OPINIONISTA: Unacceptable – only 18% of women experts’ voices heard in media during elections

To be honest, I can’t stand writing about justice for women, equality for women, safety for women, more voice for women. Why? Because these should be normalised by now; we shouldn’t have to be shouty about this in the year 2024.

Only 18% of voices during the election period were those of women experts, according to Media Monitoring Africa’s (MMA’s) research done in July 2024 on the media and the 2024 national election.

“An interesting element of the monitoring was that initial results showed 14% women’s voices, which is the lowest percentage of women’s voices we have seen in media coverage during elections. It was a positive move that the number increased to 18% overall. However, this is still far below the global average of 24%, and lower than previous election periods, where women’s voices usually account for 21% to 22% of sources,” said Thandi Smith, head of programmes at MMA.

Read it and weep, or accept the status quo, or act. Accept the conditions we face, in other words, the slow pace of progress, or misrecognise the terms we are subjected to by acting: speaking out or writing. It may not be deliberate that journalists phone male experts. It may be subliminal, or unthinking, or just who they have in their contact books. But all this contributed to not making the world a better place.

Loud voices, soft voices

It may seem patronising to have a “Women’s Month”. And, as some sexist reactionaries who wish to maintain the status quo will say: “What about Men’s Month”? But aren’t they already the default position of power, all the time and everywhere?

A small personal tangent. I remember some years ago, at a “postmortem” at the end of the week, when you discuss the paper that had just been published and the diary for the next week. I was proposing my story ideas and was cut off by a male voice, my politics section head, who then presented exactly what I had been proposing (10 minutes before in the smokers’ corner) for the next week’s diary.

But in the conference he talked over me, in a louder voice, and got the claps for his great story ideas. Initially, I thought I was imagining it, and then I saw the pattern. Now, I wish I had said: “Excuse me, let me finish.” Or: “Actually, you just repeated my idea.”

Of course, there are women with louder voices. If you shout or talk down to people, like Helen Zille, you are really disliked. Gosh, how she talked to journalists about the government of provincial unity that was on the brink of not happening in Gauteng. She told journalists something to this effect: “This is complex and technical stuff. I’m not sure if you will understand.” She was explaining something very simple, actually.

Quote This Woman+

A South African NGO that started up more than five years ago, Quote This Woman+, has a whole directory of women experts, including experts in climate change issues, health, media and democracy, elections, engineering, agriculture, psychology and education. For every sector of society you can think of, it has a directory of women experts to contact.

It seems as though this organisation is not getting funding to survive, so it is looking for partnerships to print a book of its women experts for all newsrooms, which it can update from time to time. Good idea.

Its director, Kathy Magrobi, said in an article: “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.

“In my mind, somebody less middle class, grey haired and white skinned would have been a better fit to start the project, but I couldn’t find the right person to get excited about this project at that time, so I started it myself.

“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.”

I hope it gets funding to survive, given MMA’s recent research that only 18% of voices quoted during the 2024 elections were those of women, with Zille having the most voice, but at only 3%, and Patricia de Lille coming in at 1%.

Algerian French philosopher and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida theorised on “democracy to come”. In other words, democracy is always becoming and never fully realised. Here, regarding the latest statistic, let’s take democracy to mean more voice, more inclusion, more plurality and diversity. Unless one challenges the status quo there is no progress, and by the next election the 18% might be 9%.

Anti-feminist backlash is everywhere

An anti-feminist backlash, explained American scholar Susan Faludi in the bestselling book Backlash, is a recoil when women make gains in previously traditional male spaces, and are then pushed back. In South African terms we’d call it a “klap” (slap).

This anti-feminist backlash is happening everywhere, not just in South Africa. The UK general election revealed the same thing.

As journalist Luba Kassova reported: “The analysis of 171,500 online articles from over 2,000 national and local UK news outlets has revealed a decline in coverage that includes key gender-related terms of relevance to women, compared with the previous two general election campaign periods.”

In the US, as the second woman presidential candidate has been put up to lead the Democratic Party, we recall the vile misogyny against the first one, Hillary Clinton. Now Kamala Harris gets the backlash too on that toxic platform, X, i.e. her neck looks like a man’s; her laugh is too loud; is she really black? After all, look who she is married to – a white! Gasp, what a crime.

Added to this bunk, by both the conservatives and the woke bandits – is that she is not really black. But what is Jamaican-Indian if not black? Is she white? And does it really matter? She is sticking her neck out to lead. The world is getting beyond absurd.

“Democracy to come,” Derrida theorised. Yes, we progress, but he could have added that we go backwards (one example is the anti-feminist backlash) too. Never one straight progressive upwards line, is it?

We have to take note, otherwise in our next election, diversity of voice, vis-à-vis women’s voice, may go down from 18% to 9%, or worse still, zero. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.