Tag: peopleofcolour

How many non-fiction female authors have you listened to?

I was in the queue for the excellent Taiga ride at Linnanmäki while at the Mydata conference. While in the long queue, as there was no single rider queue (but I did get called a head a couple of time as single rider). I heard a podcast called the deep dive on the subject of the male crisis. Something I have been interested in for ages and fits within some work I’d like to do more of under cubicgarden.ltd.

There is a lot of great things in the conversation but this got me really thinking (about 36:50, I couldn’t get the link to timestamp working). Sorya Chemaly uses a personal experience of talking with 2 men with teenage children at a party who also have a book club book group. They find out she is a writer/author, then ask her if she likes writing non-fiction?

Soraya mentions she likes writing it but is frustrated because men generally only read non-fiction by men not women. So as a woman, she loses half the audience straight away.

The men have a discussion between themselves in the open asking if they ever had a female written book in their book club. Turns out no they had not ever, and start to openly wonder why. Soraya, puts it clear what the problem in the podcast.

This got me thinking how many non-fiction books have I read which are written by a woman?

As I read a lot of non-fiction, I looked though my bookwrym to see.

Books I read so far in 2025

So far in 2025 I have read 20 books. The ones which are written by a female are. Unprocssed, Supremacy, Empire of AI, Careless people, Data a love story, Mood Machine, Refusing compulsory sexuality and Limitarianism.

8/20 is better than I thought it would be, I am currently reading a few book including Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown for example, which is very thoughtful.

All the books I read in 2024

In 2024 I read 24 books and the ones which were written by a female were the Shock doctorine, Extremely online, Doppelganger, Extremely hardcore, Radical intimacy, Lets talk about loneliness, The tech coup, Automating Inequality and Together.

9/24, less good but happy I am improving in 2025.

For companion, 2023 was pretty bad with only 3 women, Silicon Values, The big con and The will to change.

All the books I read in 2023

However the discussion doesn’t stop there, because how many of the women I read are women of colour? From a brief look. Karen Hao, and Sherronda J.Brown from this year and Simone Heng and Sophie K. Rosa from 2024. Although Bell Hooks from 2023 which is a important writer on this exact subject.

Soraya makes the important point that if you are not aware of this all, nothing will change. My eyes are wide open now. Thanks!

Voter ID in the UK?

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I can’t (but can) believe the UK Government is looking to make Photo ID needed to vote on elections. Has no one ever looked at the reasons why its been such a heated debate in the states?

Voter suppression or discouragement of people of colour’s votes is a big deal simply because they tend to vote more democratic or left.

Of course this isn’t the first time this has been talked about in the UK, and I expect it won’t be the last unfortunately.

How many black UK podcasts hosts are there?

The Black Detour

I was having a chat with someone (don’t have his card to hand) during a event in Salford University. We were talking about the perceptive podcasts application and podcasting industry in general. I was talking about how podcasting is/should/could be a different medium. There is still the opportunity to do new and interesting things with the format which suit/challenge the audience.

This lead into a discussion about diversity and how the established people are never going to be that interested. We zeroed in on ethic diversity

“What we need is more diversity and new voices; not just in front of the microphone but as producers.“I power-phrase him saying.

This headed to towards a long discussion about how many black podcasts we have heard? I instantly talked about…

Then he dropped the bombshell, “what about the UK?”

I found it very difficult to name any off the top of my head, so decided to asked the twit/fed-verse

A few people got back to me and I thought I’d share…

Then I found, podcasts in color which lists podcasts from people of colour (because actually its not about just one race). Its hard to work out which ones are UK but I found these.

There are many more but they don’t seem to be updated recently.

So the short answer is yes there are UK black podcasts but not as many as I would have liked. I’m planning to go back through this list and resources to find new podcasts to subscribe to.

podcasts in color

Interestingly James from podcast news pointed me at a piece of news about diversity in podcasts.

Dane Cardiel from Simplecast is “working closely with Dan and Jared on an initiative collecting input from podcasters of colour for the 2nd Annual Podcasters of Colour Networking Event at Podcast Movement 2019.” If you’re a podcaster of colour interested in participating in discussions later this month, here’s a form to fill in.

I missed my chance but good to know others are thinking about similar things.