A New Nonprofit is Tackling Gender Inequality by Giving Newsrooms a Direct Line to Women Experts

Even though women make up a solid 50 percent of the population of the African continent, only 22 percent of people who hear or see any news in the continent are women. This glaring deficit feeds into media stereotypes and reinforces harmful ideas about the role women play in societies throughout the world.

Quote This Woman+ (QTW+), a new nonprofit initiative based in South Africa, aims to close this gap by giving newsrooms a direct line to consult woman experts throughout the continent.

“[QTW+] has enabled me to find female voices for my stories, beyond the often dial quotes,” said South African freelance journalist Shaun Smillie. “The sources recommended have been of high quality and are experts in their fields. Also, they are very easy to get hold of, willing to give a comment and often on deadline.”

The initiative was loosely based on a similar project in the United States entitled “Women Also Know Stuff.” Women Also Know Stuff (henceforth referred to as WAKS) was created for the express purpose of connecting women with education in political science and jobs in politics to be able to communicate more easily with journalists. QTW+ founder Kath Magrobi said she “figured something similar could work in South Africa, and so in the build-up to the South African 2019 national and provincial elections, QTW+ was born.”

Magrobi also said she looked to take QTW+ to another level:

“I made two big changes [from Women Also Know Stuff]: curating a database of experts from all areas, and including members of other marginalized groups in the experts on the database…The ‘+' in our name represents thought-leaders, experts, activists and opinion-makers of the LGBTQIA+ community, [those] who live with disabilities, from rural areas and who are marginalized in the mainstream media for any other reason.”

Currently the website contains contact information for over 600 experts, and more than 1,000 journalists to date have called upon QTW+ to supplement their work. Journalists must register with the website in order to use its resources, but experts are vetted more heavily: they must be referred by academic institutions, media organizations and/or other experts.

Magrobi’s plans for the resource are not fully finished: the website is glitchy, which she says has been a barrier for entry. Her plans include making the website more user-friendly, and the company received funding from Google in order to update the software, technology, and contact resources to expand their database.

Hopefully, with this resource, more African women will be able to add their voices to the conversations happening in the media. 

“We live in a society where for a myriad of reasons — cultural, religious, social, psychological, educational even — women are not habituated to step up to the mic when the opportunity is offered to them,” said Magrobi.

Ijeoma Okereke-Adagba, a programme officer with Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development in West Africa, agreed that the time is long past for women to be stepping up to the microphone. “The usage of female experts as sources in the African media has increased significantly compared to 10 years ago,” she said, adding that “most African women are now seeing the need to add their voices and perspectives to issues in their sectors that affect the society.”