In August, we shared a Wired article that questioned the narrow demographic group that has been dominating the growing podcast space, noting that the limited viewpoints could limit the format’s reach. “Podcasts are still a young medium, and with the ease of recording, networks have enormous potential for promoting otherwise unheard voices,” the piece said. “So let’s go for breadth of listenership, rather than depth.”
A worthy aim indeed, especially as new data from Quartz confirms that bias among the people sitting down behind the mic. Writer Josh Morgan collected a random sample of 537 shows from the U.S. iTunes directory and did some demographic analysis. He results showed that only 18% of American podcasts had a non-white host. Women were also drastically outnumbered by male hosts, both among the white and non-white groups. Morgan made his full dataset available here.