[5][6] Alawa spent early years of her life living in Japan, where her father studied as an engineer, after moving from her original birthplace, Denmark - her mother's native land.

"[8] Alawa began her post-graduate career working on examining socio-cognitive processing at Princeton University.

At Wellesley College, Alawa worked on examining the effects of stereotypes as possible gendered obstacles to women in science.

[17][19] While originally focused on personal essays and editorials exploring gender and ethnic equality, the media platform gained new attention when it began incorporating perspectives of more than 1200 thought-leaders from more than 90 countries, including subjects such as the cultural stigma of abortion in South Africa[20] and university protests against Richard Spencer.

[23][24] In 2016, Alawa managed a collaboration with Voxe, a French NGO that created a system for comparing the platforms of political candidates to help voters.