‘If anything is going to be done differently then women’s voices have to be heard’

It might seem slightly incongruous to some that the woman who founded the most powerful database of women experts in SA — Quote This Woman+ (QW+), which celebrated its third birthday in March — is a soft-spoken academic with the doe eyes and translucent skin of a Renaissance Madonna, who resides in the KwaZulu-Natal hamlet of Hilton.

Appearances and preconceptions are frequently deceiving. Kathy Magrobi is made of steel. 

She saw the need for a mouthpiece that put prominent women’s voices in the news, and created this platform when it became clear to her that no-one else was going to do it.

Magrobi had been working as a tech development consultant and was thinking of studying further in another field when she encountered the US website  Women Also Know Stuff, a database of women working in politics all over the world.

“I wish I could say that QW+ was an original idea,” she said. “I love the thought of ideas floating in the ether that just randomly land on people, but it was discovering this site, linked to a US university, that inspired me. This was late 2018 and the 2019 general elections were already hot on everyone’s agenda. They were such important elections for us and I just thought, wow, SA needs this.”

She did not at first see herself as the head of such an initiative. “I didn’t think I was the person to start it. I thought I was too old and that what I know about feminism was out of date, so I spoke to all the young, dynamic people I know in media, thinking they’d be in a better position to run with this, but it went nowhere. 

“I realised that if I didn’t do this, no-one was going to do it, so I started working on a business plan and talking to media around SA, then I put in a last-minute proposal and was accepted to the Wits JamLab programme. I’d already come up with the name because I thought every NGO should have a name that immediately tells people exactly what you do.”

JamLab is a six-month incubator programme that provides innovators with workspace, coaching, networks and mentorship, and in most cases results in funding for the approved initiatives. 

In Magrobi’s case: “The accelerator programme started in January 2019 and by March we had 40 names in 10 categories and we went live with a very wonky database — at that stage it was just an Excel spreadsheet of names that journalists could contact.”

The idea seems simple: to link journalists to women experts, but Magrobi’s vision went further.

“Right at the beginning, I realised this was only going to work if we made it really easy for the journalists to access the experts. From all my meetings I got to understand how crazy newsrooms are right now, how fraught and how under-resourced they are and the incredible pressure there is on everyone. Our aim was to provide a resource where you don’t have to jump through five hoops to get hold of someone. Contacting us makes your work easier and — bonus — you’ll be helping to close the gender gap.”

Women might be clearing hurdles into the top media jobs in SA, but the same is not true of experts quoted in print, online or on TV. 

A 2021 report by the Gates Foundation, “The Missing Perspectives of Women in News”, contained the results of a survey conducted in SA, India, Kenya, Nigeria, the UK and the US. According to the report: “Women are up to six times less likely to be quoted in news as experts, protagonists or sources in these six countries. Women expert voices remain significantly muted in high-profile news genres such as politics (where men’s share of the voice is up to seven times higher than that of women) and the economy (where men’s share is up to 31 times higher).”

In the same vein, a US organisation called the OpEd Project found, in a year-long study, that a mere 20% of op-eds are written by women, which includes letters to the editor.

Enter Magrobi’s intervention. QW+ is the only database in SA that does what it does. “We understand that news is tough and journalism is tough, so we work hard to make it easier, and to get expert women’s voices heard,” says Magrobi.

When she started out, Magrobi thought it would be easy to get professional women on the database but much harder to get buy-in from journalists. The opposite turned out to be true.

“When I started QW+, I thought the major battle was going to be convincing journalists to use the database. I had this idea that it wouldn’t fit into patriarchal power structures, but that hasn’t been the case. Whatever their motivation, journalists have universally welcomed this.

“On the other hand, I thought women would come flocking to have their names on the database, and I was so naive. Their reluctance underlined how deeply entrenched the underlying patriarchy is in terms of why women don’t want to put themselves forward. The reasons range from psychological to sociological to cultural to actually just not having time.”

Others have tried to analyse the reasons for women’s reticence to speak up. A 2012 study conducted by researchers at Princeton University found that women find it difficult to speak up in group settings, to the extent that “women speak less than men when a group collaborates to solve a problem ... the time that women spoke was significantly less than their proportional representation, amounting to less than 75% of the time that men spoke”.

Magrobi says there is no simple answer, but “we approach so many women and say 'You are perfect for our database’ and they say ‘It sounds so amazing but I just don’t have time to work on a media profile on top of everything else that I’m doing.' And when we say ‘You don’t understand what this might do for your career,' they’ll say things like ‘My Maslow hierarchy of needs just does not allow me to self-actualise right now in terms of my career.'”

Part of Magrobi's work involves helping extraordinary women understand that having a media profile translates to added steam in your working environment: having your voice taken more seriously, being more visible at work. 

“I’d love to be able to quantify that,” she says. “And it’s not that women don’t see the benefits. It really is a time problem for many.”

One area in which this is rapidly changing is academia. 

“So much funding is now being spent on making science popular,” Magrobi says. “Covid has fundamentally changed the idea of academia as separate from consumer media. Every academic budget nowadays comes with some clause around 'How are you going to make this accessible to the public?' There is a huge impetus for academics to be able to talk human language.”

