Other Women's Jobs // A Day In The Life & Career Of Mallory Knodel

NAME: Mallory Knodel

JOB TITLE: Technologist & Human Rights Expert/ Executive Director, Social Web Foundation/Founder Internet Exchange

Location: Washington (US)

Mallory is a public interest technologist working with nonprofits at the intersection of internet governance, digital rights, and emerging technologies such as AI. Her role is to ensure that human rights advocates, technologists and policy experts all share a common language. She straddles both the human rights and the technical engineering worlds, working to bridge this gap in service of social justice.

She leads initiatives that promote privacy, free expression, and access to information while addressing equity and inclusion challenges in digital spaces by integrating human rights principles into technology standards and real-world deployments

Today we discover a day in the life and career of Mallory Knodel:

8AM:

My day begins by checking my agenda. My schedule is full of meetings with a wide variety of people: sometimes as a board member for another nonprofit, sometimes with my own team, and often with colleagues across the digital rights and policy space. On other days, I might be meeting over coffee or lunch with someone new to the field, such as a junior technologist or researcher, because mentoring and building community are an important part of my work. Now if I’m travelling for work this is often when my day officially starts over a breakfast work meeting.

10AM-Noon: 

I would say from 10 to noon, I'm usually doing a lot of meetings or actively attending working group sessions remotely. Similar to the eclectic number of meetings that I'm in, I also spend a lot of time on email. A lot of people do a lot of email, which is not glamorous, but maybe to make it more interesting, I think I would want to talk about how a lot of my work and my community building happens in encrypted messaging apps like signal and WhatsApp, where people are sharing information. They're sharing links. We're talking through different proposals and using the “whisper network” productively, to stay up on what’s happening across these two separate fields. It takes a community to be able to cover all of the vast amounts of tech and human rights issues that are out there. So I would categorise these online check-ins as a kind of ongoing conversation, which is a really big part of my job.

2PM:

Okay, so now we're at 2pm and this is when I have a little bit more space; Europe has gone to bed, and I have the opportunity to sit down and work on certain things on my own. During this time I try to build knowledge which is either in the form of writing, writing posts, conducting research, or it could also be preparing talks, preparing slides, getting ready for a workshop or conference presentation, getting ready for a speech.

Mid afternoon is really good for that kind of time, because I can sit and think. My process is typically when I have a new idea that I want to push out in the world, I usually start with a talk. Sometimes my bright ideas come in the very middle of preparing to be on a panel with other people, because when I'm preparing for a live talk or event, I actually put a lot of pressure on myself to say something new and novel that no one else has heard before and to come up with a bright idea, so that people haven’t wasted their precious in-person time to attend a session.

Live discussions are also discursive with the other panelists and with the audience so that usually sparks something new for me. I then try to write up that big idea as a short blog post or build it into a bigger issue paper, or even pitch a new area for future work in a fundraising proposal. From a sound bite, to talking points, to blog post, to report and then back again in order to get the idea more visibility! One example culminated in a report and then a keynote presentation on AI bias in the court system.

3:30PM-5PM:

By late afternoon, my role as a single mom becomes front and center. Around 3:30 or 4PM, my kids return home, and the great household shuffle begins. I try not to schedule calls at this time. Instead, I might take a short walk—to school, to finish laundry, or simply to reset my mind. I avoid interruptions during this window. This is family time and being fully present makes me more effective when I am ready to sit down and work again.

6PM-7PM:

This is the time when we prepare the evening meal in my house. So that's also not a time when I would willingly be interrupted. When I lived in an earlier timezone this is when the US would be just waking up. So for some years there were many meals made while on speaker phone with my colleagues! Sitting down together with my children is a nice way to decompress from my day while listening to them recount theirs. It feels like a “debrief” and a moment of reflection, both for work but especially for ourselves as people in relationship to one another. In this way I try to demonstrate for them a healthy work-life balance. Now, if I am travelling for work, the end of the evening meal is usually the first break of the day that I’ve had from work, since mealtime can be good for networking.

8PM-10:00 pm:

For 8PM to 10PM, I’d say there are two main things. I usually do a kind of wind down at some point—rechecking my emails, rechecking my messages, thinking about my agenda for the next day, and doing a bit of light forward planning. It’s really just to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything or left any conversations open.

The other thing that tends to happen, and might be interesting to note, is the global nature of my work. Because I work so internationally, sometimes there are meetings I take virtually instead of traveling. There have definitely been times when a meeting is happening on the other side of the world—twelve hours’ time difference—and I’ve had to consistently stay up for several days in a row to be part of those conversations.

That’s just the reality of global work. It doesn’t mean I’m always working late hours, but it does mean being very flexible about time. To reduce travel, I often sacrifice on the back end, making myself available for virtual meetings at unusual hours.

Closing reflection: 

My day looks completely different when I am travelling across Europe, Asia, or the US etc for work, keynote speeches and meetings. I care about social justice movements and civic space which takes me to places and regions around the world. Across all these roles and responsibilities, I've learned to balance flexibility, focus, and intentional pauses, which are essential to my work.