"of the two that weren't, one was chosen by popular demand"
No. It wasn't. I bought that myself; it was not chosen by the contest.
My apologies. I do now remember the discussion about that. You did chose to air the story, not Steve, and not the populous.
UPDATE:
Oh, and just to run some stats, three male narrators for flash and five male narrators for full-length fiction is eight male narrators out of eighteen stories, or 44% male narrators.
This week's full-length story has a male narrator, which will be nine male narrated pieces out of nineteen, or 47%.
These are figures so basically close to parity that I don't think there's any statistical argument here.
Particularly if we start running in Escape Pod numbers. When the initial complaints about PodCastle's "female-oriented" nature came in, Ann did a count of recent Escape Pod narrators and found that 87% of the recent stories had been narrated by men.
So, at PodCastle, after midnight tonight, you'll have 53% women. At Escape Pod, circa whenever the debate originated (sometime in April), you had 13% women.
Again, I don't think there is a possible statistical argument here.
So, no, I am not aware there is a problem, as I don't think there is one. Nor will I be doing anything to fix it, since there's nothing to fix.
Rachel, I question the validity of the numbers you're using. You are lumping all of the downloadable fiction on your podcast together and saying it's balanced, but you have apples and pears trying to balance out with oranges.
Last night, after I read this, I took a look at all of the stories on PC and broke them down by story theme, narrative voice, and reader, and author. I don't, didn't, won't care about the gender of the author (6w/7m), nor about the gender of the voice actors(8w/5m), but the numbers are there all the same. Of the last 13 stories*, 7 of the last 13 stories have female narrators, 3 from neutral perspectives (you counted Barrens dance, but I don't recall the speaker's gender being explicitly expressed. A male voice actor was given the part, but that doesn't make it a male perspective. Please correct me if I'm wrong), one from assorted perspectives (Ant King), and only 2 are told from expressly male perspectives. Story content and setting varies, but what the stories focus on shows a trend too: 10 are about a woman's experience, 2 are about a man's experience, and one is varied, but largely about a man's journey.
In short:
Author- 45%w/55%m
Reader- 62%w/38%m
Narrator- 54%w/15%m (23%n/8%v)
Focus of story- 77%w/15%m (8%v)
I don't see the equality you've spoken of, I see a majority of women.
Of the 5 PodCastle Miniatures, four were about and read by men, one was totally neutral but read by a male voice actor.
In short:
A ratio of 0/4/1, or 0% women, 80% men, 20% Neutral
The obvious answer is that in your numbers you've given as much weight to the full 45 minute stories as you have to the 10 minute Miniatures. I do not rate stories and miniatures as of equal value because:
-they don't have intros or outtros
-there is no author information
-they are substantially shorter
-they are irregularly sprinkled about the line-up
-the authors are not paid as much for them
Thus, apples and pears. If you add your apples and pears you come out even, but the genders are so keenly split between Stories and Miniatures that it appears to me to be unnatural.
As for the oranges, I'll be honest, I don't understand why it is so popular to reference Escape Pod's numbers whenever someone brings up a potential bias in PodCastle. Are posters trying to say that Escape Pod is sexist? Are posters saying that the genders of SF authors, characters, situations, and political agendas are so close in number to those in Fantasy that they make for an equivalent comparison? Or are their numbers close at hand, and easy to pull out of a hat to make PodCastle's numbers look better?
*I haven't had time to listen to today's story, and probably won't 'till this weekend, so please excuse its absence in my numbers.
Ps. I read your second post, but it seemed to be directed at Bdoomed. Your third post... tasty.