Male hosts dominate the world of podcasting, per a new USC report

In 2019, people were already making jokes about how the collective noun for a group of men should be changed to “a podcast.” Not a lot’s changed six years later, with a new report from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism revealing that male hosts still dominate the format.

Typecasting

According to a new study led by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and the school’s Inclusion Initiative, women appeared as hosts on just 33% of the top 592 US podcasts on Spotify last year. The representation of women across the podcasting landscape represents a “low point” relative to other media, per the report, with the share of female participation across top films, TV shows, and songs all higher than podcasting last year.

Though things at the very top of the pod game are pretty even on the surface — six of the current top 10 podcasts on Spotify feature at least one female host, while around 50% of the 25 podcasts eligible for the Golden Globes’ inaugural Best Podcast award also have women behind the mic — the picture is less equal further down the list, with some striking splits by genre.

Per the paper, women are least represented across business and tech podcasts, where just 8% of pods have one or more female hosts, as well as sports and fitness, with men taking an 81% share of popular sporting pod hosting duties. Indeed, of the top genres Smith et al. tracked, only true crime saw a higher share of female than male hosts — a pattern that holds up across listener figures for the genre, too.

Read the full study, “Inequality in Popular Podcasts? An Examination of Gender & Race/Ethnicity,” here.