The Shocking Stats Behind Who Runs Your Favorite Podcasts

Podcasting's diversity problem. 64% of podcasters are male. 77% of podcasters are white. A new USC Annenberg study. It's an inclusive initiative, and it says the podcast boom isn't as democratic as advertised. According to the report, 64% of hosts on the Top 100 Spotify podcast in 2024 are men, 77% are white. Across a broader set of 592 popular shows, women are still outnumbered roughly 2 to 1, and underrepresented hosts remain far below their share of the US Population. The imbalance shows up in bookings, too. Men made up nearly 73% of identifiable guests, and almost two thirds of episodes featured no women guessed at all. USC's researchers note one exception. True crime, where women slightly outnumber men as hosts, but business, tech, sports, and comedy are overwhelmingly male. The study argues discovery systems and funding patterns may be reinforcing who gets the mic and who gets amplified. As the authors put it, podcasting is replicating patterns from film and TV rather than breaking them. Okay, so what's the real message here? Podcasting is this new, innovative technology where supposedly there aren't all the gatekeepers that Hollywood has or broadcast TV news has. It should be more open to people of all races and genders, right? Well, guess what? That's not how it works. The vast, vast majority of successful podcasters are men and they're white. Why is it there's no simple answer? Okay, there is a simple answer. The simple answer is women. Start your own podcast. Anyone can do it. Nobody asked me be a podcaster. I just decided to do it. So if you want to change this, that's the first thing you've got to actually take the mic, hit record, and start. There are more really successful male and white male podcasters in the world, in part because there are a lot more white male podcasters starting the game and failing at it miserably on a daily basis. So get in the game doesn't guarantee success, but you cannot win if you're not in the game. Okay, let's dig a little deeper. This is an issue I have thought a lot about for decades, because 35 years ago, 36 years ago, I had a syndicated political TV talk show, and I realized that does make me sound really old, and I'm not a spring chicken, but I remember having to beg and beg women to be on the show as a panelist. It was a show kind of like the McLaughlin Group, if you remember that. It was the host, I was the host, and four other panelists. Panelists who weighed in on news of the day specific to the state of Florida. It was a statewide show. And I strongly remember times when I would reach out to a woman who was let's say, a bureau chief for a major newspaper in Florida who had sometimes 15, sometimes 20 years experience asking her to weigh in on her opinions on the news of the day. And quite often it was, well, you know, I'm not sure if I'm right for this, if I have the credentials for this. You know, let me think about it. And then if I'm in a bind and I needed to guess in the next five minutes, I could call a 22 year old reporter who's been working for about two weeks, who was a man, and say, hey, you want to come on a political talk show and give your opinions? Sure. What time? Where? Yeah, that was the response from almost every man, especially white men, when I asked them to do that. Now you can ask the question, why is that? Certainly I want to go beyond the glib answer I gave earlier, which is just, you know, women get out there and do it. I think there are deeper societal issues, even evolutionary aspects, biological evolutionary aspects to this. For starters, there is a culture in our country and the world where men are rewarded quite often by saying big, bold, provocative things. And if it offends some people, it's often laughed at. Whereas a woman or girl does that, it's sometimes seen as not ladylike and shocking and bad, and they, they sometimes get social punishment for it. So that's part of the issue. Another part of the issue that I think is affecting this diversity element is that, and here's where there's some controversy, but you can look at the research and make your own conclusions. From an evolutionary, biological standpoint, boys and men simply have a much greater tolerance for risk. If you doubt me, go to any emergency room and you will see probably nine out of the 10 people in there are boys are men because they did crazy stupid stuff. If you ever saw the show Jackass on mtv, it was a bunch of boys, for the most part, young men doing crazy, stupid stunts. Women are not as stupid, if you want to look at it that way, to just jump off cliffs and jump off buildings and do things that cause massive physical damage to themselves because it's risky. They are less risk friendly than young boys and men are. Well, here's the thing. Going and starting a podcast is risky to your identity because if you do a podcast and nobody watches, it's embarrassing. If you do a podcast and you say really stupid things, and people write nasty things about you. It can be embarrassing and hurt your psyche. So that is one element that I think is prob. And I don't have all the data from this study. They looked primarily at the top 100 spots and found that 64% were men and 36% presumably were women Host vast majority were white. There is another part of this, another element that I think deserves