The message has spread. Having started with a database of 40 enormously respected experts in various areas, QW+ now has more than 600 women on its database, and the number grows every day.

Finding funding has not been easy. A small initial grant saw QW+ through 2019 “on a kiss and a prayer”. In 2020, its efforts were rewarded with a year’s worth of funding from the South African Media Innovation Programme.

Then Covid hit, and, Magrobi says, “Our focus switched to building a database of women experts around Covid. In 2021, all the organisations that would have been funding media, democracy and feminist projects were directing funds elsewhere. People were saying, 'We love what you do but we just don’t have money.' So we managed to make that one-year grant last through 2021; it was really difficult but we survived, and then we managed to get funding from the Open Society Foundation SA [OSF] for 2022. Unfortunately they are closing down at the end of this year, so on our third birthday we’ve kicked off a crowdfunding initiative.

“Working in Africa, and in the context of the many inequalities here, QW+ decided right from the get-go that it would work on the principle that we keep it free for experts to register on the database and for journalists to access it.  We believe in a level playing field and equal access to information and opportunities. Of course, this is a terrible financial model, especially in the context of how Covid has impacted non-profit funding.

“We have only survived because of the ongoing support of feminist, academic and media communities who support us because they believe that the people who are the most overlooked are the most important to listen to.”

One of the few ways in which QW+ has been able to fund itself, other than through those elusive grants, is by offering a very different and proudly feminist media training programme, called  Women Own the Spotlight.

“It covers a lot more than just media and presentation skills,” says Magrobi. “We’ve partnered with people from Lifeline to develop a course that starts with those psychosocial and cultural inhibitors to owning your voice, and trying to unpack and understand those while at the same time providing some practical skills. 

“It’s no good giving the skills if there’s a voice inside your head saying 'I shouldn’t be doing this,' 'I can’t be doing this' or 'I don’t deserve to be doing this.'”

Magrobi is endlessly enthused by the support and praise her NGO has received, but at the same time: “I did not realise it would be so hard; I did not realise that so much time would be taken up finding funding. When you hire staff, finding money becomes imperative so that you can pay and keep them.”

Apart from Magrobi, QW+ has a full-time database curator and a media/social media person working on outreach. The crowdfunding plea is to be able to employ a researcher.

Experts have become less reticent about being listed as the power of QW+ has grown.

“Each person decides how much info they want about themselves on the database,” Magrobi says. “Sometimes we edit or rewrite but it is all approved by them. And some of the funding we’ve received from the OSF is going towards building a whole new system that will be compliant with Popi [Protection of Personal Information] legislation, and that will require each journalist on our list to have a log-on.”

Intricacies aside, the essence of this innovation is clear. As Magrobi says: “We know that women succeed in politics; we know they succeed in sport, business, science, and everywhere. We know that women are intelligent, articulate and eminently quotable. Our vision is to make sure that is translated into the news. 

“More than that, what I call ‘the founding foundation’ of QW+ is the realisation that when women’s voices are absent, their realities are not reflected. The issues that most strongly affect women become invisible.

“At QW+, we know that media narratives that are skewed towards men are counterintuitive to the ideals of an inclusive, democratic free press. We also know that the women+ who are the most severely impacted by poverty, inequality, poor service delivery, poor health care, violence, health crises, environmental degradation, and the overall failure of democratic functioning, almost never have their voices heard and almost never have a seat at the decision-making table. Despite this, when crisis hits, they are the people found organising their neighbourhoods and communities, and they are the ones implementing solutions that are the safety nets for many. 

“If we, as a society, a country, a continent and a world are serious about trying to rebuild inclusively, we have to make sure we hear from all the population. And that means ensuring that the voices of women+ leaders in communities — the people actually implementing on-the-ground solutions to the problems of our society — are amplified.

“When their voices are left out, the conversation about anything happening in SA becomes so narrow. Right now we’re going into elective conferences and major political shuffling, and women’s realities are being ignored in the context of how those in power position all the choices that need to be made. If anything is going to be done differently then women’s voices have to be heard.

“It is all about normalising women into everyday conversations. Every single time we hear the concept of ‘a woman doctor’ or ‘the first woman whatever’, women are not normalised.”

ALL MARGINALISED VOICES WELCOME

The plus sign at the end of Quote This Woman+ is important. “We are intersectional feminists,” says founder and director Kathy Magrobi.

“Our database is also open to any other voices that are marginalised, whether these be LGBTQI+ or experts living with disability or people geographically and educationally disadvantaged who nonetheless have expertise. If you believe you belong on our database, you probably do.” Visit quotethiswoman.org.za

THREE YEARS OF MAKING WOMEN HEARD

• In 2019, QW+ funded its start-up through successful crowdfunding of R100,000
• In 2020, it received an operational grant which was R60,000 short of budget, so it crowdfunded this shortfall plus an additional R6,000
•  In 2021, QW+ crowdfunded over R100,000 to fund a crisis intervention around the KwaZulu-Natal protest action that was not covered by its grant
• In March 2022, QW+ turned three. It is looking to raise R50,000 to hire a part-time database co-ordinator for six months to put 300 new community expert voices on its database.