By David Plotz

Updated Dec. 1, 2024

Diversity is one of six core City Cast values, which is why we work hard to hire people from different backgrounds and with a wide variety of religious, racial, ethnic, and gender identities.

But staffing is just one element of diversity at City Cast. What good is a diverse staff if our guests are homogeneous? The cities where we have podcasts and newsletters are wildly diverse– so it makes sense that the guests we feature in those cities should be diverse too. But how do we ensure we’re living up to our goal?

When we launched City Cast in 2021, we committed to tracking demographic information about our podcast guests. In the beginning, that meant tracking demographic data in two cities. Today, we have to track guests in 13 cities.

We also committed to publishing that data. Publicizing guest demographics is a way for you – our listeners and readers – to hold us accountable for representing the diversity of the cities we cover. Reporting this data helps nudge us to ensure we have guests who are varied in race and ethnicity, gender, and geography – and it calls attention to ways we fall short of representing our cities.

While it’s uncommon for media organizations to collect and share data about the diversity of guests, City Cast is not the first place to do it. NPR and Wisconsin Public Radio, for example, have been thorough about tracking their radio guests. We don’t know of any other podcast network besides City Cast that’s consistently tracking and sharing the diversity of its guests.

So are we living up to our values? How diverse is our podcast guest pool, really?

This is the third year we’ve surveyed City Cast guests. We published limited data from our first four cities in 2022: Denver, Chicago, Houston, and Salt Lake. In 2023, we had a full year of guest data for 11 cities. In 2024, we have a full year of data for 11 cities, and 6 months for our two new City Casts in Austin and Nashville.

We asked each of our podcast guests a few questions about their gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, and neighborhood. About 90% of guests responded in 2024, down slightly from 2023. The following data encompass 1,235 responding guests who appeared on the 13 different City Cast podcasts from Nov. 1, 2023 through Oct. 31, 2024. We did not count City Cast staffers who appeared on the podcasts.

We broke the data down by city, which gives a revealing picture of how we are doing in each particular city. But let’s start with the overall numbers across our 13 City Cast cities.

Here’s the racial/ethnic breakdown of all City Cast’s 2024 guests

These data are more interesting when you map them against the U.S. population as a whole.

The racial/ethnic breakdown of City Cast’s 2024 guests is very similar to what it was in 2023. As you can see, City Cast’s 2024 guests broadly reflected the U.S. population as a whole, with one notable exception: Only 10% of City Cast guests identified as Hispanic/Latinx, compared to 19% of Americans as a whole. We did slightly increase the percentage of Hispanic/Latinx City Cast guests from 9 percent to 10 percent over 2023.

But wait a minute, you say, the racial/ethnic composition of cities is very different from that of the U.S. as a whole! Good point, and that’s why we also performed this same analysis for each city’s data, examining how its guests compare to the populations of the city and metro area. As in 2023, I think we did pretty well at a city level, too, in 2024. But you should look at the data and judge for yourself. (See the city links below.)

We also surveyed our guests about their gender identity, and here’s what we found.

We had slightly more female than male guests. About 20 guests–1.6 percent of the total–identified as nonbinary. The percentage of male guests in individual cities ranged as high as 60% in Denver and as low as 35% in Chicago. The percentage of female guests ranged as high as 63% in Chicago and as low as 35% in Denver. Most cities had 1-2% of guests identifying as nonbinary, except for Denver, where 5% of guests identified as nonbinary.

Please take a look at how we’re doing in your city, or in a city you care about. And if you have a great idea for a guest who can bring a new perspective to a City Cast podcast, please drop me an email at david.plotz@citycast.fm, and I’ll put your suggestion in the hands of the right City Cast producer.