This week, we released The Creators 2025, our latest look at the people who make the podcasts we love. There’s a lot in this study—data on format preferences, retention patterns, what drives people to create, and what keeps them going. But there’s one finding I want to pull out and examine more closely, because I think it points to something the industry needs to talk about more.
Among podcast consumers, 15% of men are currently active podcast creators. For women, that number is 8%. Nearly half as many women as men.
Now, before we go any further, let me tell you what this data does not show. It doesn’t show that women are leaving podcasting at higher rates than men. In fact, the opposite is true. Among people who have ever created a podcast, women have a retention rate of 69%, compared to 67% for men. Once women start, they’re more likely to stick with it. The problem isn’t that women are abandoning the medium. The problem is they’re not starting in the first place.
And this isn’t a new problem. When we look at everyone who has ever created a podcast—active or lapsed—the gap is just as pronounced: 23% of male podcast consumers versus 12% of their female counterparts. This disparity existed before podcasting’s recent pivot toward video. It’s baked into something more fundamental about how the medium has developed and for whom it’s been developed.
That’s the part that should give us pause. We can’t pin this entirely on the “video or die” narrative, as tempting as that might be. The gap predates it. What we’re seeing is likely the result of years of an industry that hasn’t done enough proactive work to cultivate, celebrate, and elevate women creators as role models for the next generation of podcasters.
Think about the shows that get held up as models of success in this industry. Think about who speaks at conferences, who gets profiled in trade publications, and who gets cited as examples of “how to do it right.” There are certainly successful women in podcasting—many of them. But has the industry been intentional about making sure aspiring creators see themselves reflected in those success stories? Have we built visible pathways that say “this is for you, too”? The data suggests we haven’t done enough.
This is where video enters the picture—not as the cause, but as a potential accelerant of an existing problem.
Here’s what we know: among active creators who are making podcasts right now, video usage rates are virtually identical. 71% of active female creators use video in some form, compared to 70% of male creators. So the women who have decided to create aren’t avoiding video. They’re embracing it at the same rate as their male counterparts.
Put these findings together, and a hypothesis emerges: video might be adding friction at the decision point, not at the execution stage. The pressure to be on camera — to have the right setup, the right lighting, the right look — may be raising the barrier to entry in ways that don’t affect everyone equally.
I want to be careful here, because this is an area where it’s easy to stumble into lazy generalizations. But I don’t think we can ignore the reality that the stakes of being on camera are different for different people. Women in media face scrutiny that men simply don’t face to the same degree — not just about what they say, but how they look saying it. That’s not a controversial statement; it’s been documented extensively across broadcast media, YouTube, and every other visual platform. The comment sections alone are enough to give anyone pause.
And that’s before we even get to the practical considerations. Podcasting’s great promise has always been its accessibility. You can record in your closet at 11 pm after the kids are asleep. You can build something meaningful in the margins of a life that doesn’t have a lot of margin to spare. The moment video becomes an expectation, those margins get a lot narrower. Suddenly, you need a presentable background. You need to be “camera-ready.” You need an hour of setup time you might not have.
The “video or die” narrative has been good for certain segments of our industry. YouTube is an enormous discovery platform, and the top shows in podcasting are almost universally available on video. We’ve published plenty of research here at Sounds Profitable about the power of video for podcast discovery. None of that is wrong.
But when we layer video expectations on top of an industry that already has a representation problem, we risk making that problem worse. We’re adding noise to the decision-making process for potential creators who are already looking at a landscape and wondering if there’s a place for them in it.
So what do we do about this?
First, I think we need to get more intentional about representation. Conferences, podcasts about podcasting, industry publications, and award shows—all of these are opportunities to make sure the faces of success in this medium look like the full range of people who might want to create. This isn’t about charity or checking boxes. It’s about showing potential creators that people like them have built something meaningful here. I can assure you that Sounds Profitable is going to walk the walk there with our first big Podcast Movement event, Evolutions at SXSW.
Second, we need more nuance in how we talk about video. More acknowledgment that the “right” approach depends on who you are, what you’re making, and what you’re comfortable with. More celebration of audio-first creators who are building loyal audiences without ever turning on a camera.
Here’s what I know: we lose something when voices opt out before they ever opt in. The podcast ecosystem gets less diverse. The range of perspectives narrows. And we never get to hear from creators who might have built something great, if only the perceived barriers had been a little lower.
The retention data tells me that women who create podcasts are in this for the long haul. They’re not dabbling. They’re not more likely to “podfade.” They’re committed. The question is how many potential builders we’re losing at the very first step—and what this industry can do to change that.
