AI Podcast Guests

This data was originally featured in the July 26, 2023 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2023/07/inbox-insights-july-26-2023-agency-ai-readiness-ai-podcast-guests/.

In this week’s Data Diaries, in celebration both of the ubiquity of the Barbie movie and the endless torrent of news about artificial intelligence, we wanted to bring those two threads together. There are, as one might imagine, a number of podcasts talking about AI right now. We wanted to see – of the episodes (not shows, but episodes, whether or not a podcast is principally about AI or not) that have substantially covered AI, what sort of gender diversity might we see?

Let’s take a look. Using tools like Talkwalker and AHREFS, we identified podcast episodes that had both a host and a guest so far in 2023. That was about 30,000 episodes. From there, we analyzed how many were principally about AI, where AI was the key subject matter, which was 3,074 episodes or about 10%.

Using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5-Turbo API, we inferred the gender of both the host and guest to perform the analysis. What did we end up with?

Of podcast episodes about AI, 32% were female-hosted and 67.8% were male-hosted.

Next, we examined the guests:

Of podcast episodes about AI, 36.4% had female guests, while 63.6% had male guests.

Now, we know without question that there’s bias within the AI field; the field tends to skew very strongly male. However, in podcasts, hosts have the choice of who to invite to speak about AI. We did not de-duplicate guests, meaning that Guest A could appear on podcasts X, Y, and Z and be counted 3 times because Guest A made three distinct appearances. Ideally, we would see a pattern where regardless of the gender of the host, the guests would be roughly evenly distributed.

Here’s what we found:

Female podcast hosts tended to invite male guests approximately 31% of the time, and female guests approximately 69% of the time.

Male podcast hosts skewed even more unevenly; male hosts invited male guests 79.3% of the time and female guests 20.7% of the time.

How do we fix this so we achieve more parity? Certainly, female hosts shouldn’t need any assistance finding male hosts, so we can skip that part. For male hosts, we strongly encourage them to look out at the AI field to find the female thought leaders in the space. Here’s a list of 100 from Re-Work’s blog. Reach out to any of these folks to start booking interviews.

And hey, if you just want to make it easy on yourself, bring Katie onto your show!