On Attracting More Female Listeners

Greek Philosophy is male-dominated in an academic sense and Stoicism, in particular, attracts almost exclusively men (though not exclusively, as you'll discover during my upcoming interview with author Sharon LeBell). Practical Stoicism receives over half-a-million downloads a month, but look at the gender breakdown of listeners:

Assuming 2/3 of "not-specified" is male, my audience is 90% male.

This is a problem, and it's a problem for modern reasons but probably not the modern reasons you think. You may think that I'm someone who cares about the optics of having (practically) no female listeners, that I worry for the "brand" as it exists in this "woke" virtue signaling culture. I do not. My concern stems from my practical sensibilities. 

The reason I care I have so few female listeners isn't representation, although I could make that argument because, from a representation of percentages standpoint, men are over-represented (when compared to the US population) and non-binary is pretty close to exactly representative. The reason I care I have so few female listeners is that they make up damn near (maybe a little more now) half of all people on earth. 

I believe, as you believe, that Stoicism is a useful philosophy that everyone should, at least in part, incorporate into their lives for the sake of themselves, their communities, and the world. How can we believe that and not care about reaching women with this philosophy?

If my plan is to reform fundamentalist/traditional Stoicism so it can be more practically practiced in the world, because I want to make the world a better place (and this is my plan), how successful do I imagine I'll be if women aren't part of that plan?

I don't know how to move forward with this, but here are my initial thoughts:

I should effort to appear on female-lead podcasts in the philosophy and classics realm so as to get in front of more women interested in this sort of content

I should effort to find more female philosophers (who are relevant to the content of this podcast) to feature as guests on Practical Stoicism

I should survey my existing female listenership to discover more about them. Perhaps they will be willing to share demographic information that can help me build an ad campaign to more effectively target listeners like them.

I don't think it's realistic to expect that I will ever be able to get a 50/50 split. It's well-established that, for whatever reason, women are considerably less interested in this sort of Philosophy than men -- and, again, this isn't about representation for the sake of representation, it's about maximizing the impact of Stoicism across genders -- but I think a realistic goal, before the end of the year, is to see the current gender split move from 90/10 male/female to 80/20.

If you have ideas about how to make more progress towards this specific aim more quickly, please feel free to drop a comment below or send a private message from the contact page.

Thanks for reading.