Quote This Woman+ (QW+) has received over $50 000 from the Google News Initiative to support its tech turnaround.
This follows the feminist media non-profit organisation’s success at the recent Middle East, Turkey and Africa GNI Innovation Challenge, where QW+ pitched a rebuild of its current platform to the Google programme. The rebuild will focus on a slicker user experience, with improved protection of personal information, search functionality, and journalist-expert communication channels.
“With South Africa’s Women’s Month starting, this much-appreciated funding couldn’t be better timed. Women make up more than 50% of the population, but they make up less than a quarter of who gets to speak in news stories,” said QW+ director Kath Magrobi in a press release.
“And when they do appear, too often it is simply to reinforce gender, racial and cultural stereotypes. As a result, we’re missing out on the context that half the population brings to helping us make sense of the world we’re in today.”
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Quote This Woman+’s platform consists of an online database of over 600 expert sources, made up of women, and people from other marginalised groups, that journalists working throughout Africa can access when looking for somebody to interview for their news stories. Currently, over 1000 journalists access Quote This Woman+’s database of experts.
The tech turnaround will make it easier and faster for journalists to find women+ sources, who are generally difficult to find within their deadlines, helping to close the gender gap in who gets to make the news.
With the tech build estimated to run until mid-2023, Quote This Woman+ reminds journalists, producers and editors that it’s current platform is good to go for all reporters looking to expand their sources and use women’s voices, experts and analysts during Women’s Month – and beyond.
“From economic inequality to politics, health care, education, sexism, food justice and criminal justice – all issues are women’s issues, and are issues affecting groups on the margins. We believe that it is the people who are the most overlooked who are the most important to listen to: which is why our experts are drawn from the bottom of the most hierarchies,” Magrobi said.
When the same old voices – men’s voices – get platformed time and again, the media becomes complicit in silencing vital narratives about our world from the lived perspective of women. Quote This Woman+ gives journalists a tool to balance the scales of gender, class, race and intersectionality as the the basis of better feminism and democracy in our society.” Magrobi said.
For more information please contact: Kath Magrobi Director QW+ 0846888980 kath@quotethiswoman.org.za
Less than 20% of expert sources quoted in popular media are women: our online database of woman+ experts for journalists is working to change that. Quote This Woman+ campaigns, advocates and lobbies for the voices of women+ experts. Here are links to access to our database orsign up for our media alerts.
