Who is Margrethe Vestager? Antitrust regulator and other women striking fear into Big Tech

Line Coll, a former tech lawyer, stepped into her role in 2022, joining an elite cohort of officials who can force changes on the world’s biggest companies by wielding the magic wand of the region’s strict data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation. That legislation, which went into effect in 2018, transformed data regulation, once seen as a legal backwater, into a prominent area, and elevated many women working in it into the spotlight.

More than half of the 30 authorities tasked with enforcing the bloc’s data rules are led by women, and with sweeping new EU tech regulations now in effect, their roles as watchdogs may expand even further. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland all have female data commissioners, as do France, Spain, Luxembourg and, until recently, Ireland.

In other fields too, female regulators are leading the way. The EU’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager made her mark again this week when she hit Apple with the third largest competition fine ever doled out by the bloc. Vestager these days is one of the world’s three most powerful antitrust watchdogs, together with the UK’s Sarah Cardell, who is CMA chief executive officer, and US Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.

Women “shaped what this field of law looks like today,” Andrea Jelinek, Austria’s former top tech regulator, said in a speech in November. “When I first started out in data protection, there were barely any men,” she recalled. The women who took on these roles, moreover,…