Female Representation and Quality Indicators in Anesthesiology and Critical Care Podcasts.

BACKGROUND

Podcasts have emerged as prominent tools for asynchronous medical education, widely adopted across training levels and specialties. Diverse representation strengthens medical discourse, making an evaluation of speaker demographics essential for understanding equity and quality in digital knowledge dissemination. This study systematically evaluates female representation and quality assurance indicators in anesthesiology and critical care podcasts, including longitudinal publication trends.

METHODS

We systematically searched Apple Podcasts and Spotify using specialty-specific terms and manually reviewed the top twenty journals in the field for affiliated podcasts. Included were active, English-language, physician-hosted podcasts.

RESULTS

Eighty-five podcasts (53.0% US-based) comprising 10,190 episodes were analyzed. Of 12,522 hosts, 31.5% (n = 3945) were female; of 10,822 guests, 35.9% (n = 3882) were female. Notably, among US-based podcasts, female guest representation exceeded the 26.5% female workforce proportion among US anesthesiologists. Episodes with exclusively male hosts had 2.13 times the odds of featuring only male guests (95% CI 1.88-2.41). A positive trend of increasing female participation was observed from 2010 to 2024. Content support was variable: using broad, inclusive definitions, 42.0% of episodes had show notes and 48.4% provided supplemental material. Analysis of quality-related structures showed that 40.0% (n = 34) of podcasts produced episodes linked to a publication, 50.6% featured some episodes with three or more speakers, 21.2% of podcasts were journal-affiliated, and 20.0% were university-affiliated.

CONCLUSION

While a sex imbalance persists in anesthesiology and critical care podcasting, female participation among US-based podcasts exceeds local workforce demographic benchmarks, with a clear positive trend from 2010 to 2024. However, persistent sex similarity in speaker selection suggests ongoing biases. Quality assurance mechanisms remain highly variable, highlighting opportunities for incremental improvement. Future efforts could focus on structured guest selection and transparent quality indicators to accelerate progress toward equitable representation and educational quality in this influential medium.

EDITORIAL COMMENT: In modern times, many clinicians look for, and listen to, podcasts aimed at education in clinical specialties. This sampling of podcasts related to our specialty looked at how females and males contributed to podcast content generation and dissemination, as a marker for male versus female representation in speakership for continuing specialty education.