some attention, and that is if a man goes and says something provocative in social media or even innocuous, he's much less likely to have trolls come on and talk about physical violence and physical sexual violence. And I get some detractors sometimes, but no one's ever come on a video of mine and said, tj, I disagree with your opinion on that politician so much. I'm going to come sexually violate you. Never happened. And I've had thousands of negative comments and even threats on social media. If you're a woman, apparently that's what you get all day long, even if you want to talk about cooking recipes in a podcast. So it is an unfair world. And women are simply subjected to nastiness and vile physical threats for simply giving an opinion. So I would certainly assume that that's a main reason or a contributing factor as to why a lot fewer women want to put their face out there and make judgment. Plus, there's the fact that women are judged by their appearance more than men. Now, I am no Hanson brother. I'm no eye candy. I'm the same age as George Clooney and Tom Cruise and a number of other celebrities like Brad Pitt, but I don't look like them. And yet, other than once a week, somebody saying, hey tj, you got beady eyes? Or where'd your hair go? I'm not subjected to vicious, brutal attacks on my looks. Hope I'm not giving anyone ideas, but women are. And it's nasty and it's vile. So I think that has to be a contributing reason. Let's look at some more of the data from this Annenberg study from the University of Southern California. A highly credible place. Again, I of the top 100 shows on Spotify, 64% male. Which, by the way, one of those shows is Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, which is one of my favorite shows. And they have a male and a female host, 33.2% are officially female. I guess there are some who are non binary when it comes to the race and ethnicity, 77.1% are white. Women host hit parody only in the true crime genre business. And Technology, something like this show. 92% are male. Hosts for sports and fitness, 81% male. Now that's a little surprising considering there are so many women who are fitness gurus. The Julian Michaels of the world, back to the day, the Jane Fondas. So I am a little bit surprised that less than 19% of physical fitness and sports shows are, are led by women because there's a lot of parity when it comes to women in college sports and even professional sports these days growing. I would suspect that would change. Comedy. 76.4% of all successful podcasts are by men. Education. Now that's a field you often associate with women. Certainly in secondary education in the United States, primary and secondary education, it's almost all female, especially in the early grades. But even education podcasts, 60% male. The news world, almost 60% male dominated host arts and culture. Again, a field where a lot of women have done well in the journalism world, art, society, culture. 56.7% of hosts are male. So, A, do you even think of this as a problem? Some of you might not. B, if you do think it's a problem, what's the solution? I think one solution is for organizations that care about having more equality in society. One thing you could do is simply fund training for women to become podcasters because it's difficult just learning the basic technology. I've had all sorts of technology problems today, and I've been doing this for years. So I think a lot more organizations that purport to care about creating fairness and equality in the world should put their money where their mouth is and give extensive training to women who perhaps have written a book or have created a song or have started a company successfully and would like to share their message, train them on how to do it, give it a little extra bump to get going, have some funds allocated for funding new shows. Now, for any new show, whether you're a male or a female host, initially when you start, you're not making any money. Tim Ferriss wasn't making any money when he started his podcast. Joe Rogan wasn't making any money when he started his podcast. Now, they both made, at this point, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars over time. But it didn't start out that way. So one area where you could possibly help a great deal is by providing initial sponsorship for the concept of a show, rather than saying give me the hard numbers. So those are some things I would advocate if you want to be serious about this imbalance, if you even think the imbalance is a problem. I think it's certainly less than ideal. But I do get back, and I don't want to sound like just an obnoxious jerk brocaster, but I do think that part of the issue, part of the solution is more women and girls have to simply realize there is no gatekeeper to do a podcast the way there there is at certain institutions, like TV networks, like movie networks, like the big Hollywood studios. There is no casting couch. You could simply grab a microphone or grab your cell phone and just hit record and upload. Because, yes, there are. There is discrimination in the world. There's no doubt about it. There are gatekeepers in the world. No doubt about it. That can't be the excuse for why you don't share your ideas on the world, your perspective on the world through your own podcast. Regardless of what gender you are or what race you are.