Making our voices heard
O
ver half the population, and yet only one out of five of the sources given a voice in the media. South African women are still very much fighting to be heard – and non-profit company Quote This Woman+ (QW+) is fighting alongside them. By curating a database of women+ experts for news producers and journalists to use, QW+ ensures that change-makers, agitators and experts from the most marginalised parts of society are given a chance to make it into journalists’ contact lists and onto news programme talk shows. (The ‘+’ in women+ refers to experts beyond women who are marginalised for other reasons, such as sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty, rural living spaces, lack of formal education, or not speaking with the right model C accent for a TV interview.) There are many complex reasons why the gender gap exists with regards to whose perspectives are platformed in news stories. When QW+ was formed in 2019, the founders assumed that the main reason was implicit bias, and that there’d be resistance to using the database. However, in every newsroom approached, a couple of things happened. Firstly, the idea of a database of verified women+ that could be accessed when needed for news stories was welcomed with 18 I W O M E N I N T H E M E D I A
Adding the voices of women to more news stories can only enrich our media landscape, writes KATHY MAGRABI.
Kathy Magrabi
skewed distribution of power. Rather, this default reflection of social norms and structures has remained in place despite a raft of initiatives to stamp out patriarchal bias in news. Why? Because maintaining the status quo is what takes the least effort and the least imagination in a highly stressed and critically short-staffed newsroom environment. It’s not even that there is a lack of credible expert women+ sources, but rather that tracking them down when they’re unknown quantities takes longer than the journalist working in the age of social media can afford.
TAKING STEPS TOWARDS PARITY
open arms. Secondly, when asked to estimate, the journalist, editor or producer in question significantly underestimated the actual size of the source gender gap in their area of news, and was committed to improving it within their context.
TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE
QW+ has come to realise that in our current finance- and resourcestrained context, newsrooms are not actively trying to maintain a themediaonline.co.za
We work in a world where newsrooms have haemorrhaged jobs, and the time to research and write stories has shortened inconceivably, where the number of pairs of eyes on a story has reduced from five or six to sometimes no more than one. Journalists are often forced to fall back on the sources they’re familiar with – the sources who are known quantities, who they in turn are known to, and who can be relied on to take their calls even when it’s not convenient, and who they trust can be relied upon to deliver a great soundbite. Often this means they default to using the same sources over and again, who are, in the majority, men. This is the first part of the context. Sometimes, journalists tell QW+ that they’re frustrated with interviewing capable women+ experts because these
