A keynote presentation at ICA Nigeria: March 25, 2026 | Yop Rwang Pam
Good morning, everyone.
Let me begin with a scene that many of us will recognize.
Imagine Lila, a co-director, sitting in a leadership meeting beside her male peer. They hold the same level of responsibility, carry the same weight of decision-making, and are there to shape the same organizational change. Lila speaks first. She offers a clear, bold, well-considered idea for how change can happen, grounded in experience and strategic judgment. The room does not reject her outright, but neither does it truly receive what she has said. Her contribution is registered as passion rather than insight. Then, a few minutes later, her male colleague repeats the same idea in different words, and suddenly the room responds. He is applauded. The idea is called strategic, timely, and exactly what is needed. What changed was not the quality of the idea, but the voice through which it was delivered.
After the meeting, if the woman is upset, she is told not to take it personally. If she is firmer the next time, she is too intense. If she softens her tone, she is heard as less authoritative. If she pushes for recognition, she is difficult. If she says nothing, the room carries on as if nothing happened.
What happened there?
Was it sexism? Was it culture? Was it hierarchy? Was it communication? The answer, very often, is yes. It was all of those things at once.
That is why this topic matters, and why it is more complex than we sometimes allow. Gender, communication, and power relations in African societies are not separate conversations. They are deeply entangled. Power does not reside only in budgets, titles, laws, and formal leadership positions. Power also lives in who gets heard, who gets believed, who is described as competent, who is allowed to be direct, and who must constantly manage tone, warmth, and acceptability just to be treated as legitimate.
For a conference of communications professionals, I want to suggest that this is not a side issue. It is not the softer edge of a harder political or institutional problem. It is the center of how power works. Communication does not simply explain the world, but it also tells us who is credible, who is respectable, who is disruptive, who is serious, who is emotional, who is an expert, and whose authority still has to arrive with an escort.
You see communication is not a support function around power, but the actual place where power is made created or muted.
This begins early. In many of our societies, children learn long before adulthood that speech is not neutral. Girls are often taught the disciplines of caution, respectability, accommodation, and self-management very early. Boys are more often granted a wider margin for confidence, interruption, certainty, and appetite. Africa is not one thing, of course. Our histories, cultures, classes, geographies, religions, and family systems differ enormously. But across that diversity, one pattern remains familiar enough to matter: speech is not socially received in the same way across gender, and that difference shapes authority.
By the time people arrive in school, in the workplace, in politics, in civic life, or in the media, those lessons have already started to harden. A man may be read as decisive where a woman is read as aggressive. A man may be seen as naturally authoritative, while a woman with equal command is asked, directly or indirectly, to soften herself. A woman may be welcomed into the room, but not fully welcomed into the authority of the room. These are not small social misunderstandings. They are part of how a society signals where power belongs and what form it is allowed to take.
This is one reason I worked on the Women, Business and the Law case study. The 2024 world bank report does not only ask what the law says. It also asks what supportive frameworks exist and how rights are actually experienced in practice. That shift in thinking matters, because it recognizes that a right on paper is not the same thing as power in the world. The report found that women globally enjoy only 64 percent of the legal protections available to men once implementation and practice are taken into account. Nigeria’s profile is especially revealing: it records a legal frameworks score of 50.0, a supportive frameworks score of 21.7, and an expert opinions score of 45.0. In other words, even where legal recognition exists, the structures that allow women to exercise those rights fully are still weak.
That gap tells us something about gendered power. Law matters. Policy matters. Reform matters. But reform does not happen in a vacuum. It enters homes, workplaces, courts, religious spaces, markets, bureaucracies, and communities that are already shaped by stories about authority, morality, obedience, care, and respectability. A woman may have legal standing and still lack practical authority. She may have access on paper and still be blocked in practice. She may have voice and still not have consequence.
The role of communication is impossible to ignore in this.
I’ll explain. Power does not operate only through formal rules. It also operates through tone, expectation, framing, institutional habit, community gossip, family language, media representation, and the many small signals that tell people what is permitted, what is risky, who is credible, and whose ambition must remain carefully packaged. Communication, in that sense, is not just the channel through which inequality passes. It is one of the ways inequality is made to feel natural.
We see that clearly in public life. Across 39 African countries surveyed by Afrobarometer, most citizens support women having the same chance as men to be elected to public office. But that same research found that 52 percent also say women who run for office are likely to face criticism, name-calling, or harassment. That contradiction tells us that societies may accept the language of equality while still expecting women to pay a social cost for stepping fully into power. Afrobarometer also found that women continue to trail men in education, ownership of key assets, and control over household financial decisions. So the issue is not only whether equality is publicly endorsed. The issue is whether women’s authority is socially recognized and materially supported.
The same tension appears in representation. International IDEA’s 2024 Africa Barometer found that women hold 26 percent of seats in African parliaments, up only slightly from 25 percent in 2021. The report warns that, at the current pace, parity remains far away and we may not reach it until around the year 2100 Those figures are not only about numbers. They are also about imagination. When leadership is still seen mostly in male form, authority continues to feel male by default.
