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 Austin.
So are we living up to our values? How diverse is our podcast guest pool, really?
Since we launched City Cast Austin in the spring, we’ve been asking each of our City Cast Austin podcast guests a few questions about their gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, and neighborhood. More than 90% of guests have responded. The following data encompass a total of 46 responding guests who’ve appeared on the podcast from when we launched in May until Oct. 31, 2024. (We did not count City Cast Austin 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. Since City Cast Austin has only been going for six months, this is a sparse amount of data, and we don’t want to make too many sweeping conclusions based on it.
City Cast Austin guests are somewhat whiter than the city and metro area as a whole. We had more Black guests and significantly fewer Hispanic guests than you’d expect based on the local population. Almost every city in the City Cast network has a lower percentage of Hispanic guests than you’d expect given the local population.
We also asked about gender identity. A 57% majority of our guests identified as female, with 41% identifying as male and 2% identifying as non-binary.
