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 Pittsburgh.
So are we living up to our values? How diverse is our podcast guest pool, really?
This is the second year of data we have about City Cast Pittsburgh guests. (Here’s our report for 2023.) We ask each of our City Cast Pittsburgh 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 91 responding guests who appeared on the podcast between Nov. 1, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2024. (We did not count City Cast Pittsburgh staffers who appeared on the podcast.)
We then used census data to compare our podcast guests to the broader Pittsburgh city and metro population. This helps us see how well we’re reflecting the community we’re serving.
Pittsburgh is an overwhelmingly white city and metro area, and City Cast Pittsburgh’s guest pool mirrored that. City Cast Pittsburgh had a lower percentage of Black guests than the city, but the 9% of guests who were Black in 2024 represented a significant increase over 2023. We also had more Hispanic/Latinx guests than you’d expect given the general population, one of the only cities in the City Cast network where that is true.
We also asked about gender identity. Slightly more than half of our guests identified as female, with 47% identifying as male and 2% identifying as non-binary.
