City Cast is 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?
This is the second year of data we have about City Cast Philly guests. (Here’s our report for 2023.) We ask each of our City Cast Philly podcast guests a few questions about their gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, and neighborhood. About 80% of guests responded in 2024. The following data encompass a total of 93 responding guests who appeared on the podcast between Nov. 1, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2024. (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 and metro population. This helps us see how well we’re reflecting the community we’re serving.
City Cast Philly’s guests were more white than the city as a whole. We had about the same percentage of guests who are Black as the metro area’s population, but we had significantly lower percentages of Asian-American and Hispanic/Latinx guests than the city population. Only 4% of City Cast Philly guests were Hispanic/Latinx, compared to more than 10% for the city and region.
We also asked about gender identity. A 52% majority of our guests identified as male, with 48% identifying as female.
