Podcasting Today Report: Podcast Listening Among Women

RADIO ONLINE | Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Nielsen

According to Nielsen's recently released Podcasting Today report, the top genre among female podcast listeners in the U.S. is 'kids and family,' with a 77% audience composition. Among the top ten most popular podcasts that are listened to by women, the category of 'true crime' comes in at a whopping 60%. Fiction podcasts are evenly split among male and female listeners.

Nielsen says that regardless of characteristics such as gender, podcasts listeners are a diverse group with diverse interests and that women are among the most voracious consumers of podcasts of all types and subjects.

Women are savvy consumers of news, information, and other media across devices. They also make up 45% of all podcast consumers over-indexing in podcasts across all genres. This is a sought-after demographic for marketers and advertisers, as female-led households in the U.S. increased 41% in the last five years. No matter what media they're consuming, truth, transparency, and real representation matter.

The second most popular listening genre after kids and family podcasts is health and fitness (63%), followed by arts podcasts (61%). Among the top ten most popular podcasts that are listened to by women are true crime (60%), religion and spirituality (58%), education (54%), society and culture (53%), fiction (50%), and TV, film, and music (48%).

While kids and family is the most popular podcast genre among women, for men, the top podcast genres with the highest audience composition by far are sports (81%), technology (80%).

When looking at top podcast genre usage among women ages 25-54 based on percent of all podcast usage, comedy, and true crime were tops (9%), followed by news and society and culture (8%). For men in the same age demographic, news was the most preferred genre (13%), followed closely by comedy (12%).