More women are becoming regular podcast listeners, research says

Podcasts are for the girls.

In the earlier days of the podcast industry, the stereotype of the average listener was thought of as “an older white man wearing a massive set of headphones, likely sitting at his computer,” Melissa Paris, VP of sales research and analytics at SXM Media, wrote in a post about a new report from the company.

Nowadays, not so much. Women made up about half (48%) of monthly podcast listeners in the US, according to The Women’s 2022 Podcast Report, a study conducted by Edison Research on behalf of SXM Media by surveying 1,500 US adults who identify as women. That’s up from 44% in 2017.

Additionally, more than one in three (35%) US women over the age of 18 said they listened to a podcast in the past month, aka an estimated 47 million women.

Ad opportunity: Women podcast listeners were more likely to consider, recommend, purchase, and spend more on brands they hear advertised on podcasts with hosts or producers who are women compared to other podcasts, according to the report.

• Compared to the general population, women who listened to podcasts on a monthly basis tended to skew younger. They were also more highly educated, more likely to be in the workforce, and more likely to have higher household incomes, per the report.
• Those demos are prime for many advertisers, but still, podcasts are not “necessarily thought of as top of mind,” for brands looking to target women, Paris told Marketing Brew.
• “They absolutely should be, because it’s a really, really crucial space for women,” she said.

Not all women: Women listen to a wide variety of podcasts, the report indicates, but their preferences differed based on more specific demo breakdowns. For instance, Hispanic women over-indexed for listening to fantasy/sci-fi and children’s podcasts, while Black women over-indexed for love and relationships and wellness/self-improvement ones.

Advertisers can use that kind of data to find podcast topics that they hope will “naturally over-index with these specific groups of women that [they’re] looking to target,” Paris explained. “Contextual targeting is one of the easiest ways to apply that in the podcast realm.”

Big picture: Podcast companies and stakeholders are working to demonstrate that both hosts and listeners are becoming more diverse, and diversity was a big topic of conversation at this year’s IAB Podcast Upfront and Advertising Week New York.