Where are the women? The UK's podcast charts have a blind spot
Podcasting, verb: one of this century’s newest media formats. And what’s different here: there’s no inherited gatekeepers, no legacy schedules, no decades of "that's just how it's always been done." So it's worth asking why, for most of 2026, the UK's top 10 podcast chart didn't include a single British female-led show.
Looking at Edison Research's UK podcast rankings, based on listener reach rather than one-off chart spikes, and the top 10 for Q1 2026 reads:
The Joe Rogan Experience
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Rest Is Politics
The Rest Is History
Newscast
The Rest Is Football
That Peter Crouch Podcast
The News Agents
Americast
Crime Junkie
Excluding number 10, Crime Junkie, and every remaining show is fronted by men.
Which makes for an odd mismatch, because the audience doesn't look like that. RAJAR's MIDAS survey, the UK's own industry standard for audio measurement, puts the podcast listener base at 55% female to 45% male. Women are, by that measure, the majority of the people actually listening. They're just not who most of them are listening to at the top of the chart.
How other countries compare
The US and Australian top 10s aren't equal, but they're not empty either. In Edison's Q2 2026 US rankings, Call Her Daddy sits at number four, ahead of household names like SmartLess and Dateline. Alex Cooper built it from a dating show into a cultural force, and it holds its own against The Joe Rogan Experience and The Daily. Crime Junkie, hosted by Ashley Flowers, sits in the top three.
Australia tells a similar story. Mamamia Out Loud, hosted by Mia Freedman, Holly Wainwright and Jessie Stephens, is currently Australia's number one podcast. And look at one of my favourite podcasts; Shameless. Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald started it as a side project in 2018 and it's since grown into Shameless Media, an independent media company built by women, for women, on track for around $10 million in revenue this financial year without ever taking outside investment. The flagship podcast has been a fixture near the top of Australia's charts for years.
So the UK's absence isn't down to appetite, and it isn't down to a lack of talent behind the mic. Somewhere between production, promotion and the algorithms that decide what gets pushed to the top, British female-led podcasts are getting stuck outside the room where the biggest audiences are.
The PM podcast
Which is what makes the past couple of weeks so interesting. Andy Burnham's first podcast interview as Prime Minister wasn't with a politics show, or any of the usual first interview stops for a new PM. It was with How To Fail, Elizabeth Day's podcast about failure and what we learn from it. The episode was recorded at the new No.10 North, and turned around and published within days of the leadership contest wrapping up, no small feat for a show with an interview that candid at the centre of it. And in the days since, How To Fail has climbed back into the UK's top 10 on Apple Podcasts.
We can't say for certain the Burnham episode is the reason it's there. Elizabeth Day already had a loyal audience before he ever sat down with her. But the timing is hard to ignore, and it says something that when the country's most senior politician wanted his first proper conversation as PM, what format he chose to have it.
The takeaway
None of this is really about one chart, or one episode. It's about what gets built on top of attention once it arrives. Call Her Daddy and Shameless didn't stay podcasts. They became media companies, because someone let them hold the room long enough to grow. British female-led shows haven't had that room, not because the audience isn't there, but because the top of the chart has decided who gets to fill it. If a single interview can move the needle in days, imagine what consistent visibility could do over a year. That's the takeaway: the appetite and the talent are already here. What's missing is the platform to match.