#WomensMonth | Why women need to be thought leaders
You know the call. It's 9 PM. You're finally doing something that isn't work, and your phone buzzes. A journalist needs a quote. They've already written the story. They just need "expert confirmation" for paragraph six. You're flattered. You say yes. You get a line. You're an SME - a Subject Matter Expert.
And for that, you get a footnote. Not a platform.
Subject Matter Expert
Let's talk about that word: SME. It's a problem, because it already stands for something else - Small and Medium Enterprise.
And in reputation terms, that's exactly what it feels like: being a small voice in a room full of Thought Leaders.
You're technically brilliant. You can answer any question thrown at you. But you're answering questions someone else defined. That's the SME trap.
And if you're a woman in South African business, you're more likely to be in it than you realise.
The question nobody's asking
SNG Grant Thornton's Women in Business 2026 survey says 47.3% of senior management roles in South Africa's mid-market firms are held by women.
That's well above the global average of 32.9%. Every single South African business surveyed had at least one woman in senior management.
Only three other countries in the world can say that.
It's a good number. It's also, on its own, a bit of a vanity metric.
Because the question that survey doesn't ask is the one that actually matters: of those women, how many have actually built a platform as a Thought Leader? How many are shaping the conversation rather than just confirming it?
Quarter of news coverage
The Global Media Monitoring Project puts women at only about a quarter of all news coverage worldwide.
In Africa specifically, just 22% of the people quoted, seen or heard in the news are women. I've been doing this for twenty-seven years, and what I see on the ground lines up with that. Women get quoted plenty as the SME. The safe pair of hands who can back up a story.
Far fewer get treated as the Thought Leader whose opinion the story gets built around.
A Thought Leader
A Thought Leader is proactive. She's got a position nobody else is taking yet, and she publishes it before anyone asks her to.
Over time, that turns into a body of work: bylines, panels, people who follow her opinion because it's hers, not because they needed a quote for paragraph six. She's the one the story gets built around.
An SME is reactive. Credible, technically sharp, genuinely useful when a journalist's already written the story and just needs a line to back it up. She answers the question she's asked. She's not setting the agenda. She's confirming someone else's.
What it looks like
Here's what that actually looks like.
Take AI adoption in business right now - everyone's talking about it. The SME is the CIO who gets the call to confirm whether the company's new AI rollout actually cut costs this quarter. Credible, accurate, quoted a paragraph deep, and forgotten by the next earnings call.
The Thought Leader is the one who wrote, well before the rollout started, exactly what it would do to the org chart and what leadership needed to get right first. She's not the one confirming the story anymore. She's the one they call to ask what happens next.
Or two women on the same industry body.
One gets asked onto a panel because the moderator needs a decent CV to answer a question on the day.
The other gets asked to write the opinion piece before the conference even happens. The one that actually decides what the panel ends up arguing about. Same expertise. Similar seniority. One of them just got there first.
That's really the whole thing when you strip it back: A Thought Leader creates the question. An SME answers it well.
Why the tier gets chosen for you
Here's the pattern I keep seeing. It makes me tired every time.
Men default upward into the Thought Leader tier, sometimes well before their track record has actually earned it. Women, even the ones with more expertise, get filed as the SME. The safe quote. The second call after the CEO.
It's not that women are choosing the smaller tier. Nobody's choosing it. It gets chosen for them - quietly, by every journalist, every panel organiser, every internal comms person who reaches for the name they already know.
Some of that just comes down to who holds the power in the first place.
Just Share's latest assessment of the JSE Top 40 found women hold 38% of board seats and only 27.4% of executive roles. As for how many of those companies actually have a woman sitting as Group CEO? You could count them on one hand.
When the most senior, most quoted voices in an industry skew that male, the industry's default answer to "who do we ask" skews the same way. Everyone underneath just inherits it. Nobody sits down and decides that. It just happens.
How to change this
- Stop waiting for the call. The Thought Leader publishes her opinion before anyone asks. She doesn't wait to be invited. She creates the invitation.
- Stop treating your expertise as a service. It's a position. It's a point of view. When you speak, you're not just answering a question; you're reframing it.
- Stop accepting the "second call" role. When you get the quote request, ask: "What's the story you're trying to tell? Because my view on that is…”, and start defining the agenda.
- Build your own platform. That opinion piece you've been meaning to write? Publish it. That LinkedIn post you've been overthinking? Post it. That conference panel you want to be on? Pitch yourself as the one who'll set the tone.
Not an optional extra
"You can't save souls in an empty church." — David Ogilvy
Ogilvy was talking about advertising nobody sees, but it holds up here too. The sharpest Thought Leader position in the world means nothing if there's no one in the room to hear it.
And for a lot of capable South African women, building that room isn't some optional extra on top of the real work. It's the part that decides whether any of the rest of it matters.
One more thing about that Word "SME"
If you're running a small or medium enterprise, this matters to you too. Because the trap is even tighter when your business is small.
You're an SME running an SME. The world assumes you're just trying to survive, not shape an industry.
But here's the truth: some of the most powerful Thought Leaders I've worked with started in businesses that were technically "small." They didn't wait to be big enough to have a voice. They built the voice first, and the business followed.
So whether you're a Subject Matter Expert or a Small Business Owner, or both, the question is the same: are you answering questions, or are you writing them?
WomensMonth | Tafadzwa Penny: A career is not just a ladder, it is a becoming
This Women's Month, stop being the footnote
The 47.3% figure is a milestone worth celebrating. But it's not the finish line. Because leadership without voice is just a title.
This Women's Month, don't settle for being the safe quote. Don't wait for someone to hand you the microphone. Write your own opinion piece. Define your own position. Create the question that everyone else will spend the next year trying to answer.
Not because you need to be louder. Because you need to be earlier.
The SME is the safe choice. The Thought Leader is the necessary one.
Which one are you building toward?
