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 Denver.
So are we living up to our values? How diverse is our podcast guest pool, really?
This is the third year of data we have about City Cast Denver’s guests. (Here’s our report for 2023.) We ask each of our podcast guests a few questions about their gender identity, racial/ethnic identity, and neighborhood. About 90% of guests responded in 2024. The following data encompass a total of 114 responding guests who appeared on City Cast Denver between Nov. 1, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2024. (We did not count City Cast Denver staffers who appeared on the podcast.)
We then used census data to compare our podcast guests to the broader Denver metro and city populations. This helps us see how well we’re reflecting the community we’re serving.
As you can see in the chart, City Cast Denver’s guests broadly mirrored the population of the city and region, but were a bit whiter than the city and metro populations. City Cast Denver had slightly fewer Hispanic guests than you’d expect based on Denver’s population–only 21% compared to 29% for the city, but that’s a 25 percent improvement over 2023.
We also asked about gender identity. A 60% majority of our guests identified as male, with 35% identifying as female and 5% identifying as non-binary. Denver has the lowest percentage of female guests and the highest percentage of non-binary guests of any City Cast podcast.
