By Kath Magrobi, Executive Director Quote This Woman+
Every year on 8 March, we watch the same routine. Social media is filled with praise. Calendars clog up with panels, breakfasts and branded “women’s empowerment” events. Newsrooms scramble to find women to quote for the day.
Then the focus ends. The posters come down. The hashtags fade. The attention moves on. Were women visible? Yes. But we make a mistake if we think that token visibility results in lasting change.
If you believe that International Women’s Day should be more than a momentary spotlight, do one useful thing: nominate one woman+ expert for the Quote This Woman+ (QW+) database, so journalists can find and quote more diverse voices all year. Quote This Woman+ is a pan-African gender and media non-profit that helps connect women, and other overlooked experts and changemakers to the media. If we want lasting change, this is a practical action that can help shift who gets heard.
Why we need more than just visibility
Is it important to bring a focus to women’s rights? Undoubtedly. Visibility can remind people that inequality is real, and that women’s rights are not a side issue.
But visibility is not the same as power. Visibility does not automatically change budgets, policies, safety, or who makes decisions. Visibility without accountability can even become a trap, a performance of solidarity that allows institutions to feel good by hosting Women’s breakfasts, for example, without doing the hard work of paying the women they employ equal to the men they work alongside..
Visibility alone allows us to praise women for resilience, but to ignore why such resilience is necessary in the first place. To celebrate brave women navigating rising food costs, conflict, weather shocks, hunger, and failing services: but to gloss over the hard questions around why there are no bridges, why care work is still unpaid, or why economic shocks land hardest on women.
Quote This Woman+ has had enough of speeches praising women’s strength while maternal health, education, and protection services remain underfunded. We are tired of women being invited onto panels once a year, while being shut out of decision-making the other 364 days. We are fed up by the sudden media rush for women’s voices in March, followed by silence in April.
And this is what we want to change. We want women who are thought-leaders and trail-blazers across all of society listened to as carefully as their male counterparts.
We want respect for the fact that women experience life differently, and we want respect for the importance of their different perspectives in places where decisions are made.
That is exactly why we exist as an organisation. We help journalists to find and quote women experts in their news stories, knowing that people whose opinions are taken seriously by the media get noticed in other places of power.
We curate a growing database of credible experts who are overlooked due to gender, power, class, disability, geography, or bias in professional networks. We support them to use their voice with confidence and safety.
So here is the one action you can do again: Each One Reach One. Nominate one new woman+ expert for the QW+ database. It can be someone in your field, your community, your campus, your union, your clinic, your organisation, your church, or your neighbourhood. If you want more information, visit our Frequently Asked Questions here.
Men, we’re asking you to nominate the trail-blazing women you know too. Societies that exclude half their people from influence cannot thrive. When women have real access to decision-making, communities are safer, economies are stronger, and governance is more accountable.
If International Women’s Day is to mean anything beyond tokenism, it must push us towards sustained action. Start with one useful move: nominate one woman+ expert to QW+. We shift society when we shift who gets heard.
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