For communications professionals, this should matter deeply because this is exactly the terrain on which meaning becomes social fact. You are not only transmitting information. You are shaping frames. You are deciding whose expertise is centered and whose is treated as supplementary. You are influencing whether women appear in public narratives mainly as victims, moral figures, nurturers, and resilient survivors, or whether they appear as thinkers, strategists, institution-builders, technical experts, and legitimate holders of power.
And this does not apply only to journalism in the narrow sense. It applies to government communicators, development communicators, public affairs professionals, political strategists, editors, moderators, campaign designers, radio hosts, institutional leaders, social media managers, and anyone whose work helps shape what gets said, how it gets said, and who gets to say it. Communication can clarify or conceal. It can widen democratic participation or stage-manage perception. It can honor people’s full humanity or flatten them into narrative function.
The digital environment has raised the stakes further. The mobile internet gender gap in Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the widest in the world, at 29 percent according to GSMA’s 2025 reporting. That means millions of women are still excluded from the primary communication infrastructure of our time. And for those who are online, visibility often comes with heightened vulnerability, including harassment and reputational attack. So the digital public sphere has not removed gendered power. In many ways, it has scaled it.
This is why I strongly believe that as communicators, we need to ask harder questions of ourselves. Not just whether women are present in our stories, campaigns, panels, and case studies, but how they are present. Not just whether women are included, but whether they are framed with full authority. Not just whether we celebrate women, but whether we know how to communicate women’s power without reducing it to inspiration, exception, or soft symbolism.
Too often, we inherit frames we did not create and reproduce them without fully interrogating the underlying factors. A male leader is described as bold and strategic, while a female leader is described as passionate and committed. A campaign shows women’s hardship, but not women’s thinking. An institutional profile celebrates inclusion, while the senior women inside that same institution are quietly managing interruption, tone policing, and narrative erasure. None of this is neutral. These are communication choices, and they carry power.
I also want to say clearly that this conversation is not only about women. Narrow gendered communication norms damage everyone. Men, too, are shaped by expectations that tie authority to dominance, hardness, certainty, and emotional distance. Boys learn early that vulnerability can cost them respect. Men learn that care can be feminized and therefore discounted. Institutions then reproduce these patterns and call them professionalism, leadership, or culture. So the task is not simply to fit women into an old script. It is to question the script itself.
And that brings me to the practical question for this room. What does it mean to do things differently?
It means, first, that communication professionals have to become more precise about framing. We need to pay attention to the adjectives we use, the examples we elevate, the people we quote, the stories we lead with, and the assumptions built into our language. If women are always being framed through struggle, care, and endurance, while men are framed through strategy, authority, and decision-making, we are not simply describing reality. We are teaching audiences how to value people.
It means, second, that we have to move beyond visibility as the main test of progress. Visibility matters, but visibility without authority is often just performance. We need to ask whether women are being positioned as legitimate knowers, serious actors, and decision-makers. Are they speaking on the core issue, or only on the social dimension of the core issue? Are they being cited for expertise, or mainly for personal testimony? Are they being invited to shape the message, or only to humanize it?
It means, third, that internal communication deserves as much scrutiny as external communication. Who gets credited in meetings? Who gets interrupted? Whose ideas are recirculated through someone else’s voice? What styles of leadership are rewarded? What informal narratives gather around senior women? Communication professionals are often among the first to see these patterns. That means you are also among those best placed to name them and help shift them.
It means, fourth, that when we tell stories about African societies, we must resist flattening. Women are not only vulnerable. Men are not only obstacles. Culture is not the only problem. The story is more layered than that. There are structures, histories, economic pressures, institutional habits, and inherited forms of legitimacy all interacting at once. Better communication does not simplify complexity into cliché. It makes complexity more honest and more usable.
And finally, it means that we must communicate in ways that redistribute legitimacy. That may be the deepest task of all. Not simply to include more voices, but to change whose voice is treated as authoritative in the first place. That may mean changing who is quoted first, who moderates, who is trusted with analytical depth, who represents the institution publicly, whose perspective is treated as central rather than decorative, and whose authority is allowed to stand without apology.
So let me return to the woman in that meeting.
The question is not only whether she spoke. The question is what had already been communicated, long before she opened her mouth, about who carries weight, who sounds credible, who can be direct without penalty, and whose authority arrives pre-approved. That is what makes this issue so complex. And that is also what makes the work of communication so important.
If we want to shift gendered power relations in African societies, then communications professionals cannot be satisfied with better wording around old assumptions. The task is deeper than that. It is to notice where language is hiding hierarchy. It is to challenge frames that make male authority feel natural and women’s authority feel conditional. It is to tell fuller stories, design fairer platforms, create institutional cultures where recognition is not rationed by gender, and use communication not simply to polish public life but to make it more truthful.
That is the work before us. To listen differently. To frame differently. To credit differently. To platform differently. To write differently. To moderate differently. To decide differently. To build communication systems in which women do not have to shrink themselves to be legible as serious, and in which authority is not quietly coded as male before anyone has even spoken.
If we do that well, then perhaps the next time that woman speaks in that meeting, the room will not need her idea repeated through another voice before it is respected or acknowledged. It will be heard as it was always worthy of being heard: clearly, fully, and on its own terms.
Yop Rwang Pam
Senior Partner, Principal at Project by projects
Project by Projects 