After years of being pushed aside as a niche medium, podcasts are finally having their heyday. The past couple of years have seen a huge boom in the number (and quality) of podcasts—especially those that are hosted by women and/or talk about women and their experiences. Here are five brilliant lady-led podcasts that podcast newbies (and podcast enthusiasts who haven’t yet) should start binge-listening to right now:
2 Dope Queens
Having debuted in 2016, 2 Dope Queens is a classic-in-the-making. Hosts Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams are two young black BFFs who swap stories about sex, romance and modern living, as well as their bitingly comedic takes on pretty much anything that they feel needs to be talked about. There’s almost always a special guest, usually a standup comedian or a celebrity who is female, a person of color and/or a member of the LGBTQ community.
Nerdette
Girls can be nerds—and Nerdette co-hosts Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen are proud of that. The two brazen ladies talk about anything that they find fascinating, from how to build terrible robots to Tom Hank’s obsession with typewriters to what paved the way for the first female Doctor in Doctor Who. Joining them are interviewees like Hollywood’s Jenny Slate, poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic book writer G. Willow Wilson.
The Allusionist
This is the perfect podcast for language nerds. The Allusionist takes a crack at the English language and how history and culture has morphed it over the centuries. Helen Zaltzman is an unapologetically witty and intelligently hilarious host. Pro tip: the podcast gets off to a rough start, but it improves greatly as it progresses.
The History Chicks
“Welcome to The History Chicks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.” That’s how hosts Beckett Graham and Susan Vollenweider characterize their podcast. For one hour, they revisit the stories of famous women in history and discuss how they function in constructed historical narratives, how they influence current history and what your high school history teacher didn’t tell you about them.
Still Processing
Okay, so Still Processing isn’t 100 percent female-hosted—New York Times culture writers Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris tackle pop culture, current events, the internet and whatever else you can think of with the perfect mix of energy, intelligence, humor and passion. Like the listeners, the hosts themselves are still in the process of understanding the confusing social, political, cultural and technological climate of the era, and their conversations are both cathartic and enlightening.
