How Diverse Were City Cast Philly’s Podcast Guests in 2023?

When we launched City Cast in 2021, we committed to tracking–and publishing–demographic information about our podcast guests. Diversity is a core City Cast value, and accountability is another. We want to have podcast guests who are diverse in race and ethnicity, gender, economic background, and geography. Tracking and publicizing guest demographics is a way to hold us accountable for representing the diversity of Philadelphia.

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

We ask each of our City Cast Philly podcast guests a few questions about their gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, and neighborhood. About 95% of guests responded in 2023. The following data encompass a total of 158 responding guests who collectively made 290 podcast appearances from Nov. 1, 2022 through Nov. 9, 2023. (We did not count City Cast Philly staffers who appeared on the podcast.)

We then used census data to compare our podcast guests to the broader city population. This helps us see how well we’re reflecting the community we’re serving.

As you can see in the chart, City Cast Philly’s guests mirrored the population in some ways but not in others. We had about the same percentage of guests who are Black, Asian-American, and white as the metro area’s population, but our guests were more white and less Black than the city. And we had fewer Hispanic/Latinx guests than you’d expect. Only 4% of City Cast Philly guests were Hispanic/Latinx, compared to more than 10% for the city and region.

There are understandable reasons for this shortfall: Many Hispanics and Latinx people are immigrants, and immigrant communities are traditionally hard for journalists outside those communities to access. Some may not consume much English-language media. As a result, Hispanic/Latinx residents of Philly may be less likely to know City Cast Philly and be part of the community we’re building. But we need to keep pushing to get more excellent Hispanic/Latinx guests on City Cast Philly.

We also asked about gender identity. A 53% majority of our guests identified as male, with 46% identifying as female and 1% identifying as non-binary.

Learn more about guest diversity on other City Cast podcasts here.