Ontario, California – Wendy Malley says she didn't know how much of a men's club podcasting had become until she arrived here for the nascent industry's first trade show last week.
The co-host of Gabber JaW says she realized her gender might be a problem when some guys flocking to the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference rudely rebuffed her efforts to strike up a conversation. At first, she thought she had interrupted them. But moments later, another group of men got on the same bus and were instantly welcomed into the group.
"I thought, 'Oh, gosh, what's the rest of my weekend going to be like?'" said Malley, who works for Nielsen Media Research and lives in suburban Chicago.
What she found at the conference was a world overwhelmed by male voices and male exhibitors. Malley said she didn't experience any other incidents she perceived as sexist, but she was nonetheless struck by the dearth of female faces. Just 15 percent of the 2,000 attendees were women, show organizer Tim Bourquin said.
It turns out even the president of Women in Technology International, which had a booth at the show, is a man. David Leighton said his mother founded the group, and he has since taken over.
Leighton said he believes the male skew is largely due to the newness of the medium and the fact that many of the most popular podcasts focus on, uh, podcasting.
"Any of these new, cool mediums tend to attract guys at first," he said. "Right now, it's technology for technology's sake. Once we see more practical uses, we'll start seeing more women. It was that way with the internet and e-mail usage, too."
Some startling statistics reported at the conference bore out this suggestion. Leo LaPorte, host of one of the most popular podcasts, This Week in Tech, said in a keynote address that his audience is 97 percent male, according to market research. Yahoo senior product manager Joe Hayashi said 85 percent of folks who use the search engine's recently released podcast directory are men.
Furthermore, several of the most prominent women in podcasting, including Malley, either co-host programs with their husbands or boyfriends or were thrust into the craft by their men.
"My husband read about podcasting in Wired magazine and wanted us to do it, so I said if he set it all up, I would," said Malley, whose husband had a work conflict that forced him to miss the expo. "But then I was thinking about starting a podcast with a girlfriend and I thought, 'I'm not sure the demographics are out there to listen to this.'
"I don't know if a guy's going to download that podcast," Malley said. "They'll see it's two chicks and think, 'I probably don't want to hear a bunch of chick talk.'"
Maybe not, but Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger have found a large and broad audience for their twice-weekly MommyCast show. Such a good audience, in fact, that the suburban Washington, D.C., moms landed a one-year sponsorship for their program from paper-goods maker Dixie.
The women, who have seven children between them, have made a significant media splash, taking partial credit for the hype that surrounded the summer sleeper hit documentary March of the Penguins. Their support of the film – and interviews with the filmmakers – garnered write-ups from Variety and Hollywood Reporter early in the movie's ascent.
"There's a learning curve there, and once women come to it, (podcasting is) going to be huge for women," said Vogelzang, 43. "They are able to listen on their own terms. Women do not have the luxury of being in a specific place and time to listen to a broadcasted show."
Still, some female podcasters have different concerns than men. Many balk at giving out their full names for fear of being stalked. The co-hosts of The Tipsy Chicks, a Minneapolis-based podcast, halted their show for a few weeks last month, in fact, because they received menacing e-mails from a male listener who told them he knew where they lived and worked. They reported the anonymous e-mailer to his ISP and haven't heard from him since, says one co-host.
"The women who have a male co-host, they do fine," said Erica, 31, who declined to disclose her last name for fear of her safety. "It's when it's just a solo woman or two women that guys seem to get really weird. That does make me want to just hang it up."
