Women in media ownership: building wealth through strategic communication

I spent nearly two decades inside South African media — YFM, SABC, DStv-i, agency — working in sponsorships, airtime sales, research and strategy. I watched the Mazda 3 launch unfold as a Sponsorships Executive. I built measurement frameworks for set-top-box audience data. I sat in rooms where commercial decisions were made. And I watched women do the work — the research, the strategy, the relationship-building — whilst men owned the outcomes.

That observation isn't sentiment. It's a commercial fact. Women influence over 60% of household purchasing decisions in South Africa, yet own approximately 13% of media businesses and hold fewer than 20% of senior leadership roles across the sector. That's not an inclusion problem. That's a value leakage problem.

When I started my own business in 2017, it wasn't born from ideology. It was born from necessity: I needed autonomy over my time, space to build something aligned with my values, and — frankly — a workplace that wouldn't ask me to choose between ambition and motherhood. What I discovered, building a business from scratch, was this: media ownership isn't a nice-to-have for women. It's a strategic imperative. And that insight drives everything The Businesswomen's Association does.

The BWA represents both women entrepreneurs and employed women across sectors, because transformation and inclusion are inseparable. You cannot build truly inclusive workplaces without women who own the businesses, and you cannot enable ownership without addressing the systemic barriers that keep talented women employed, underpaid and sidelined. Media is one of those sectors where this tension is sharpest.

When a woman owns a media business — a radio station, a production company, an advertising agency, a content platform — she doesn't just accumulate wealth. She controls narrative. She decides which voices are amplified, which stories matter, which audiences are served. She hires other women into leadership. She models what's possible. For employed women in media, that matters: a female media owner creates an environment where ambition isn't punished and strategy isn't gendered.

South Africa's media landscape — broadcast, digital, out-of-home, print — is still overwhelmingly male-owned and male-led. Women in senior roles remain concentrated in support functions rather than revenue-generating or strategic positions. But what's invisible in those numbers is the opportunity cost: every woman-led media business that doesn't exist is a revenue stream that doesn't flow to women, narrative control that remains consolidated, and a missed signal to the next generation that they could own the room, not just work in it.

This is a moment for women to own the transformation, not just be included in it. The media industry is fragmenting; traditional broadcast is under pressure; digital and out-of-home are ascendant; new measurement and attribution technologies are democratising access to tools that used to belong to incumbents. The barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been.

Systemic change requires both: women who own media businesses and control capital, narrative and strategic direction — and women thriving in employed roles who drive innovation, hold institutional knowledge and mentor the next cohort. These aren't competing priorities; they're interdependent. Early in my career I received a leadership grant that changed my trajectory, and now, as a Council Member with AMASA, I'm committed to ensuring that pipeline exists for others.

If you're a woman in media — employed or entrepreneurial — this is your moment to think differently about ownership. It's about control, about building a business that works for you, about the next woman seeing your success and knowing it's possible. Women in media ownership isn't an ESG checkbox or a diversity metric. It's a commercial, wealth-building, narrative and transformation imperative — because systemic change doesn't happen when women are included in someone else's system. It happens when women build their own.