across 60 countries. Many observers framed digital platforms as a leveller that would help underrepresented candidates reach voters cheaply.
But UN Women reported a decline in women’s cabinet-level representation from 23.3% in 2024 to 22.9% in 2025. It also said only 27 countries had a woman leading government in 2025.
More African policymakers and civil society groups are likely to push platforms for clearer rules on political harassment and coordinated attacks.
For founders building social, media, and civic products, Mwendwa’s critique is also a product question. If ranking, identity fields, and moderation workflows are biased, the output at scale can be biased too.
Expect more scrutiny on how “neutral” platform choices, like what gets recommended, what gets labelled, and what gets removed, shape who can participate safely in politics and public life.
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