Nigeria has some of the most educated, most talented, most resourceful women on the African continent. Women who have built businesses with nothing, navigated systems that were designed without them in mind, and shown up in spaces that did not always welcome them. But despite these struggles and efforts, a disproportionate number of women are completely invisible online.
They remain unheard not because they lack ideas (in fact, they have loads), nor because they don’t possess the skills, knowledge, or compelling stories that could capture people’s attention. Rather, it’s due to one persistent, culturally significant question that resides in the hearts of almost every Nigerian woman I have worked with: What will others think?
Where does this question come from, what is it doing to us, and why answering it honestly might be the most important professional decision a Nigerian woman makes in this decade?
Visibility anxiety is not unique to Nigeria. Every culture has its version of the fear of being seen. But ours has a specific texture, inspired by specific forces. For instance, grow up inside a dense web of communal accountability. Family. Extended family. Church. Neighbourhood. Social circles that have known us since childhood and feel entitled to opinions about how we live, what we do and what we dare to attempt. This is not a bad thing. Community is a gift. Accountability has value. The Nigerian social fabric, for all its complications, produces people with a deep sense of relational responsibility.
But it also produces a hyperawareness of perception. A tendency to perform for the imagined audience before we perform for the real one. A habit of making decisions not based on what we want to build, but on what we are afraid people will say about the attempt. See, the aunties are not on your Instagram. But they are in your head. And in too many cases, they are running the show.
When I sit with women, and we go beneath the surface of what people will say, three specific fears almost always emerge.
The first is the fear of public failure. In private, failure is manageable. You try something, it does not work, you learn, you continue. But online, failure has witnesses. In our culture, where social reputation carries enormous weight, the prospect of being seen to have tried and not succeeded feels like more than a professional setback. It feels like a social one. And social setbacks in tight communities have long memories.
The second is the fear of being perceived as proud. There is a policed line in Nigerian culture between confidence and arrogance, and that line is drawn differently for women than it is for men. A woman who speaks publicly about her expertise, who claims authority, who puts herself forward without waiting to be invited, risks a label. Too much. Too forward. Who does she think she is?
The third is the most specific and the most damaging. A woman is not afraid of strangers on the internet. She is afraid of the cousin who will screenshot and send it to the family WhatsApp group. She is afraid of the woman from church who will suddenly have things to say. She is afraid of the colleague who has always had quiet opinions about her ambitions.
So, a w0wan, instead of building her content strategy for her audience, is building it for a small room of critics who have not asked to see anything, will not pay for anything, and will have opinions about everything. She is letting that decide what the world gets from her.
Meanwhile, when talented Nigerian women opt out of digital visibility en masse, the information landscape that shapes how people think about African women, African business, and African expertise gets built by whoever shows up. And whoever shows up is not always the one who is most qualified. They are simply those who are least afraid.
I have had the privilege of watching women move from invisible to visible, from quiet to known, and the thing that strikes me most consistently is that they did not start with perfection. The fear did not go away. They started while the fear was still fully present, but they became visible anyway. What they discovered on the other side of that first terrifying post, that first video, that first time they said something in public that they had previously only said in private, was that the noise they feared was so much smaller than the impact they made. The critics were fewer than imagined. The support was greater. And the woman they became in the process of showing up consistently was someone they respected more than the woman who had stayed safely quiet.
There is something else they understood that I think is the most important reframe available to any Nigerian woman sitting on the edge of visibility. Showing up online is not about you. It is about the people who need what you carry and cannot find it because you are not there.
When the question shifts from what will people say about me to what does the woman who needs this lose when I stay quiet, everything changes. They start considering visibility as an act of service and responsibility. When more women become visible online, they inspire generations of young girls and shape how a demography is percieved.
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Featured Image by Karolina Grabowska for Pexels
The post Paula Pwul: Why More Women Need to Be Visible Online appeared first on BellaNaija – Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!.
Nigeria has some of the most educated, most talented, most resourceful women on the African continent. Women who have built businesses with nothing, navigated systems that were designed without them in mind, and shown up in spaces that did not always welcome them. But despite these struggles and efforts, a disproportionate number of women are
The post Paula Pwul: Why More Women Need to Be Visible Online appeared first on BellaNaija – Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!. Read More
