The story of Quote This Woman+

I did not set out to launch a gender and media start-up just before turning 50, but once the idea for Quote This Woman+ (QW+) took hold, it wouldn’t leave me alone. In 2019, frustrated by the endlessly gendered portrayal of women in the news, I decided something had to give. I came across overseas organisations that curated databases of women-only experts for journalists so they could close the gender gap in their reporting and realised: South Africa needed the same thing. From the beginning, adding the plus in Quote This Woman+ was important to me – that the project should amplify the voices not only of women, but also of thought leaders marginalised from mainstream news for other reasons – sexual orientation, gender identity, poverty, location (rurality) education (not speaking with the right Model C accent) or anything else. It was also important to me that we ensure a level playing field: that we should not charge women to be on the database, or journalists to use it, but ask those who can afford to, to support us, and find other ways of ensuring sustainability. How Quote This Woman+ started Research from the South African NGO Media Monitoring Africa states that women’s voices aren’t being heard in SA news stories – appearing only once in every 5 articles, with the other 4 voices being men’s. Traditionally during elections, the gender gap widens more, with only 1 in every 7-to-8 people interviewed being a woman. Back then, with the 2019 national and provincial elections drawing near, I had a strong belief that if I could get together a searchable database of women+ who had voices worth listening to, journalists and news producers would use them. So with no funding or staffing – but with an itch for change – I registered Quote This Woman+ as a non profit. I started QW+ just after finishing a freelance project in the ICT for Development sector. Ironically, the hardest part of the process was using my own voice as a part of amplifying QW+. Since 2007 I have had an often-invisible disability called trigeminal neuralgia, which can make things like speaking painful. But I’ve learnt to marshall my coping mechanisms and just get on with it – because QW+ is important, and because getting on with it is what women are best at. 2019 Elections Within 2 months, we gathered 40 women+ experts and started lobbying the media. Interestingly, the first actual queries to our database came from foreign journalists, then from the Mail & Guardian, (the then) Tiso Blackstar and Primedia. Other media players – large and small – followed. As we engaged with them, we came to realise that across the board, the media houses had no idea how big their gender gaps were: consistently, they’d estimate that they were using significantly more women sources than the statistics proved. Without exception, they were fully supportive of QW+ as an initiative to work with them to close their gender gaps. During the elections our experts were quoted in international pieces from Paris to Nairobi, New York to Beijing, which made our experts realise how powerful our database really was. 2020 – and COVID19 When Covid-19 hit we were able to respond by creating a coronavirus database. With Jordan home for lockdown, we were able, within 24 hours of SA’s “patient zero”, to start a new database with a media broadcast of eight new women+ Covid-19-related media-experts. We answered media queries from local and international journalists, from prestigious international news agencies, local community print and radio, and they were able to give a balanced perspective on what was happening in SA thanks to the QW+ database. The work we do Quote This Woman+ has over 600– and otherwise marginalised – women+ thought-leaders, experts, activists and trailblazers on our database. We now send out a fortnightly media update, which reaches a core database of 1000 journalists. The work we do at Quote This Woman+ doesn’t stop here. We give life to our tagline #NoVoiceLeftBehind by helping women+ feel comfortable in the spotlight: often this means confronting the inordinately high prevalence of imposter syndrome amongst women. QW+ offers media training and workshops, and so far, these have been provided without a charge to our database members. We also handle Twitter, email, WhatsApp, and phone queries from journalists regarding which experts to quote. On average, we get 3 media queries a day, Monday to Sunday, as early as 6:30 am, and as late as 10:30pm. 50 years old, cisgender, and white: I may not have set out to start Quote This Woman+, and I may fall short given the critical, multi-dimensional, intersectional feminist drivers of African womxn/women+. What I have, though, is an abiding commitment to the concept of #NoVoiceLeftBehind, and an appreciation that right now, I can use the voice that I have, and the agency that privilege gives me, to ensure the QW+ platform is entrenched in the media landscape: a foundation for those who follow.